I wholeheartedly confirm this fellow professor’s experience. While I challenge students to think by giving them a lot of material I’m very sure they never would have seen, I have become more empathetic to all the issues of our time because they have taught me. They have made me more open to transrights, to preferred pronouns, to police brutality, to sexism, and on and on.
I have never found the university classroom to be a place where indoctrination happens so much as the first opportunity many have had to actually be critical in their reading and playful in their thinking. I am more radicalized by their way of being in the world, by all these millenials and zoomers who long to comprehend the world they are inheriting. They teach me to transgress–not the other way around.
From the Washington Post…
I have heard the complaints of conservatives who believe that American colleges are indoctrinating their children. I don’t understand this. From where I sit, this complaint is only rooted in the fear that their children might acquire some empathy and understanding.
I am amused why many conservatives believe those of us who teach in college hold such sway over their children. They could not be more misinformed. My students regard me just as they regard all old people: as someone they have to deal with until they return to the company of other young people.
CALL ME MAGGIE 