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Students should strive to be ‘thoughtful’ and ‘open-minded,’ instructors say
A University of Cincinnati public speaking course urges students to be “thoughtful” and “open-minded,” but threatens them for displaying a long list of “isms.”
The public university offers several options for its “Introduction to Effective Speaking” class this semester, but all instructors have similar language in their syllabus.
“We do not always have to agree, but we must always be considerate, thoughtful, and open-minded,” the syllabus states.
But it also states: “Any forms of sexism, ableism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, classism, ageism, religious intolerance, or any other threat to a free and equitable learning environment will not be tolerated and may result in a loss of points.”
These terms are not defined, and efforts to ask professors for definitions were unfruitful.
The College Fix reached out to professors of the communications department and asked if stating “Marriage is between one man and one woman” could lose students points. The Fix also asked about any concerns about chilling speech.
None of the instructors responded to emails sent in the past month.
The Fix reached out to the campus American Association of University Professors’ president, Stephen Mockabee, but he did not respond to emails and phone calls in the past several weeks.
The university did not respond to an emailed request for comment in the past several weeks either.
However, free speech scholar Eugene Volokh said professors do have the freedom to cut off students for their comments in the classroom, though they need to be judicious in how they regulate speech.
“In class, there’s very little free speech,” he told The Fix via email, noting how students cannot speak until called upon or how professors can end a discussion if it gets off topic.
Volokh formerly taught at University of California Los Angeles law school and now researches free speech and Constitutional law issues at the Hoover Institution.
He said “professors aren’t just allowed to admonish and if necessary cut off students for not being ‘considerate, thoughtful, and open-minded’ – they basically have an obligation to do that.”
Volokh also observes that such restrictions that govern speech within class assignments are necessary for the growth of the students in those skills that the course seeks to cultivate.“That includes” he says “stressing the need to speak considerately, thoughtfully, and open-mindedly to be effective, and to avoid alienating your audience through sexism, etc.”
But professors also need to ensure their pedagogical goals are not undermined by too many limits on how students discuss ideas.
He said “it’s important that teachers allow students to express all sorts of viewpoints, while insisting that the viewpoints be expressed in ways that are effective and conducive to good class discussion.”
He said that it would not be “open-minded” if students were asked to cover a political topic and were prohibited from taking certain perspectives.
This is especially so if those speeches were “free of personal insults, belittling the audience or one’s adversaries because of their identities.”
Although he did not care for the framing of the syllabus and even suggested a better version of one, he reiterated that “one has to recognize that there isn’t and can’t be any general prohibitions on professors ‘chilling speech’ in class – indeed, one of our jobs is to chill certain kinds of speech.”
