Enjoy Your G-Rated College Learning Experience

I’m going to dress you up like a “whore,” and then we’re going to do it in front of an audience—wait, no, you misunderstand. It’s educational.

The strange case of Patricia Adler, a respected and widely published sociologist who teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is one of those conflicts in which no one comes out looking great. But one problem shines through the fog: it’s becoming increasingly clear that academic administrators can exert direct control over course content, forcing professors to rewrite their syllabi to guard—even preemptively—against the possibility that students will be offended by something someone says in class.

Several articles have described the contretemps over Adler’s course on the construction of deviance this week, the most detailed of which appeared on the website Inside Higher Education. The Chronicle of Higher Education also weighed in with a lightly reported blog post. See also the story from local paper the Daily Camera and a growing list of others. In most of those sources, and certainly in the first two, the comment threads are more valuable than the stories, as experienced professors chew over a controversy about classroom practices.

Teaching a course that enrolls 500 students, Adler regularly orchestrates a lesson on class, gender, and the stereotypes surrounding prostitution by asking undergraduates—”assistant teaching assistants,” a new one on me—to dress as different kinds of sex workers, roleplaying in a Q and A with the professor that describes their path to, and life in, sex work. Adler’s defense of the class session is not a great one: she’s been doing it the same way for years and years, suggesting the familiar possibility of a stale syllabus and a stalled pedagogy.

But staleness isn’t the reason university administrators have intervened in Adler’s class, warning her against repeating her prostitution lecture with student simulators. Rather, they were protecting hypothetical future students from the possibility of discomfort.

As the Chronicle put it:

Students quoted by The Daily Camera said Ms. Adler had told the class that the administration thought her lecture on prostitution was inappropriate, degrading to women, and offensive to some minority communities.

[. . .]

They said Ms. Adler told the class on Thursday that she had tried to negotiate with administrators and had offered to leave the skit off the syllabus in the future. But administrators reportedly told her that in the era of sex scandals at institutions like Pennsylvania State University, they couldn’t let her keep teaching.

That’s just stupid: a sociologist can’t engage students in a classroom discussion about prostitution because a football coach raped children. Even dumber is the suggestion from a university spokesman, discussed in the Inside Higher Ed story, that future iterations of the class “could involve review from our Institutional Review Board, which is responsible for regulatory compliance involving human subjects.” Suddenly IRBs are responsible for course content? Wonderful.

And it just keeps getting worse. Responding to news reports and a student petition, CU-Boulder Provost Russell L. Moore released a not-terribly-comforting statement on the university’s intervention in a professor’s course:

A number of you have raised concerns about academic freedom and how it may connect to this situation. Academic freedom protects faculty who teach controversial and uncomfortable / unpopular subjects. However, academic freedom does not allow faculty members to violate the university’s sexual harassment policy by creating a hostile environment for their teaching assistants, or for their students attending the class.

Try to parse that. Where does the discussion of uncomfortable sexual topics end—in a sociology class, or a class in history, anthropology, biology, and so on—and a “hostile environment” begin? If a group of evangelical students complain about the assigned reading in a twentieth century history survey because they find homosexuality offensive, has the professor created an uncomfortable environment, or a hostile one? Does student discomfort in fact end any discussion of a sexual topic?

Then there are the due process issues, as a university suspends a professor’s course by administrative fiat.

The list of taboo subjects that bring on student complaints at colleges and universities is growing. And it’s not a sign of a healthy culture. In varying contexts, students—hothouse flowers who have to be protected from offense or discomfort—don’t want to talk about it, or even possibly potentially don’t want to talk about it, as might have been the case here, so the professor had better come up with something else to teach, or they’ll face professional discipline. What’s the point of college?