[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by MBates

In court on occasion it is extremely difficult to sit and listen to one of my opponents speaking at length about something while misrepresenting the law or the facts of the case. Or sometimes they are not doing either of those things but just urging an outcome I seriously disagree with.

False equivalency is false. In court you have very specific rules of conduct by which you are expected to follow. Failure to comply would lead to contempt charges and a fine or jail time. This is what happens when you have an ultimate authority figure in the room who has the power to judge behavior and adjudicate penalties on the spot. That doesn't exist in the classroom. Instructors are but a cog in the machinery, and one that the administration will throw under the bus before a paying customer.

But I don't get to yell loud and stop them from speaking.

Yet students have that ability. They can become disruptive in the classroom/theater and the only way to diffuse the situation is to immediately debunk their points. I hope you can appreciate that a lesson plan which has a 65 minute lecture in a 75 minute class is greatly impacted by time consuming interruptions. To put into your context, how effective would your opening or summation be if you were constantly interrupted by the gallery or the jury?

Poor advocates interrupt to complain to the judge or make faces or sigh out loud during the submissions.

And this, and worse, is exactly what lecturers must endure in the classroom.

The best advocates sit quietly and listen intently. You try to both limit your outward showing of emotion and control and channel your visceral responses into an objective and fact based devastating reply. The shorter and more pointed the better.

So do the best students. Unfortunately, there are students very much like Stephen Miller who are there to disrupt more than learn. When you try to make them accountable they just launch a grievance and the administration does what it can to placate the individual and move them along, just so they don't have to deal with the lawyers.

People can be made to change their minds in this format. Watching an ideology or an argument fail to withstand scrutiny in a fair war of words makes it harder to believe in.

That's what you hope, but when you have 30-100 students in a room, all with expectations of learning the subject matter in question, you have to try and stick to the lesson plan, which as stated, is difficult with a disruptive force in the room. Many times there is no option to ignore these people.

The 'liberal' schools and their students should be actively seeking conservative far-right-speakers to come to engage in debate. If their views are so wrong then it really ought to be easy to demonstrate.

How about the conservative students keeping their yaps shut, respect the classroom, the other students, the faculty, the school, and the process?

If hateful and bigoted internet views are too prevalent in today's society I suggest we need more open debates against them at universities and any other 'legitimate' stage (isn't the legitimacy of the stage dependent on it being one of free exchange and debate of ideas not one censored by the current majority world view?).

Less public debate means the hate-filled bigots will stay in their bubble and develop more extreme views. They will not go home and talk themselves out of their internet-fueled ideologies. If you publicly debate them you at least have a chance to make that happen.

I completely agree. We need more of this. Just not in classrooms not focused on rhetoric. I love debate, so long as rules are observed. When they can't play within the rules, which includes presenting these things called facts - not lies - then debate breaks down to nothing more than a pissing match.

And as an aside, I find it pretty odd that university professors would complain about being on the front-lines of fact-checking and dispelling objectively wrong theories to help shape minds through responsible discourse. What did they hope to be able to do when they became professors? It is sort of like a NHLer complaining about being in the Stanley Cup Final because of how annoying it is that the other team tries to score on like EVERY shift. Do you have a more important job to do in your chosen profession?

I hope you can appreciate there is a time and a place for being put on the front line and having to engage in fact-checking. The lecture hall should not be that place. As I said, how effective would you be at presenting your case if the gallery were able to just shout out ignorant noise during your presentation or examination? Do you think the jury would be open to accepting your theory of the case if gallery were shouting out conflicting and erroneous information at their whim, and the judge allowed it? I love fact-checking papers and engaging students during office hours, but in a room full of other students, that is not the place to be airing your views on the subject matter, unless asked by the facilitator. A time and a place for everything. Unfortunately these student don't believe in these rules or protocols. This is part and parcel in many classrooms these days.