Long before the methods shifted from sad tears to protest signs and disruption, I called for professors to take back the classroom. They didn’t. They didn’t want to because they feared their students’ condemnation. They didn’t want to because they shared their students’ activist beliefs. They didn’t want to because they embraced the soft pedagogy of appeasement and acquiescence.

Now, they’ve completely lost control.

At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago. Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.

The writer is no white supremacist. 

Lucía Martínez Valdivia is an assistant professor of English and humanities at Reed College.

She describes herself as “an eminently replaceable, untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD,” not, I think, to suggest she has victim points but to show she’s not easily dismissed as the inherently evil white male cis-gendered academic. All she wanted to do was teach her course to students who paid, or whose parents paid, good tuition money to learn such things as “Aristotle and Plato.”

We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.

What was Valdivia to do? What was anyone to do at that point?

Understanding this argument requires an ability to detect and follow nuance, but nuance has largely been dismissed from the debates about speech raging on college campuses. Absolutist postures and the binary reign supreme. You are pro- or anti-, radical or fascist, angel or demon. Even small differences of opinion are seized on and characterized as moral and intellectual failures, unacceptable thought crimes that cancel out anything else you might say.

While the observation that everything has been reduced to the un-nuanced binary, good and evil, may be true, there is also a message hidden in these words that reflects why it was never tenable to allow this in the “interest of supporting dissent and the free exchange of ideas.” Mobs aren’t nuanced. Mobs are mobs. Did academics expect anything else?

Some colleagues, including people of color, immigrants and those without tenure, found it impossible to work under these conditions. The signs intimidated faculty into silence, just as intended, and these silenced professors’ lectures were quietly replaced by talks from people willing and able to carry on teaching in the face of these demonstrations.

This might be intended to suggest that the profs who were supposed to teach were replaced by others who cared less, performed less, because of student protest. But what it also says is that the academics and administrators were too soft and cowardly to do their job of teaching students, of telling the students who denied other students an education to call their mothers and tell them they won’t be getting a college diploma. The “signs intimidated faculty into silence”? Whose fault is that, the signs or the faculty?

No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak. University life — along with civic life — dies without the free exchange of ideas.

In the face of intimidation, educators must speak up, not shut down.

This has gone well beyond the “must speak up” stage. Classes are not public, even quasi-public, forums. They are private. They are allowed to prohibit disruption of core educational purposes. There is a duty to educate the students who came, who paid tuition, to be educated. Academics and administrators have that duty to get the protesters out of the classroom so they can teach the students who are there to be educated. Speak up? No. Act.

Much as one can appreciate the conundrum in which a professor finds herself today, where students are empowered to “seize the microphone” to prevent them from mentioning Plato and Aristotle, you created this problem. What did you expect to happen when you ceded control of the classroom to the tender feelings of the precious victims?

While there is much to be said for no one having to “pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak,” that applies to public speech, not to teaching. Your job is to stand in front of a classroom and educate. You are the teacher. They are the students. This is not a peer relationship, but pedagogy. The litany of excuses for why students should be indulged, why you should coddle the frail, has become your excuse for being soft, for being cowards and for your failure to do the job you’re paid to do.

Tell them to shut up and sit down. If they don’t belong in your class, tell them to leave. If they refuse, have campus security eject them. They have no right to deprive other students of an education. They don’t run Reed College, unless you let them.

And before you raise all the reasons why the marginalized students are entitled to silence your teaching, to shut down your class as perpetuating white supremacy, or patriarchy, or colonization, or whatever nonsensical jargon prevails at any given moment, ask yourself whether the poor vulnerable marginalized student who is sitting in that seat hoping to be educated is entitled to learn. By appeasing one, you’ve denied the other. That’s on you, because you weren’t tough enough to do your job or smart enough to understand your responsibility.

For far too long. academics have been lying to themselves to avoid confronting an obviously untenable situation in their classrooms. It’s time to cut the crap and do your job. And stop blaming students for being an un-nuanced ideological mob. You’re supposed to be the grown-ups in the classroom. Take responsibility for yourselves and fulfill your duty to your students.