A recurring theme in discussions of trigger warnings in college classes is the idea that students with PTSD should be going to campus disability offices, not professors, to ask for the assistance they need. This question has come up in my Facebook and Twitter feeds today, in response to the piece I just wrote for Inside Higher Education, and in the course of one such conversation my friend Andrea Chandler said a few things about her experience trying to work with the disability office at the college she was attending.

If you’re a professor and you think the disability office will handle this stuff, you need to read what Andrea has to say. If you think you don’t have a role in addressing these issues, you need to read what Andrea has to say. If you don’t understand that how you run your classroom could make the difference in which of your students graduate? Well, just read the damn thing:

Just getting the single accommodation I asked for, to bring my mobility service dog on campus, was a multi-semester nightmare.

Disability services on most campuses are an absolute joke. Try actually speaking to disabled students about what it takes to get even the simplest, most straightforward of accommodations. In my case, using my service dog meant first meeting the disability services guy, whose office wasn’t accessible. This is not unusual.

Then they wanted me to sign paperwork giving them access to my entire medical record, which would have disclosed more to them than I was willing to disclose. This was in addition to the specific paperwork from my doctor stating that my service dog was a medical necessity.

Finally, they wanted contact information for my parents or husband, to whom they would be reporting my academic progress.

It was only after I suggested we call the DOE Office of Civil Rights that they accepted that all they needed was that letter from my doctor. Until the following semester, when I had to have the exact same fight all over again, because apparently permanent disability is not a possibility schools have considered.

Meanwhile I was dealing with classrooms so stuffed with desks that they violated the ADA & Rehab Act standards on physical accessibility, instructors who constantly called attention to my service dog in class & who could never speak to me about class material without first trying to have a conversation about the dog, and even better were the instructors who made it clear they didn’t want a cripple in their classroom. When I suggested to Disability Services that the instructors needed training in dealing with disabled students *and offered to find DOE & DOJ training resources for free*, I was ignored.

So yeah, this isn’t my first rodeo where I’ve had someone come out and say I shouldn’t be in the classroom because I don’t fit their definition of what a student should be. I wish I were shocked by that attitude, but it’s very miserably common.

The biggest problem I see in the empathy-lacking anti-tw crowd is that they seem to believe that the prof-student relationship is all one way; in which student vessels receive knowledge from the prof and the professor does not hold a dialog unless it is of the Socratic type.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a long way from being an impressionable teenager but I’ll be damned before I deal with any more of that patronizing bullshit. What Angus has done with his content note and being willing to back it up by working with students is model a kind of education where the professor works in partnership with the students, offering them the basic respect of believing they know exactly what their capabilities are and that they *want* to be there, and to learn, but may need a hand. The profs I see on the other side are the kind that drove me (and others with disabilities) out of academia. They act like we’re faking disability to work the system, and forcing their own odious ideas of mental illness being something you can bootstrap your way out of onto students.

I honestly hope to God none of em ever end up in the same place I am, because I’ve seen it destroy people who do. And I hope they get the fuck over themselves.

(Reposted with Andrea’s permission.)

I’ve just written a piece for Inside Higher Ed discussing why I’m adding a trigger warning to my syllabi, and explaining what I see such content notes as contributing to the classroom environment. As far as I’m aware, I’m the first prof in the US to go public with the text and rationale for their warning.

Here’s an excerpt:

History is often ugly. History is often troubling. History is often heartbreaking. As a professor, I have an obligation to my students to raise those difficult subjects, but I also have an obligation to raise them in a way that provokes a productive reckoning with the material.

And that reckoning can only take place if my students know that I understand that this material is not merely academic, that they are coming to it as whole people with a wide range of experiences, and that the journey we’re going on together may at times be painful.

Read it all, if you like.

Almost exactly a year ago the Arizona state legislature passed a law, HB 2169, that banned the use of student fees to support independent student organizations, rendering illegal the referendum-based funding model that Arizona’s statewide student organization, the Arizona Students’ Association had depended on for nearly two decades.

ASA has been working diligently over the last year to fashion a new approach and identity for the HB 2169 era, and this weekend that work is bearing fruit with the Association’s first annual Student Congress.

Starting with a reception this evening, and continuing through Sunday afternoon, students from all three of Arizona’s public universities and about half a dozen of its community colleges will be meeting in Tempe to debate and adopt a new structure for the Association and to elect new leadership to begin the rebuilding process in earnest.

It promises to be an exciting weekend, and I’m excited to be in Tempe — the folks at ASA asked me to come down to deliver a kickoff keynote tomorrow morning and to stick around to consult and advice as the Congress progresses. I’ve been reading the draft governance documents as they evolved, and there’s some very interesting stuff in them. More on that soon, I hope.

In the meantime, I expect I’ll be tweeting a fair amount about the festivities in the next 48 hours, so check that out if you like.

Landed in Madison, Wisconsin last night for a training this afternoon with the student government association at the University of Wisconsin. This morning I popped into Paul’s Books, like I always do when I’m in Madison, to check out their education section. By far the best collection of obscure student movement histories of any bookstore I’ve ever been in.

Anyway, I was flipping through the shelves and stumbled across a book called “The Dignity of Youth and Other Ativisms,” which I’d never heard of, by a sociologist I’ve never heard of.

It’s a collection of essays and book reviews, mostly about high school students, and I was about to close it and put it back when a glimpse of something caught my eye. I thumbed back and there it was: “U.S.N.S.A.”

I come across references to NSA in books from this era all the time, and usually they’re not of much interest. But this was different, it turned out. Better. Way better. The author had “twice been a speaker at national meetings of the United States National Student Association,” most recently in 1963 (the book was published in 1965), and a big chunk of the preface—eight dense pages—is devoted to his impressions of the National Student Congresses he attended.

There’s a tremendous amount of great stuff in here, and I’m immensely frustrated not to have found it while I was working on my dissertation. Some excerpts:

“It is not tedious and boring; neither is it, in the usual sense, exciting and interesting. These are not the right dimensions along which to place the experience, which is psychedelic rather than intellectual. Within a few hours, as the emotional pressure of the meeting gradually builds up, other aspects of reality lose their power to distract; to break off from the meeting would produce an aesthetic shock, a sense of incomplete closure.”

“U.S.N.S.A. delegates play politics not like professional politicians but like tough amateurs of a sport at which they excel. Victory does not change the course of history, and they know it, but they mean to win and they play for keeps. They put—the cliché is precise—body and soul into it.”

“The kids dress for comfort, and at their age to dress for comfort is to dress for effect. I do not simply mean that this makes them more attractive, though it certainly does; but that the whole feeling-tone becomes more authentic; gestures are more revealing, the whole emotional weight of the delegate seems to flow more easily into what he is saying. If this seems like mere personal fantasy, I would suggest that you imagine Senator Dirksen attempting to carry his point while dressed in a T-shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts and sandals. There are students at the University of Illinois, however, who can do this quite effectively.”

Note: The student judiciary at UMass Amherst has upheld the Elections Commission ruling in the dispute I discuss in this piece. See the end of the article for an overview.

I recently stumbled across a story about this spring’s student government elections at UMass Amherst, and it raised some issues about campaign regulations that I see fairly often.

Five slates ran candidates for president and vice president in this month’s UMass SGA elections, and the ticket of Ellie Miske and Gabrielle Cook won—decisively, if not overwhelmingly. The two picked up 36% of the votes cast in a fractured field, beating their nearest competitor by about a hundred and fifty votes. A third member of their ticket, Emily Devenney, won the college’s student trustee seat by a slightly wider margin.

After the votes were tallied, though, the winning ticket was disqualified by the SGA’s elections committee and the second-place team was declared the winner. The disqualification was grounded in three violations of election rules: The use of a 10%-off coupon at the campus copy shop, the use of a candidate’s personal printer to copy election materials, and a candidate’s campaigning in a dorm without an escort.

The Miske-Cook-Devenney ticket is challenging the disqualification, and from this outsider’s perspective it seems that they have a decent case on each of the three charges.

Regarding the copy shop, the committee found that the use of the coupon amounted to a prohibited appropriation of campaign funds and a violation of the rule that “all candidates must purchase their materials at fair market prices to which all other candidates shall have reasonable access. The first of these conclusions seems flatly wrong to me—the copy shop didn’t “appropriate funds for the purpose of campaigning,” as prohibited by the SGA regulations, they just offered a general discount to the campus community. And while reasonable people can disagree about the definition of “reasonable access,” it  certainly seems a stretch to construe the coupon use as a willful violation of the rule.

The printer complaint is perhaps a bit stronger, but here again the rule is arguably ambiguous—and also a little odd. Candidates are required to declare all equipment and supplies used in campaigning, but both “computers” and “copy machines” are explicitly exempted from disclosure. It seems counter-intuitive, to say the least, that a candidate would be allowed undisclosed, unregulated use of a personally-owned copier but be prohibited from printing out flyers they designed on their (explicitly unregulated) computer on its (implicitly regulated) attached printer.

As for the unescorted campaigning complaint, it doesn’t appear to have been grounded in any specific provision of the SGA’s own bylaws, but rather in a broad prohibition on candidates violating any aspect of the campus code of conduct. In this case, the code says that no student may engage in solicitation in a dorm building—with “solicitation” defined as “planned, in-person sharing of information with and/or requesting of information from students living in a University residence.”

Now, campaigning for student government office is certainly “sharing of information with and/or requesting of information from students,” but so is interviewing residents for the student newspaper, and it’s hard to imagine anyone being brought up on charges for that. There’s also no indication in the elections report that any of the students who were approached by vice presidential candidate Gabrielle Cook in the dorms objected to the contact, and no suggestion that campus conduct charges against her were ever lodged.

Honestly, I’m kind of conflicted about all this. On the one hand, I think it’s important for elections to have rules, and important that those rules be followed. On the other hand, it’s also important that the will of the students be respected in campus elections, and significant that this disqualification has the effect of thwarting that will.

These kinds of questions come up a lot in student elections, partly because there are so few remedies available when the rules are broken. If you violate campaign laws in an actual government-government election, you’re almost never going to have your election thrown out. Instead, you’ll be fined or prosecuted. But because those options aren’t in the toolkit of a student elections board, disqualifying candidates tends to be the go-to remedy.

It’s not unreasonable, in principle, to disqualify a student association candidate for election violations, but it is a huge, drastic step to take, and should be treated like one. As I said above, when you kick a candidate off the ballot—or worse, bar the winning candidate from taking office—you’re thwarting the will of the students, denying them the prerogative to choose their own representatives. That’s not just anti-democratic, it’s profoundly corrosive of students’ support for their student association—support that tends not to be all that high to begin with.

Given all that, candidates should only be disqualified where their actions have fundamentally compromised the democratic process through willful, substantive violation of the rules. You kick them out when it would demonstrably do the system more harm not to.

And what about the other, less egregious cases? What do you do with them? I don’t have a simple one-sentence answer for that one. I can think of a variety of remedies that might have value in specific circumstances—censure, allowing the next year’s assembly to take up the complaint, throwing the election out and starting over, docking a portion of a stipend—though each of them has obvious drawbacks. It’s a difficult question.

But in the case of UMass it seems a pretty easy call. Whatever the misdeeds of the disbarred ticket, the flaws in the rules loom at least at large. If you don’t want candidates using coupons to buy supplies, you should say so clearly. If personal copiers and personal printers are to be treated differently from each other, that should be made explicit. And if you’re going to kick an entire winning ticket off the ballot because one of its members talked to some students in a dorm without a chaperone, that should be made obvious in the rules, not left for the candidates to discover for themselves in the code of conduct.

If all that had been done before this election—if the SGA’s regulations had explicitly banned coupons and copiers and unescorted dorm visits—I’d find the penalty imposed a lot more proportionate. I’d likely still disagree with the rules themselves, but I wouldn’t see the punishment imposed for violating them as unreasonable.

As it stands now, though, it seems to me that the sensible thing to do is to seat the winning ticket, let the students’ voice be heard…and then fix the regs so that this situation never arises again.

May 1 Update | The student judiciary at UMass Amherst voted unanimously last night to uphold the Election Commission’s ruling. Some highlights from their decision, which an Amherst student forwarded to me by email:

• The value of the disputed copy center coupon was found to have amounted to somewhere between three and nine dollars “and allowed the DMC ticket to produce a greater number of fliers than other candidates.” Evidence was offered that a candidate from another ticket had requested a coupon and been denied it.
• The candidate who was accused of campaigning in a dorm without an escort said she had been escorted by residents for most of her visit to the building in question, but admitted that she had talked to students in the building’s lobby while her escort was not present. (She testified that she hadn’t realized that campaigning solo in the lobby was disallowed.)
• The judiciary brushed aside the question of whether a printer and a copier are the same thing, finding that the relevant violation was in using the printer to produce campaign fliers in an unauthorized manner.

In the end, the judiciary found that talking to some students in a dorm lobby, using a coupon to produce campaign lit, and printing out 20-25 unauthorized fliers on a personal printer “significantly impacted the outcome of the election,” and thus constituted cause for setting aside the result.