How anyone thinks of this stuff we’ll never know…
Via Campus Reform:
One professor at Ohio State thinks that colleagues who change their materials for fear of offending students are “cowards.”
Koritha Mitchell, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, argued on Vox that her presence as a black, female faculty member, combined with the white privilege her students are bombarded with on a daily basis, causes the classroom community to fear controversial discussions.
In her article titled, “I’m a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards,” Mitchell says that her very presence makes students uncomfortable because she does “not fit any picture society has given them of an expert.”
“My students, after all, have grown up bombarded with the message that people who belong in authority—especially authority based on intellectual accomplishments and expertise—are men, usually white men,” she elaborates. “I challenge my students simply by existing.”
According to Mitchell, students also grow up learning that real literature is only written by white authors. However, she claims this learning trend isn’t limited to a certain “identity category.” She alleges that students are made uncomfortable by the presence of even a couple of required readings by authors who are not white. Mitchell said she doesn’t have the luxury of changing her curriculum to make her students more comfortable.
Universities, Mitchell said, treat students as consumers and therefore: “The customer is always right.” That is why she “read[s] about professors being afraid of their own students and changing what they teach in response to that fear.”