As a frosh in labor history class, my professor, Roger Keeran, sought to instill the virtues of anarcho-syndicalism. The Wobblies, after all, had the best songs, and the Pinkertons sucked. Professor Keeran was hardcore pro-labor with a smattering of socialism to boot, but I liked him.

He took disagreement well, with a smile, knowing that while he believed what he believed, others would disagree. He never held it against me that I wasn’t ready to vote for Eugene V. Debs, and we all enjoyed the music.

But this anon prof’s tale, presented at Inside Higher Education, reflects not merely the true believer side of pedagogy, but the death of intellectual integrity. As to why her mind was lost, it’s unclear. But lost it was.

It was the middle of the semester, and we were covering rape culture. As any feminist instructor who has ever taught about rape culture probably knows, covering this topic is challenging for a multitude of reasons. Sometimes we encounter students who realize that they have been raped who come to office hours looking for resources. Other times, students learn that they have actually perpetrated rape and struggle to reconcile that with their images of themselves as “good people” and “not one of those (usually) guys.” And many feminist instructors, especially those who are women, know all too well what it is like to navigate the “mansplaining” of a few men students who would like to ardently deny that rape culture exists.

She makes no claim to being neutral, self-describing as a feminist and infusing her description with the usual tropes, like rape culture and mansplaining. So how many angels dance on the head of a feminist pin? The only acceptable reactions to her instruction are for women to recognize they’re rape victims and men to recognize they’re rapists.

In support of her polemic, she offers a litany of low-brow strawman assertions, the usual blame the victim type stuff. This may be accurate, because the “men students” in her class aren’t particularly bright, or inaccurate because it’s easier to show the wrongfulness of silly arguments, such as:

In response to discussions about the fact that what a woman is wearing does not give someone license to rape her, nor does the rate of sexual violence have anything to do with clothing choice: “But don’t you think what she was wearing is at least a little important?”

This is how “such students” respond. So exhausting. But one “man student” in her “gender course*” made her head explode:

He started by citing an example of a case he read in the news media in which a woman on a college campus raped a man and the institution responded poorly. However, I first felt a twinge in my spine when I looked up the source of his story and traced it back to a men’s rights advocacy group. “OK,” I thought to myself, “students use questionable sources all the time, often because they might not have the skills to distinguish objective journalism from something like an MRA group. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here and make a note of it for the next paper.”

Who doesn’t feel “a twinge” when a student uses a source other than “objective journalism” because it says what you want it to say? But the anon prof is bigger than that. For the moment.

Unfortunately, his argument quickly devolved into a tirade claiming — since he presented just one case wherein a woman raped a man — that feminism is pointless and women are complaining too much about gender inequality.

Whether her characterization is accurate is, well, suspect, but not particularly relevant, since this isn’t really about what the student said, except to demonstrate how it affected her.

I got up from my desk and went for a walk. I could not concentrate. I had plans to read a book later that afternoon, which were shattered by being thrown back into a pit of traumatic, fragmented memories by this student’s paper. I was furious at the fact that, as an instructor, I was expected to take his paper seriously, and scared of what he might do if he did not like his grade.

Furious that a student disputed her god? Nothing new there. But “scared” of his fantasy reaction? What grade would she give him, this insouciant misogynist?

“Zero! You get a fucking zero!” I literally screamed at my computer screen.

Just because he failed to pray at the altar of feminism? Oh no, that was just the beginning of her delusion.

Although I knew it was unlikely that this student would literally try to rape me, his words felt so familiar that I began having trouble distinguishing him from the man that did.

Her student was committing “word rape,” which was “unlikely” to result in “literally” real rape.

I felt irritated that in two pages of (poorly written) ranting, this student was able to undercut whatever authority I thought I had as an instructor. Authority that, especially as a woman instructor, I worked hard to establish and maintain. I imagined him sitting on the other side of his computer screen laughing at my pain, joking about my distress.

What any of this had to do with undercutting her authority as an instructor is unclear, but her delusions of a student “laughing at [her] pain, joking about [her] distress,” suggest that this instructor, who offers her tale in a quest for sympathy and understanding as a pedagogical victim, has been put in a classroom as the purported grownup charged with educating students. Instead, she’s the survivor of rape by disagreement.

Whether the student deserves an “A” or an “F” can’t be determined. Perhaps his paper sucked. But that a person who suffers from paranoid delusions is put in front of a classroom of students remains a problem. She appears mere steps away from bringing a gun to class to kill this “man student” who, in her fantasies, is her rapist’s (?) best friend, maybe laying in wait to rape her again.

And all the guy did was disagree with her feminist religion, which now appears to be worthy of the campus death penalty in the tortured mind of this pathetic pedagogue.

*She neglects to provide any more detailed description of the course she was teaching. Was it Intro to Gender or Advanced Rape Culture Advocacy? Who knows?