Elise Archias and Blake Stimson, bless them, are keeping after the administration of Hamline University, seeing in Hamline’s mistakes a larger problem in the relationship between student affairs administrators and faculty.
What Archias and Stimson focus on in this essay is the consequences of having someone field a student’s complaint about perceived harm from the content of a course who doesn’t know anything about that content and believes that they don’t need to know anything about the content. That a report of feeling harmed is a fact and that the cause of that fact is irrelevant.
In previous critiques of Hamline’s actions against an instructor who showed historical images of the Prophet Muhammed created by devout Islamic artists, they’ve observed that this administrative approach to “harm” among other things should make it completely impossible to distinguish between the supposed harm a white child feels in K-12 classrooms on hearing that white people were in the past committed to some form of structural racism (slavery, say) that the child should feel reparative obligation towards and the harm that a black child might feel at a teacher saying “you people” don’t study hard enough or something along those lines.
Administrators focused on harm deny that’s what they’re doing or what they’ve done, but at an absolute minimum the discourse on “harm” they offer has been appropriated by far-right political regimes and used to attack education at all levels. I sort of think that’s something that progressives have treated seriously as an idea, which is that one ought to at least try to make that kind of appropriation difficult.
The problem is that the most productive road for doing so routes through thinking about history and its complexity—and thus requires the expertise of faculty. And thus requires telling students in some cases that their claims of harm need to be reconciled against complex histories, without any guarantee that this reconciliation sorts out in favor of the claim of harm being uncontestably salient.
A student-created resource that I read with interest a few years ago featured one anonymous student complaining that they felt insulted by a faculty member who had previously embraced their ambitions to break into film and TV production saying “Well, get used to waiting tables”. That student desperately needed someone to tell them, “This is the conventional wisdom about what a person trying to make a go of it in theater, TV or film ends up doing while waiting for the big opportunity, there’s no discriminatory malice here.” That is a question of cultural capital, differentially distributed, but the speaker isn’t responsible for that. Sometimes people hear something and interpret it as a deliberately harmful communication and instead it’s just a measure whose inside a large space of common meaning and who isn’t. As a college student, I was once charged in a summer job with checking in with authors about possible copy edits, and despite being an avid reader, I’d never come across the phrase sea change. So I asked the author, confident it needed correction, and got told it was a well-known phrase. So it was, and so I was (slightly) chastened.
But equally sometimes, it’s about the knowledge that faculty hold in their areas of expertise—that a current student of any cultural capital—just might not know. I don’t know that many devout Muslims between 18-22 know that Muslim artists who were regarded as devout made images of Muhammed in the past, but if they’re in college they should be prepared to come to know that. They might still disagree afterwards that such images should ever be made, and argue for the reclassification of those artists. That is a fair outcome. But it cannot come to pass if the students in question argue they are harmed by even coming to know it, and have student affairs professionals with no such knowledge validating that position.
What feels to be the case sometimes at the moment is that two classes of precarious professionals—student affairs professionals and contingent faculty—are vying not to be the Main Character in the face of student complaints about harm. That’s a bad change in the academy, because I honestly think that thirty years ago they would have stood together, aligned behind the same instructional project. I don’t fault people in precarious positions trying to get the other person in trouble first, but I do fault the institutions for letting that go on at all. (It starts when the leadership stops having anyone’s back—or having any commitment to a deeper mission.)
Image credit: Photo by Mario Klassen on Unsplash
Are the administrators really "precarious professionals," though? I thought the president of the college had been fully onboard with firing the adjunct instructor?
I think a common thread here is that almost everyone (the student, the leadership, the student affairs professional) has given up on the idea that the most valuable part of college is learning things.