Classroom

Two-dozen professors put their heads together on productive classroom discussions. They landed in different places. Sam Kalda for The Chronicle.

He said that she stayed in the class, and that after he had explained his point of view to the dean, no action was taken. Another participant described it as “one of the best intellectual experiences I’ve had in a very long time.” “We’ve got to free ourselves from the idea that somehow we’re going to fix politics in our classroom.” Therapists might tell each spouse to leave the question of who is ultimately right to the side and focus on understanding the other person. He sees it as his job to prepare students for the conversations they’ll be having in the “real” world. Karen Taliaferro, an assistant professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, has found that certain hot topics immediately cause students to retrench, moving them from a learning posture to a defensive one. According to Bejan, civility is an “artifice of good faith, good manners, respectful behavior” that students and academics adopt when the sincere feeling isn’t there so that society can function and people can discuss difficult topics without shutting down. She distinguishes the negative term “self-censorship” from “discretion,” which is a virtue, Bejan said. Usually, more students answer “yes” to that question than “no,” Rose said. “The whole point is that civility isn’t charity because you have to be civil to the people that you don’t love. “There’s a bit of a cottage industry of commentary in the U.S. For about four days in August, the mostly early-career faculty members gathered to discuss (and yes, disagree) about what it means to have civil discourse, what professors should expect from their students, and what the boundaries of speech in classroom discussion should be.