A large part of what makes unauthorized speech in the classroom harmful is that it (a) uses up finite class time and (b) interferes with what the professor is trying to say or do. But an unauthorized post on a discussion board doesn’t have those effects, and a private e-mail (or outside posting, web page, etc.) by a student certainly doesn’t. So I’m more likely to feel it is unfair when a school punishes a student for those actions.

The bottom line as far as the law ought to be concerned is that a (non government) school is private and can do as it pleases, up to the point where that would amount to breach of contract or other unrelated violation (and sometimes it does). Nevertheless schools ought to be fairer, and I support efforts like FIRE to hold them accountable at least by informing consumers.

Sammy: I was once behind my back (the teacher never said a word to me) withdrawn from a class.

Apparently times have changed since 1974. At my university, teachers would not be able to withdraw a student from the class. We can advise students to withdraw if their grades are so low they can’t pass, but even then we must also state explicitly that they’re welcome to stay. In fact, faculty have been disciplined for suggesting that a failing student skip the final even when a perfect exam couldn’t bring the student up to a passing grade.

Does any university allow the teacher to withdraw a student nowadays?

I think this was because I kept asking questions — but the teacher had asked for questions. I might have been embarassing her. I don’t know.

Sammy, when you talk to people, are you looking for clues as to how they are reacting to you? Facial expressions? Body language? Voice tones? A lot of times people telegraph “shut up now” and if you don’t get it and keep on talking, they’ll react negatively to that.

Anatid, there is one more thing I would add if I were you, and that is this: when you meet a specific male, or female, university student, you have no idea what his or her spatiotemporal skills are without some testing or observation. Or linguistic skills. According to the statistics, the female is probably going to be better at linguistics and the male at s-t skills, but you don’t know until you check. If spatiotemporal skills have to do with reading maps and knowing where you are in relation to places you can’t see, I am about a thousand times better at that than my husband is, and he’ll tell you the same. And he’s a smart man, it’s just that he’s linear, as he says. I think some women tend to get irritated at statements like “on average, women aren’t good at X” b/c they’ve heard those statements all their lives, the statements don’t describe them, and they fear that their input in those areas will be ignored b/c it’s assumed that they have nothing to offer.

I was once behind my back (the teacher never said a word to me) withdrawn from a class.

I think this was because I kept asking questions – but the teacher had asked for questions. I might have been embarassing her. I don’t know. I know I corrected her at least once (She said her “Iraqi friends” told her that Ramadan came out in a certain season of the year – but the Islamic calendar gradually moves through the entire year)

I had no idea that the teacher had any complaints against me till after she had gone to an administrator and gotten me withdrawn.

Maybe there is another side to the story but I don’t know it.

This was in the spring of 1974.

I had learned a few things from her lectures. For instance – at least as I understood it – that feudalism was the outgrowth of wage and price controls in the Roman Empire. (These were really tough wage and price control laws – they extended to decreeing that a son should have the same job as his father had had.)

The Roman Emperor Diocletian started that. Inflation was really really bad for many decades in the 200s.

The course was a course in Medieval History.

All I can say is, the classroom is a very different context than the interface of politicians with mass media? (Good thing, otherwise there’d be very little actual learning.)

spatially related mental tasks

Chiming in after having attended one of the most rabidly liberal universities on the planet, if Doe got accused of being sexist for bringing up this study, then he probably just isn’t a very good teacher.

The average American male university student has better spatiotemporal skills than the average American female university student, yes. You teach this paper. You cite the other papers that alternatively support or discredit its external validity. You ALWAYS pair it with the studies that find that the inverse is true for linguistic skills (women tend to do better than men), and you discuss the pros and cons of those studies as well. Then you show off the fMRI studies that support the concept of a biological substrate. You always make sure to mention that while these data are fairly rigorous, they’re also correlational, and could be the result of males and females being socialized differently and therefore have differentially-developing neuroanatomy. You cite the way-too-small-sample-size-to-be-valid study that shows that female-to-male transgenders show improved spatial learning after a few years of hormone therapy, just because it’s an interesting anecdote. You present the entire concept as open to discussion, and encourage students to come up with possible confounds.

And then if anyone STILL calls you sexist for presenting these data, all they’re doing is making themselves look like idiots.

Much like it’s the student’s responsibility to be respectful in class and only speak in ways that contribute to group learning, it’s also the instructor’s job to present controversial studies in ways that will be reasonably acceptable to his or her students.

Among other things, there are plenty of studies and concepts in academia that are complete trash, and distinguishing the rigorous studies from the invalid ones is important. The instructor is in a much better position to help the students do this than expect them to do it all on their own, especially if they’re new to scientific literature. If he can’t defend the material he’s teaching, then why is he the one teaching it?

It was presented and — he loved it! I guess he felt that any attention was good attention.

I know he wanted to go to law school. I don’t know if he did or if he became a lawyer. I can easily imagine, though, that he has been annoying judges with ridiculous objections and motions for the past 30 years. Anything to draw attention to himself.

As a practical matter, I think the only reason to discipline a student outside the classroom for this sort of conduct is it if actually becomes threatening to other students. We’d measure that by other standards anyway. Otherwise, such a person already has his punishment: the rest of the students in class can’t stand him, he earns a poor grade because he isn’t following the professor’s instructions, and depending on the size of the institution, he gains a reputation that may follow him. A written rebuke by the professor, the authority figure, should be enough to make clear to the other students what is going on.

In general, it’s unfortunate when students are judged unfairly because of the content of their views or the manner of expression. However, those decisions are rightly up to the professor. As the opinion noted, nobody was otherwise preventing this person from expressing his views elsewhere; he just doesn’t get to do it in class as he pleases.

“By the standard you all are using, my girlfriend and I rape each other all the time!”

I am amazed. As “ASlyJD says” illustrates, hissing at foolish or pointless speech, whether the speech is by a professor or a student, is a time-tested means of community moderation. It is virtually impossible for hissing to drown out a speaker, but it can easily express both existence and degree of community disapproval.

So why condemned?

If a student asks a question because they’re having trouble understanding the material and other students decide to hiss at the “dumb” question, the result is both really mean to the student in question (who is probably already quite aware that he or she is struggling) and is also a serious problem for the professor (who likely relies on students’ feeling comfortable asking “dumb” questions to get a realistic picture of how the class is doing).

I suppose it would be another matter if the hissing is at a student who clearly understands the material but is just asking the question to show off or deliberately side-track the class; I’ve never actually encountered this scenario as either a professor or a student (though as a student there were certainly a couple of people I might have liked to hiss at).

To be clear, that was steve, not Steve!

Oops. I capitalized the S just because it was the beginning of the line. I will be more careful in the future. After all, the name is dear to my heart (since it’s my real first name).

To be clear, that was steve, not Steve!

I am amazed. As “ASlyJD says” illustrates, hissing at foolish or pointless speech, whether the speech is by a professor or a student, is a time-tested means of community moderation. It is virtually impossible for hissing to drown out a speaker, but it can easily express both existence and degree of community disapproval.

So why condemned?

Steve: “someone typing something obnoxious or offensive can be easily ignored.”

But think of a thread here. How many times have you seen an obnoxious or really asinine comment and gotten upset for the moment, even though this is just a blog that you can ignore at will? Imagine being in an online class, where you have to pay attention to everything you read because it is part of the course (and you don’t know what something is about until you read it). I imagine that it could be pretty disruptive constantly to have to deal with disrespectful or needlessly provocative comments that interrupt the flow of a discussion.

pmorem: The phrase that caught my attention was “displaying defiance”.That seems to me to come dangerously close to “failing to submit” or even “disagreeing”.

So be it. We’ve all had profs that are notoriously thin-skinned, and unfortunately the only appropriate response is to shut up and do as you’re told, or transfer. Write a note to the Dean if you feel you are being unfairly treated. Call FIRE if you think it’s a Constitutional case.

Professors have to be granted a great deal of latitude to handle classroom decorum. Anything less invites anarchy, and a reduced educational experience for the rest of the students subjected to douchebaggery from one of their peers.

The phrase “displaying defiance or disrespect
of others” is somewhat vague. If the intent of the policy is to
prohibit intentional insults and ad hominem attacks, perhaps the
policy should simply say so.

1. Do you believe that a specific policy that prohibits intentional insults and ad hominem attacks would be constitutional?

2. What is the “extra deterrent effect on in-class speech” of the university’s policy as applied to Harrell (whose complained-of speech did not involve the expression of ideas), or is that irrelevant because a hypothetical can be conjured up in which some in-class speech can be deterred because of the application of the policy to someone else?

In fact, even among politically sophisticated junior and senior humanities/soc-sci students who I’m teaching in a small seminar now, getting dissenting positions or alternate perspectives onto the table is harder than pulling teeth — much less disrespectful or disruptive interventions. I rather suspect that most of the (let us hope few) court cases arising in this whole area arise from the small number of students who one might uncharitably call ‘cranks’: those who both feel very strongly on some issue (whether related to class content or not), and who have a certain deafness about how to present those views in a way that opens conversation rather than hectoring.

Such students, I surmise, are also most likely to either face sanctions for their tone-deafness, or to file suits because they feel their viewpoint must be heard regardless of a professor’s efforts to quell them.

That seems to me to come dangerously close to “failing to submit” or even “disagreeing”.