A student at Wellesley College is building a database of professors who commit perceived “microaggressions,” such as using pronouns other than the ones preferred by a student. The information in the database is crowdsourced, meaning that it relies on students to submit faculty evaluations.
Is this a Rate My Professors kind of resource for students, or a Burn Book by social justice warriors?
This well-intentioned project is vulnerable to baseless accusations that could tarnish a professor’s reputation – and harm that professor’s career – based on a lie. Sharing information is great; a digital rumor mill is not.
Wellesley junior Elizabeth Engel told Campus Reform that she created the database after struggling with finding professors who would accommodate her needs.
“As a mentally ill student, it’s always been kind of frustrating to find out whether a professor is good about dealing with mental illness,” she said.
The stated intentions of the project are positive; helping students with mental illness navigate college life is a worthy pursuit. The percentage of college students seeking mental health services is on the rise.
It is the content of the professor evaluation, however, that goes past medical wellness concerns and into political territory that has no impact on how well a student with special needs would be accommodated in class.
The evaluations ask students to rate faculty on a scale from 1-to-10 on how accommodating the professor was of the student’s mental illness. It also asks for an explanation of the rating. As far as surveys go, this is standard stuff.
And then, it asks “Does this professor perform/use ableist microaggressions?” as if a microaggression can damage a person’s wellbeing. If someone feels disrespected, it might make for a bad day – but it’s doubtful that a perceived social slight would worsen a person’s mental health.
What is a microaggression to one person might be completely normal polite discourse to another. For instance, the term “illegal immigrant” is factually correct, but if someone feels microaggressed by it, they could use that feeling as grounds to publicly shame a professor.
Another question asks, “Does this professor respect students’ prounouns?” This is particularly odd, considering Wellesley is an all-women’s college. In this day and age, people identify as either gender, both genders, no gender, genderfluid – the list goes on.
Maybe, if you do not identify as a woman, a women’s college might not be for you.
Wellesley is Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright’s alma mater. Diane Sawyer, Nora Ephron, and Cokie Roberts went there, too. The next Secretary of State could be at Wellesley right now – maybe she’s taking the survey.
