March 20: Almost the worst part

It seems that a not insubstantial number of my faculty colleagues (possibly including one very close to me--we are still exploring our differences on this) believe that the pre-requisites for engaging in classroom discussion of sensitive and potentially risky subjects are--and should properly be--so daunting that most of us should stay away from it most or all of the time. And some are prepared to say so publicly, in rather blunt terms.

Making a mistake in this domain (or, it seems, just having some bad luck) apparently is to be regarded as a strict liability offense. At risk of inserting some retrospective personal judgments into our depersonalized prospective-only focus [see Ray Purdy's subsequent post on this--TWB], it seems that if one of us, lacking absolute prescience, broaches a controversial topic in a living, not completely sterilized and fully scripted classroom and someone makes a fuss, the administration will hang you out to dry. We are on notice: Do what it takes to make the problem go away. Don't look to us for support.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't teach like that.

To digress: Kind of like attitudes at many universities, sometimes including this one, where faculty who call students on plagiarism or other forms of academic misconduct are often left largely on their own, without much institutional support, if the accused students (or their parents) stonewall, threaten to lawyer up, and challenge any findings of misconduct or attempted academic discipline. Having been drawn in to something like this situation on a couple of occasions (I recommend avoiding them, although I am better at giving that advice than following it), I remember with deep gratitude the solidarity offered by a number of valued colleagues, including my late and greatly missed colleague Gordon Baldwin, who agreed at considerable personal inconvenience (and no conceivable personal benefit) to sit in with me on my very unpleasant encounter with a ROTC student (Gordon had a tie to ROTC, which is one of the many reasons I went to him for counsel) being confronted with hard evidence of the plagiarism he had previously denied. That student did a lot of growing up in a hurry, due almost entirely to Gordon's quiet but firm presence. (I guess the work I had put into documenting the offense may have helped a bit.)

Oh, if only we still had Gordon to help provide leadership through our current fiasco with his uncommon common sense, practical judgment, and willingness to call it as he saw it. And his good humor.

Oh, woe is I. Woe are we.