So here's the problem with my department: it has no short-term memory. I don't mean that it collectively forgets stuff. I mean that on certain matters, and by 'certain' I mean 'most', it is incapable of retaining new information.
Like the case of the postgrad conference folder. Back in, oh, 2003, 2004, the department thought it would be a good idea if the PhD students organising the postgraduate conference put together a folder of information about what they'd done, who they'd contacted, and what needed to be arranged for when. Maybe it would have been; but, things being things, people got busy and the folder never got made. Nobody claimed it had been made; nobody claimed it would be made; nobody connected to the project was ever under the impression that it existed. So later that year, when the secretaries wanted to know where the folder was, people let them know politely and with no confusion that the folder did not exist, and so the matter passed.
Until the next year, when the secretaries wanted to know where that folder was, and people explained once again that it didn't exist, and the matter was dropped. And the year after that, when the secretaries wanted to know where that folder was, and people explained through gritted teeth that THERE WAS NO FOLDER, and the matter was dropped once again. And the year after that, when the secretaries were very annoyed that someone from the previous year-group was obviously holding on to that folder, still, because it wasn't available to give to the new group, and people wept softly in corners and spent long nights drafting the most unambiguous e-mails possible about the non-existence of the folder. And last week, when the secretaries decided they'd had enough of this folder going missing year after year, and requested copies of all the documents in it so they could build up a folder of their own.
It's possible I'm missing out a few conversations about the folder, here. There were a lot. Anyway, what I'm saying is that I think most of the department's dysfunction can be traced back to this same idea - that once it has got an idea into its collective head, that idea is there forever, no matter what else happens to interfere with the facts.
I'm grumbling about my department a little here because I've just had dinner with a friend who got his PhD today, and who's one of my favourite academics in the whole wide world (even after his baby bit me). He's also great to talk to about work matters, because although he graduated from my department, he was distanced from it for so long that its bizarreness just seems absolutely ridiculous to him. I mean, I know it's ridiculous, too, but you don't realise how much of its oddness you've internalised as just the way things are until someone else interrupts your story with a 'they told you whaaaaaaaaat?'
So here's the slightly less funny things the department has got into its head recently:
- TA allocations are divided up entirely at random. The fact that they hugely favour the same few individuals year after year does not in any way impact upon this randomness.
- The department has absolutely no obligation to let current TAs know if they won't be teaching next semester. Word will get round from the people who did, so they'll hear about it eventually.
- Post-PhDs like me doing hourly-paid teaching are a persistent annoyance, and are only still attached to the department because they don't want to leave [gosh, who would?]. It is, therefore, totally acceptable to ask them on very short notice to teach 25% of the first-years, but to drop them from the list of end-of-semester party invites because they're not staff.
- Post-PhDs like me whine, and we don't understand how things work, and we don't appreciate how much the department's done for us, and we persistently let it down, and we need to grow up and act like professionals and stop taking everything so personally.
This can get to you after a while.
My friend staged what I can best describe as an academic intervention, insisting that I get an old research proposal together and submit it to funding bodies for this year's consideration, pointing out to me that it's really really interesting and that it would work very well with one increasingly trendy research area, giving me names of people and departments to contact about taking this further.
"And also," he said, "you have got to leave this place before it drives you insane."
Yeah.
1. Doctor Who as Hamlet (in the current RSC Hamlet)
2. Jimmy McNulty as Oliver Cromwell (in Channel 4's Civil War bildungsromantitragedwhateveritis, The Devil's Whore)
I know they're both great actors, but that's always going to be weird.
A girl from secondary school has just added me as a friend on Facebook. The only, and I mean only, conversation I remember having with her is queuing up for shotput aged fourteen when she told me that she'd had just about enough of my cheek and would be waiting behind the PE block after school to batter me. (I mean, presumably there were conversations leading up to that because as far as I recall it didn't come out of nowhere, but, yeah, we weren't exactly friends.)
I know Facebook is a strange place anyway, full of friend requests from people you don't even remember very well, and there's a few people I'm friends with on Facebook whose names I'd honestly struggle to remember otherwise, and maybe that's not a bad thing, really, because maybe the world needs more of it, but I draw the line at being the Friend of someone who, for all I know, is still waiting behind the PE block. I mean, come on.
New shoes! New shoes! Okay, I can't walk in them for very long, but NEW SHOES!
"I thought you weren't doing the genetics test."
"No, I was going to think about it. And now I've watched Heroes and I've made up my mind."
"I don't think you're taking this very seriously," says my mother. She might have a point.
As well as the geneticist, I have appointments with a neurologist, an orthoptist, a hospital optician, and the ophthalmologist who sent me on to all the above, as well as the contact details for a vision impairment place that might be able to give me some useful advice for dealing with photophobia (if we were living in a parallel universe where I actually contacted them). The orthoptist has already seen me once and I don't know what she's still doing on the list, except that for most of that appointment she was fascinated by my condition and asked me questions I couldn't answer about precisely what they'd done in my childhood operations to deal with it so well, so maybe she's just curious and hoping I'll be able to do better than "Um... something with the muscles, I think?" in the future. (I won't. I don't know what they did. But in my defence, I was four years old and under general anaesthetic at the time.)
Plus, I'm not doing badly. I haven't had a migraine for a while now, and while I feel like a bit of a dork wearing sunglasses in November, I can't be doing that badly if feeling like a bit of a dork is the worst part of it. So maybe I'm not taking it too seriously, but it doesn't seem too serious. Certainly not enough to warrant the variety show of medical professionals it's getting, anyway. Right? Right.
(And then I remind myself that the variety show comes because there is possibly something wrong with my brain, something that might well be getting worse, and I feel very serious indeed.)
The ophthalmologist said it was obvious I'd spent a lot of time in hospitals, and I can guess why. The tests haven't changed much in ten years, and none of them bother me; shine bright blue lights into my eyes, put my face in a metal frame and crank another light closer and closer and closer for whatever strange Orwellian purpose that machine has, tap my eyeballs with cotton-buds to test their reflexes, and I smile happily and sit still. The exception is eye-drops, but these days instead of throwing myself to the ground and screaming in pre-emptive pain I look suspiciously at the nurse and say "Is that atropine? I hate atropine," and she tells me she's sure I'm used to it by now. The ophthalmologist said I had a very sensible approach to all this. I didn't make any Heroes references with him, but I must have seemed pretty relaxed.
There are downsides to seeming relaxed in such environments. When you seem confident enough to trade jokes about being somebody's ideal publication before you ask for a layperson translation of the line he read out from the Great Big Book Of Weird Eye Stuff, you probably shouldn't be surprised when the answer's "It means that possibly part of your brain is missing." And several minutes of "Oh, no no no! Not in a bad way! It's not a new thing, you have a PhD, it's obviously not affected you that badly!" later, my heartrate had almost returned to normal.
And then he talked to me about the different variations of my condition and the hereditability of said different versions, and I got confused again and said "So, wait, if mine might be autosomal dominant, what does that mean?", and he said "Oh, it might be like Huntington's," and then I hit the ceiling with enough force to ricochet across his office. ("No no no! It's okay! No! I don't mean it's like Huntington's, it's not like Huntington's, it's just the pattern of how it's inherited that's the same, please can you climb out of that drawer now?")
But the facts remain. My condition is sometimes accompanied by wider deformities of the central nervous system, and these come in many different flavours, and they are so varied and the condition is so rare that there's no pattern to follow. It's possible that my migraines and photophobia are connected to that, and it's possible that they're not. The doctor did reassure me that pressure to publish is still pressure to publish in the medical sciences, so people are going to write up the weird and unusual cases disproportionately, etc etc etc, but my condition is weird and unusual enough as it is and he's not immune to the lure of that. By the end of the appointment, his desk was covered in abstracts and articles he'd printed off to show me while I was waiting for the atropine to do its work, and he was pointing out various interesting things this condition has done to other people. "Learning difficulties - well, you're okay there!" he says happily. "And these hand abnormalities! Have you seen these? And see, more CNS things - gait ataxia, brain stem atrophy -"
We look at each other.
"- I'msureit'sveryrare."
Whatever.
Probably I'm fine. Probably the worst I'll ever have to deal with is looking like a bit of a dork in sunglasses when it's November. Probably nothing's going to get worse. But if I have to go through all this hassle all the same, I should get to make jokes about living in a world where rare genetic conditions mean that you can fly.
Youtube Search Suggestions Present: President-Elect Obama.
Obama antichrist
Obama brush your shoulders off
Obama children singing
Obama dance
Obama europe
Obama fox news
Obama guns
Obama hillary umbrella
Obama is an arab
Obama jews
Obama krypton
Obama lion king
Obama mccain roast
Obama never gonna give you up
Obama obama
Obama pledge of allegiance
Obama quotes the bible
Obama rally
Obama socialist
Obama terrorist connections
Obama us citizen
Obama votes
Obama will win
Obama xcel
Obama yes we can
Obama zone.
Essay 51 - ...what? This one needs some big corrections, but I don't even know where to start. It's like trying to guide someone through putting up shelves with a kipper.
Essay 52 - Terrible writing. Brilliant ideas. And sadly, despite something one of my students once told me as evidence for why I should change his grade, in the real world it does indeed matter where the commas go.
Essay 53 - Passionately and eloquently argues for two contradictory ideas. You're messing with me, aren't you?
Essay 54 - similar to essay 51. Earned the glorious honour of getting listed on the second-marking grade sheet (all our essays being exchanged with another member of staff and checked for grade consistency before going back to the students) as 'HELP!'
Essay 55 - This was absolutely brilliant. I hope it's the student I think it is.
Essay 56 - Not quite brilliant, but still fairly shiny.
Essay 57 - Best grade of the whole batch so far. These creative responses can really, really work sometimes.
Essay 58 - Good analysis, but slightly worrying in terms of student's future life choices, viz. responding to early modern love poetry of the woe-is-me-life-is-as-nothing-until-my-love-looks-my-way variety as a) obviously a sign of deep, suicidal depression from the speaker and b) clearly proving that his love is real and genuine. (One of my fellow TAs suggested 'FYI - beware of angsty boys bearing mix-tapes, because BELIEVE ME it gets old fast' as an additional comment, but we decided against it.)
Essay 59 - Ah, the many tactful ways I have learnt to say 'You have some good ideas but have totally misread the question' over the years.
Essay 60 - Why is this one printed in blue? It clashes with my marking pen.
AND THEY ARE DONE! O frabjous day, callooh callay!
Essay 41 - I gave this a pretty good grade, but I still think I might have been too mean. I'll flag it up to look at tomorrow when I have coffee in front of me; it did have some genuine problems, but it's not the student's fault that these particular problems are the ones that drive me crazy.
Essay 42 - The opposite problem! This one's answered the question that all my plagiarists, may their names be howled in Hades, went for, and while it's very good I'm now wondering if my effusive praise and brilliant grade is partly because the student actually wrote it themselves. Maybe go back to this one before the coffee.
Essay 43 - Hee, this one mentions an academic marking essays. It's like one of those infinite regress pictures.
Essay 44 - Oh, student, you are going to absolutely love heavy theory. Really. I want to see your face when you discover Derrida, and kind of wish you'd been at university fifteen years earlier to truly get the most of it.
Essay 45 - It is a sign of my great age and boringness that I almost want to thank this one for writing their essay in a larger font. omg, I can read it!
Essay 46 - This one is in 10 point, just to show me. (But it's very good.)
Essay 47 - Dialogue: not your friend.
Essay 48 - Another plagiarist. Tar and feathers.
Essay 49 - This one has such a clever last line that I just know the student was smiling when they wrote it. I hope there was a victory lap around the room, too. (Which reminds me of something a girl in my Masters class once said: "You know how sometimes when you're getting to the end of your argument, and you're really pleased with yourself, and you start doing little twiddly show-off things like you're throwing your own victory parade? With Kristeva, you can hear the damn trumpets from page 3.")
Essay 50 - Oh, clever. Student, I am seriously proud of you.
*pause to rearrange blog layout, because that's going to get me through the marking faster, obviously*
Essay 31: They're a bitch to mark, but I'm loving these creative-writing essays.
Essay 32: That said, I wonder about students like this one, who can write like a Pulitzer-winning angel; are they going to be this good at writing analytic pieces as well? Aren't they going to feel a bit disappointed if they turn out not to be and their grades plummet once creative responses aren't an option?
Essay 33: Moral nuance: not a big thing in first-year essays.
Essay 34: Yeah, see, when I warned everybody off using 'they have many similarities and many differences' as an argument, I was not actually suggesting 'they have lots of similarities and only a few differences' as a replacement. Really.
Essay 35: This is an interesting one, because I think I know who wrote it and (for the sake of anonymous vagueness) they're a student whose pre-university background was in a profession which has the potential to be traumatic and harrowing in a variety of ways, and the student's chosen to write about that very thing. Effectively and well, so it's not awkward to mark. Just interesting.
Essay 36: Do not eat your thesaurus. It never helps.
Essay 37: I think this student did something really interesting without realising it, and then moved on to say eighteen varieties of the same thing about rhyme. I did a lot of underlining, and there may have been arrows.
Essay 38: This one answered the question I'd say is by far the toughest (although it's on the shortest texts, which might explain a lot about its popularity). Made some good points intermittently. There's a weird feeling with some of these and-now-I-will-proceed-to-discuss-imagery essays; I think a lot of the time these students actually quite like having opinions of their own about the text, but they've been trained to write in the kind of way that stamps down on that, and so it comes through in patches and bursts, as if there's some quietly-fought battle hiding under the type.
Essay 39: defied all rational description.
Essay 40: Brilliant ideas, very strange tangly structure. This can be fixed.
Essay 21 - I think this student is both smarter than me and on hallucinogenic drugs.
Essay 22 - More creative writing. I am very impressed with the quality of the student creative writing this semester. Except, in this case... well, see, they're supposed to be responding creatively to a particular text, and not so much in this case. So although it's a great piece they've written, it won't get the grade it would in a creative writing class. Alas, student.
Essay 23 - The exact opposite of 'The Waste Land and Me' - spotting all the right things, really knowing their stuff about poetic terminology, but it reads like they've been taught to write by catching a poem and drowning it in formaldehyde.
Essay 24 - This one has some excellent turns of phrase. They seem to seep out by accident (I get the feeling this student's learned to write the same way the writer of Essay 23 did), but they're great all the same.
Essay 25 - So good that my current choice of marking implement (metallic turquoise gel pen) seems to tarnish it somehow.
Essay 26 - ESL student doing a creative piece, where some of the ESL idiosyncrasies actually work surprisingly well.
Essay 27 - This one is really, really good, and the student's clearly done a lot of reading. The critics do swamp the student's own ideas a bit, as critics are wont to do, but we can work on that.
Essay 28 - I swear we went over the problems with 'many similarities and many differences' the week before these came in.
Essay 29 - Excellent ideas, somewhat lacking in execution. When even the Victorianist marking your essays thinks your sentences are unbearably long, you might want to work on knowing when to stop.
Essay 30 - Another good grade, another very similar registration number. (This is one of the main problems with anonymous marking, especially when you have a lot of essays to mark; seven-digit registration numbers that will quite often differ by only one digit pave a dangerous path into confusion and chaos when it comes to submitting grades.)
Essay 11 - ARGH. I wish we had a whole separate grade category for essays like this one (garbled, repetitive, nonsensical, half the length it should be, etc etc etc). Since we do not, I will console myself with stories of people handing essays back In The Old Days with comments upon them like 'I am returning this perfectly good paper to you because some idiot has scrawled nonsense all over it'.
Essay 12 - This one won't get a much better grade than Essay 11, but I don't mind ones like this anywhere near so much - the student is clearly trying, just has real difficulties with basic writing skills. That can be worked on. (Preferably in primary school teachers why are you letting children get through the system without knowing what a comma is, but whatever.)
Essay 13 - Yay for student creative writing! (The essays I'm marking at the moment are a mixture of creative/analytic responses to texts, which is an... interesting idea.) And this one's very vivid and pretty creepy (deliberately so!), which is great fun to read even when the exposition is a little clunky.
Essay 14 - There had to be a plagiarist sooner or later. And to this one's credit, I got almost to the end of the essay before turning to Dr Google. (Oh, the shame - usually I'm much quicker off the mark than that.) It looks like it's about 70% plagiarised, with another short paragraph that I know has to be lifted from somewhere and can't find. Thanks to some judicious word-swapping and sentence-rearranging, Turnitin passed it through as fine.
Essay 15 - OH for heaven's sake TWO plagiarists in a ROW is just not FAIR. This one seemed a little bit less dire at the start, but by the final pages had degenerated into copy/paste/right-click-thesaurus to the point where the final sentences didn't even make any kind of sense.
Essay 16 - Written by the student themselves, o frabjous day! And this is an interesting one, because it's doing a lot of things right but has also headed off down the wrong road from the start, in the model Stanley Fish described re: hypothetical journal articles nobody would want to read as 'The Waste Land and Me'.
Essay 17 - I love this one.
Essay 18 - More creative writing! And very vivid, although possibly would have been better served had someone confiscated the author's thesaurus beforehand.
Essay 19 - Whoever is in charge of the language proficiency requirements for exchange students needs to be fired. This student is clearly trying very hard, but I can't at all follow what they're saying.
Essay 20 - MORE PLAGIARISM! Greeeeeeat. And the thing is, if I turned up my existing speech on secondary sources and referencing and plagiarism to make it sound even more scary, I'm fairly sure it wouldn't touch the ones who already think I won't spot it, and the overly nervous ones who are worried about accidental plagiarism would fret themselves into panic. Sigh.
*Pause to hunt down interestingly-coloured pen.*
Essay 1 - Two sheets of paper. One of which is the cover sheet. For a 2000 word essay. Huh. Oh, no, it's just in REALLY tiny font. I'm putting this one back in the pile, my eyes can't deal with that at 11pm.
Essay 2 - What is it with students inventing their own paragraphing system? Loads of mine do this two-tier thing, where a blank line means an actual new paragraph while a line break means, I don't know, a change of subject within the paragraph or something. It's really curious. But this is an interesting essay - no real argument, no clear train of thought on anything, but clearly written by a student who really likes poetry and wants to talk about how it sounds. This is the kind of student whose grade could go up a lot in essays to come.
Essay 3 - This one worried me. It's a close-reading of a poem in which the student's chosen the most negative, bleak, life-is-nothing interpretation of everything, to a point beyond misreading (e.g. the poem mentions 'a town', and the student writes that not naming this town contributes to the apathetic and boring feeling of existence the poem describes... and on, and on, for a whole essay). Yeah, this one goes into the Discuss With A Colleague pile.
Essay 4 - Wow, this one can write. I am so impressed by how confidently some of my students write when it's their first university essay; I don't think I was anywhere near this brave. (Although, here's a frightening thought - I was having lunch with the person who taught me first-year English as an undergrad the other day, and he remembered which short story I'd written on for that first essay. ERK.)
Essay 5 - CONGRATULATIONS STUDENT for getting every single presentation category ticked in the 'unsatisfactory' box! This takes real dedication. Ignoring the stylesheet and all my advice risks getting one right by accident; this, my friends, is skill.
Essay 6 - I feel a little sorry for students who've spent however many years at school being taught how to write a book report, and then get to university where their book report is going to get the same grade this one will. It's a pretty good book report, too.
Essay 7 - This is odd. It starts off without an argument, it continues for a long time without an argument, and then it sort of picks up an argument without realising it on page 3. Your subconscious already wants to write literary criticism! Trust the Force, Luke!
Essay 8 - This was brilliant. Really brilliant. But so cautious! Half an essay written in the form of "Possibly this is going too far but it occurred to me possibly that in my opinion maybe it could be argued that [really insightful point here]." Whoever this is (all our marking is done anonymously), I wish they'd start sitting next to the student who wrote Essay 4.
Essay 9 - If you're not sure what the question means, then adding "This proves how [question here] is true" every fifth sentence is probably not the way to go.
Essay 10 - Oh, the dreaded essay written by the exchange student whose English really isn't up to essay-writing level. I feel mean telling them off for this as if it's something they can just Work Harder At - it's truly not their fault that the language-proficiency tests done with some of the exchange universities are really not up to scratch - but, all the same, I can't even understand what this one's saying half the time.
OH MY GOD YOU GUYS a bunch of us just went out for drinks and we were at this fancy new restaurant which to be honest was kind of expensive and I think they didn't like it when we just ordered starters but whatever because it's mid-semester break and this means we can go out and wilt into chairs and compare stories from teaching all night long so anyway there we were talking about the temperature because three of us said the room was too hot and the other one said she was suddenly freezing cold and she held up one of her arms and it was covered in goosebumps and then an empty wine-glass moved across the table towards her all by itself and she didn't see it but two of us just stared and stared and then we put the glass back and tried to jiggle the table or lean on it or something to see if we could make the glass move that way and it wasn't budging and then the waiter came over so we said "Is this place haunted?" and he blinked at us and we said "No REALLY is it really HAUNTED because that glass just moved ALL BY ITSELF we SWEAR" and he said he'd go away and ask someone if they'd heard anything because he was new and then we never saw him again.
Which I think is possibly because he's a student in our department. And because he's still in the kitchen telling the chef that TAs just absolutely lose the plot at mid-semester break. Which is fair.
(But I swear, that glass moved.)
I share an office, so people who need to talk to their students will usually end up doing it with a few TAs present. Annoying, but, you know. Mostly we don't pay too much attention to what someone else's student is talking about; this time, because my friend is teaching the creepiest student alive, I did.
Not that I knew she was teaching the creepiest student alive. I knew she was teaching a student that seemed to have some problems beyond a more typical glowering-bratty-teenager model - this student had, for example, suggested during a discussion that the death penalty should be brought back and extended to cover a wide range of crimes, and shrugged off someone else's 'What if innocent people end up getting executed?' with 'Doesn't matter - people are shit and there's too many of them anyway' - but hey, sullen misanthropy is something students have grown out of before, I'm sure. And mostly we all assumed he was putting it on as an act.
Having heard this kid speak now, I am fairly sure he's not.
And the thing is, he didn't even say anything disturbing in that meeting. No threats, nothing like that. He was polite and attentive. I wish I could put into words just what was so disturbing about him, but I don't think I can beyond saying that he held a conversation like he was talking to ELIZA. This wasn't shyness, or social awkwardness, or autism failing to pick up on social cues - this was a blankness. I didn't even look up from my own work, and it still made my skin creep.
My friend's half-course has finished, so she's not teaching him any more. Other people still are. The student support people are 'keeping an eye on him', which seems epically ineffective as a tactic - but what else could they do, really?
I don't even know what this kid looked like. Maybe I'll see him in a newspaper one day.
As a general principle, I'm fine with the idea that my students shouldn't be unduly influenced by my own views. True, since they're taught by a person rather than a series of PowerPoint slides, I don't think it's possible - let alone desirable - to act as if I have no opinions of my own when I'm teaching, but my opinions shouldn't be presented as unilateral truth. Or maybe they shouldn't even be presented. Donne was a genius, fine; people who write on whiteboards with permanent markers should be tarred and feathered, okay; but nobody in my class needs to know whether or not I go to church or where I stand on Trident, and they certainly don't need to hear that my opinions on any such matters are The Truth, disagree with me and your grades will pay the price.
So that's the theory. Simple enough.
A while ago, I was teaching an introduction to forms of literary representation using three images of Guernica/Gernika after the Luftwaffe bombing. One photograph of blackened, half-destroyed buildings; one aerial map of the town showing the areas hit; one copy of Picasso's painting. I recommend this to anyone teaching the same kind of thing, too. Forget starting off with George Eliot and medieval allegory. Anyway, the way we talked about the pictures treated the bombing unambiguously as a Bad Thing, but I thought that was fairly non-controversial - until a few weeks later, when one of my students handed in an essay on an unrelated topic that turned into a paean for Franco somewhere around the middle of page 3.
Huh.
I know my students aren't always going to share my views on politics. I know my students aren't always going to share my views on history. But I did think we might have some common ground on the matter of fascist dictators.
I was reminded of this recently after talking about another incident of several years ago with one of my colleagues, in which I cut a student off mid-sentence and didn't let him finish voicing a particularly homophobic opinion (something beginning with the words 'Of course, all right-thinking people are obviously repulsed...', if I remember right). It's the only time in my teaching career I've ever done that, and I don't regret it. To that student, I'm sure, it looked like I was stamping down on discussion by only letting the views I agreed with get heard. To the others? Who knows.
So then, what's my role in those situations? I shouldn't be using my position of authority as a political pulpit, and my students have every right to hold whatever bizarre, repellent or horrifying views they want. Should I keep in mind that the quiet, sullen student at the back might very well disagree with whatever the rest of the class is saying, and attempt to balance the discussions accordingly? Give equal time to pro-Franco views? Make sure the students are aware that there are at least two sides to every story and that it's not for me to make moral judgments? "Okay, everybody, I see what you're saying, but let's remember that the supporters of baby-bayonetting have a right to their opinion as well?"
It'd be disingeneous to pretend I was morally torn on this issue. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with the idea that viciously homophobic and pro-fascist students might feel marginalised for their views, really. Ideally, fine, I'd let them bring their ideas to the discussion, and hear them out, and then gently nudge them with a series of non-confrontational questions and possibly a poem or two into a position where they realised what was truly important in life and tearfully repented of their ignorance, and they'd be the first students to stand on their desks and recite 'O Captain, My Captain' on my last day - but the semester is too short for ideally. And while I could avoid all potential confrontation by refusing to discuss any emotionally charged subjects and making sure any strongly-held views got dissipated by an unstoppable bland wave of let's agree to disagree, I don't think this is the point of studying literature.
I wonder what this looks like from the students' perspective.