Bare-Faced Grins
Blaine Greteman
It’s now a commonplace that a ‘woke’ mob of ‘snowflakes’ are ruining campus life in the US. In the past month, the Times has covered the story of an American academic who claims he was forced from his job by ‘wokeism’; the Economist has fretted over ‘wokeness’ at ‘elite schools’; and the Netflix show The Chair has dramatised the story of a bumbling professor whose hypersensitive students destroy his life. In Iowa, where I’m a bumbling professor, state legislators tried to pass a ‘Suck it up, buttercup’ bill taking aim at anti-Trump and BLM protests. But the most easily triggered students on campus this year are the ones who think we’re violating their rights by asking them to wear masks or get vaccinated, even as the Delta variant has overwhelmed local hospitals.
These are the same students who last year sported T-shirts emblazoned with ‘Trump 2020: Fuck Your Feelings’ and ‘Trump 2020: Make Liberals Cry Again’. But it’s out of respect for their feelings that, as in many US states, the legislators who told the buttercups to suck it up have passed a law against mask or vaccine mandates on campus. And university administrators have obeyed, sending out guidance warning us not to ‘penalise or criticise students for not wearing face masks; provide tangible incentives, such as extra credit or a higher grade, to students who wear face masks; or direct students to sit in different areas of the classroom based on whether they are wearing face masks’. Even by the repressed standards of Midwestern politeness, a ban on ‘criticising’ students on a university campus is sweeping and bizarre.
But the students who won’t wear masks still complain any time they feel ‘pressure’, and call their parents, who also complain. Administrators get regular lists of these complaints from the provost’s office. They then have to track down the complaining men – and they are almost always men – and try to placate them. This has created obvious tensions on Iowa’s campus, just as it has in Georgia, where faculty facing similar bans have been protesting.
One of my colleagues with a high-risk medical condition has been advised by her doctor not to be in a room with unmasked individuals. She told her students this and reminded them that the university ‘strongly encourages’ them to wear masks. She was met with smirks, eye-rolls and groans from the men who continue to sit in the front row with bare-faced grins.
Gender and race play a part in all this. In my classes, students dutifully follow my lead and don their masks; I’m a white man who teaches Milton, who may be the whitest poet who ever lived. But I supervise a large programme, with forty instructors teaching around fifteen hundred students, and in classroom after classroom I observe a different scene: unmasked white men staring down female instructors and instructors of colour. It’s a matter of policy, not accident, whose feelings we’ve decided to protect. If you’re an immunocompromised student or instructor who doesn’t want to sit surrounded by a bunch of unmasked, unvaccinated people? Well, fuck your feelings.
The sense of bro-grievance has metastasised beyond masks. At a recent Faculty Assembly meeting, we were told that the students who refuse to wear masks are also complaining loudly when instructors move classes temporarily online because of Covid exposure or infection. This apparently violated the ‘advertisement’ of in-person teaching.
Another instructor described a student as a ‘raging asshole who doesn’t read anything except mask mandate’ legislation. One disturbing side effect of the situation is that some faculty have started turning against their students or seeing them as threats. Teachers have always dished on their students, and vice versa, but the level of hostility strikes me as entirely new.
My department recently endorsed and published a statement affirming that ‘a university that teaches critical thinking and promotes the advancement of scientific knowledge as part of its core mission has an obligation to its students, staff and faculty to follow public health guidelines to offer a safe, equitable and collegial learning environment.’ But few of us feel we’re fully honouring that obligation.
The notion of wide-eyed students sitting rapt at the feet of their bespectacled, tweedy professor was always a fantasy and is now hopelessly out of date. But it contains a grain of truth: universities are built on the idea that knowledge, and even wisdom, can best thrive and be communicated in an environment – call it ‘collegiality’ – that fosters trust and respect. Anyone concerned about the tyranny of the ‘woke’ should be far more frightened by the way this truth is being sacrificed to protect students’ right to feel good about being wrong.
Comments
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28 September 2021
at
8:39pm
robert edward cenek
says:
Well stated and fully agree with your observations. I grew up in Iowa, and also matriculated from a Iowa college. It pains me to see how much the state has devolved - certainly to the point that I would never relocate from my current residence on the East Coast back to the Northeast part of the state - my birthplace and original home. I fondly recall the U of Iowa being a beacon of reason during the Days of Rage. Now it seems filled with entitled junior Trumptistas.
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29 September 2021
at
8:42am
F.S.
says:
I have read the Economist's "fretting". At least, in focusing on one particular kind of aggression, it doesn't deny or belittle the existence of other kinds. The same can't be said of this blog post.
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4 October 2021
at
1:02am
RobotBoy
says:
Horrifying. I had no idea that there weren't mask mandates on Iowa campuses. Idiots.
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6 October 2021
at
5:52pm
prwhalley
says:
@
RobotBoy
I really think this is true. It's God's gift to the resurgent fascist tendency.
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5 October 2021
at
10:44pm
Stephen Vlastos
says:
Kudos to Blaine Greteman for blowing the whistle on University of Iowa President and subordinate administrators, who, apparently out of some combination of fear and careerism, are energetically implementing state mandates that both limit free speech and and put at risk the health of faculty, staff, and students.
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7 October 2021
at
6:37pm
Carlene Bauer
says:
I am close to someone who was born, raised, and educated in Iowa and she recently remarked upon the state drifting, troublingly, Trumpishly, rightward, just as the first poster mentioned. And while I deeply appreciated this piece, I'd like to reserve the right to be frightened by more than one thing at a time. Just because these horrifying students exist doesn't mean that their "woke" counterparts aren't doing just as much damage to intellectual life--to the collegiality Greteman invokes. The larger problem seems to lie with university administrations refusing to be the adults in the room in so many matters where student life is concerned and letting the students--I'm sorry, their customers--call the shots.
Read moreHaving said that, I do think the embrace of identity politics on campus by the humanities in particular has had a suffocating effect. I say this as an instructor in the humanities. The focus on tribal identity with a complete lack of a class analysis is a real danger to progressive change.