Also, as you can see from my comments, one of my friends who still teaches there doesn’t like the policy at all.

Thanks for the thought, but I’ve moved on to Texas Tech, where I am unwilling to comment about the biology professor who wouldn’t write letters for creationists. Having done work on an alumni magazine in the past, I think “alumni magazine” and “sugar-coated” are practically redundant; one of my friends who worked their full-time said he sometimes felt as though he were reported the Dear Leader’s speeches for the official Communist Party organ. I can ask some of my friends at Utah whether the policy is making any difference, though the spam filter will probably have closed this thread before I do so.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank Dave Hardy for explaining how a town in Arizona could possibly have been named Snowflake. I had thought it might be a lucus a non lucendo thing, like the Lubbock newspaper being named the Avalanche-Journal.

How about up muhammed the the war for clean nuclear drawings energy, with and nudity bell curve Israeli settlements?

(Interesting to see if the spam filtering catches that)

Disability rules do not give students a right to read different things; performing a play is not the same as reading it. How drama depts deal with objections that may come up around performing I don’t know.

If you taught in humanities or social sciences, Nat, you might be more aware (a) of how resistant a lot of students are initially to readings whose views they don’t share and (b) of how, in areas where legitimate controversy exists, you cannot possibly teach the subject without having students read a range of readings some of which they will, if they are paying attention, find disagreeable. This is why disability accommodation is such a frivolous comparison.

The relevance of my point (3) is that professors in the U.S. are already legally required to make accommodations that many of us otherwise would not make, and yet we somehow muddle through. The relevance of my point (4) is that at least one major university is already dealing with constraints not entirely unlike those that may be imposed on Arizona universities in the future, and at least the public face put on those constraints is that they’re not so bad after all.

As for us “just talking about reading assignments”, that’s not what the proposal in question says. It is about alternatives to “a course, coursework, learning material or activity”.

I don’t see the relevance of your points (3) or (4). We’re just talking about reading assignments.

For a lot of subjects, e.g. moral philosophy, you have to give students a range of different readings and some of them must “conflict[] with the student’s beliefs or practices in sex, morality or religion”—they can’t possibly agree with all of them. How could you teach Nietzsche, for example, or Machiavelli, who are guaranteed to get readers angry? And the inclusion of “sex” in the bill is almost certainly designed to go after literature with gay characters.

I assigned part of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind last quarter, and he really offended several of my students! Can you imagine teaching a class in which different factions formed, each objecting to certain readings and demanding alternatives? What kind of classroom discussion would you have? Forget the question of timed exams—could you even have common assignments? Can you imagine how universities could possibly adjudicate all these things, especially since “offended” is a matter of states of mind—all the student has to say is “I’m offended—this is contrary to my beliefs.”

What you have here is a parody of a parody. As our tame troll “Steve” shows, there’s a widespread perception that academics are committed to a mindless identity politics in which everyone gets to read stuff by people like them and every argument is won by someone saying “I’m offended that …” So now you get this weird identity-politics for another group of students. As I’ve noted before there are some interesting questions about how to get students comfortable dealing with material that they think of as controversial. But this is about the worst way imaginable.

(2) I know essentially nothing about the content of The Ice Storm, so the following question is not rhetorical: If Trefzger’s professor were instead an office worker reading “the good parts” of The Ice Storm aloud in his cubicle, could he be considered in violation of U.S. sexual harrassment law?

(3) Perhaps I’d be more sympathetic with the doomsayers here if my discipline were something other than mathematics. The accommodations I am legally required to make for my students have to do with the Americans with Disabilities Act. Those at my university who are supposed to know have informed me that unless I’m willing to bear the burden of proof and demonstrate in a court of law that solving problems expeditiously is a vital part of mathematical proficiency, I am required to honor requests for extra time on exams for those with diagnosed learning disabilities. (To keep the playing field level from my perspective, I now make my exams untimed for all of my students.)

(4) I guess there’s a chance that the sort of accommodations Arizona legislators are proposing might not be all that horrible. The alumni magazine from the University of Utah recently had an article celebrating the plan reached as the result of the settlement of a lawsuit from a theater student whose religious scruples prevented her from using profanity. (This might not have been her only scruple. If her theater professor had used his academic freedom to insist that actresses need to get used to doing topless scenes, she might have objected to that as well.) Perhaps the magazine sugar-coated the plan because many deep-pocketed alumni might have had sympathy with the student. If Matt Weiner’s still at Utah, maybe he can tell us exactly how rosy the situation really is.

Oh, wait, that would be “homogenous”. Never mind. :-)