TRUST IS A MUTUAL OBLIGATION.

A Morale Conditioner masquerading as a professor of English comes up with a new twist on an old paranoid theme:  "Unlike the controlled environments of physical classrooms, online education can directly expose those of us doing antiracist work to unintended and hostile audiences."  The horror!  Those outsiders, who might be parents, or who might be lurking the online classes, are up to the same old tricks, now calling attention to critical studies terminology the same way they used to count all the titles with "Marx" or "Marxism" in them.  When somebody is teaching institutional economics, or perhaps comparative politics, in the guise of  a literature class, perhaps somebody should call attention.

Most colleges and universities are committed to multicultural interpretations of social justice, as long as it also serves the professional interests of white faculty and students. But it remains to be seen if this commitment will extend to an active antiracism. The former is a type of interest convergence, and it lends itself quite easily and naturally to professionalization and can be broken down into assessable skills that can be marketed to corporations and educational administrators without much disruption of the status quo. But the latter, informed by critical race theory, openly questions professionalization as such and demands interrogation and reorganization of the status quo -- precisely because the professions and their educational tributaries are rooted in systemic racism.

While antiracist pedagogy may sharpen skills that many employers seek, such as literacy in a diversity of perspectives and cultures, that is not its primary goal. On the contrary, it aims to reassess its assessors by understanding white supremacy as a key organizing principle of Western history, culture(s) and institutions. It then reimagines them, recognizing the violence that made them possible and then demanding that those long denied agency have full participation.

In the same way that "reimagining police" has made Minneapolis less safe, is "reimagining institutions" going to make interest convergence more difficult, or graduates with proper antiracist dispositions less employable? Perhaps English departments ought to stick to literature, and let other disciplines marshal the empirical evidence on whether professionalism leads to more poverty.

Never mind that: Matt "Dean Dad" Reed sees online lurkers as more dangerous to learning than the politicized priors of so-called critical theory.  "Having a third party -- whether a parent, a self-appointed political watchdog or whoever else -- lurk in the shadows, waiting for a “gotcha” moment to dive-bomb the instructor, makes serious inquiry of controversial subjects impossible."  He continues with an observation that is probably irrelevant to that politicized English class.

When I taught the great works of Western political thought, I’d often role-play someone who agreed with that week’s author. The idea was to help students see how certain ideas worked. So one week I’d be a Hobbesian, fantasizing about a Leviathan that would keep everyone in line, and the next I’d be a Lockean waxing rhapsodic on social contracts. At various times I’d be a Platonist, an Aristotelian, a Machiavellian, a Marxist, a utilitarian, an anarchist and even -- the most fun -- a Nietzschean. (Villains always get the best lines.) I’d ask students to try on different schools of thought for size. A voyeuristic creep looking to score points could easily isolate a single line from a moment like that and run with it. Out of context, it could look damning. But the context is the entire point.

Read that other essay, dear reader, and see if there's any role-playing, or code-shifting, going on.

Here's the problem, though.  It doesn't take a "voyeuristic creep" cherry-picking snippets of an online class or a reading list to assert that a professor is indoctrinating students.  Students themselves dip in, zone out, have reasons fair or frivolous for missing a class, and they'll misunderstand even the most anodyne of statements.  Doesn't matter how conscientious you are, it happens.

It doesn't help for higher education to be perceived as offering ideological conditioning dressed up in recondite jargon.