Not that this wasn’t obvious years ago, when I admonished academics to take back their classrooms. Some wanted to, but they didn’t stand a chance. As a result, classrooms have become, in the words of history prof Steven Mintz at Inside Higher Education,* “contentious.” But Mintz has the solution!

Too often, students’ concerns like these are dismissed as the product of overindulged, hypersensitive, easily offended snowflakes who consider themselves paying customers who are always right. But I think that it is a terrible mistake to trivialize the student concerns.

Many undergraduates are convinced that important alternate perspectives and noncanonical texts and works of art are ignored or disparaged, and that too many faculty members are insensitive to how their assignments and classroom activities are perceived and experienced by students.

There is only one appropriate response to such concerns: to engage the students in dialogue as early as possible.

This is important, as there aren’t ten, not even five, appropriate responses to concerned students. There is only one, and so it’s critical that profs know it so they don’t get bad reviews, put into the academic gulag or, dare I say it, denied tenure.

Don’t expect deference.

Appeals to authority and expertise don’t work in parenting and certainly don’t work in the classroom. If we don’t respect our students, we shouldn’t expect respect in return.

Anticipate potential problems.

Review your readings, assignments and assessments from your students’ point of view and do your best to foresee likely land mines.

Strive to make your class a community of inquiry.

Students come to class with very different levels of confidence and styles of self-expression and argumentation — styles that can make their classmates feel very uncomfortable. Students differ radically in their family background, political affiliation, degree of religious commitment and ethical assumptions.

Do everything you can to convince your students that college is, first and foremost, a space where students have an unmatched opportunity to formulate their adult values — a process that requires ideas to be critically scrutinized, tested and remade.

Make your classroom a “safe space” for intellectual exploration.

All of us are susceptible to foot-in-mouth disease; all periodically and inadvertently blurt out remarks that we’d like to take back. That’s why it’s especially important to cultivate a classroom culture that’s open to alternate perspectives and nuance.

Be explicit about your pedagogy.

Explain why you chose a particular reading or instructional activity and offer a pedagogical justification. But don’t stop there: get feedback from your students and be willing to rethink an approach that upsets or offends some of them.

Do your darnedest to embed multiple perspectives into your class.

Make it clear that there are many different points of view, approaches and interpretations, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Don’t adopt the steamroller approach of hastily dismissing a perspective or rejecting a side of an argument out of hand. Oversimplification may reign in the Twittersphere, but it’s one of our jobs to model nuance.

Hey, he’s a history prof, so stop hating on him for being bad at counting to one. But Mintz’s first point, “don’t expect deference,” might be key to what follows.

Appeals to authority and expertise don’t work in parenting and certainly don’t work in the classroom. If we don’t respect our students, we shouldn’t expect respect in return.

On the contrary, they work remarkably well in parenting, provided that parents use them. Kids ask why and parents reply “because I said so.” Sometimes an explanation is warranted or offers a teachable moment, but ultimately someone has to make the decision, such as why can’t little Johnny jump off the garage roof to see if he can fly, and the decision is “no.” It’s not a debate. Their “opinion” on the subject is not worthy of respect. They don’t get a vote. That’s because they’re the child, and one of the attributes of being a child is immaturity, ignorance and poor judgment. There’s a reason children get raised by parents and not the other way around.

But Mintz takes it a step further in his second sentence, that “if we don’t respect our students, we shouldn’t expect respect in return.” First, respect isn’t the relevant frame for students. If they knew what they were talking about, they wouldn’t be the students but the teacher. They’re not the teacher because they have minds filled with mush waiting to be molded. Treat them politely, although a little condescension is also a lesson about toughening up those sensitive feelings of inadequacy and an appreciation for actual knowledge and experience as opposed to simplistic platitudes.

But as the professor, you should not only expect respect, but demand it.** Somebody decided to put you in the front of the lecture hall, to have you stand at the lectern, to make you utter words of knowledge to those empty vessels who are paying money to soak it in and, hopefully, come out more knowledgeable on the other end. That’s your job, to teach those little shits, not to pander to their feelings and reinvent your subject matter to accommodate the sensitivities of the least knowledgeable person in the classroom.

Mintz is right, that classrooms have grown contentious. But it’s not because the students are any smarter than they used to be, but because academics wrap up their abdication of responsibility in empty rhetoric like “make your classroom a ‘safe space’ for intellectual exploration.” I suspect what Mintz is trying to say is that heterodox views should be welcome, and maybe give a trigger warning to the unduly passionate that they may feel a twinge of outrage at their exposure to an idea they find reprehensible.

But his “one appropriate response” is that a professor needs to first obtain the approval of students to both teach and tolerate ideas that the intellectually weakest student might find abhorrent. This is how academics gave away their classroom. You don’t need the permission of the little shits to do your job. Carry a roll of dimes and be the grown up in the room, or give back your paycheck because you failed to deliver an education.

*IHE has eliminated comments because constructive criticism by the academics who are of the view that they are paid to teach and not to rub their charges’ tummies is hurtful.

**Granted, some profs don’t deserve to teach, creating a dilemma here, but that’s a distinct problem.