BTW, thanks for planting the image of a “guerilla rectal exam” in my brain. Thanks a lot!

Matt L, that is not a materialist argument. It’s consumerist logic, and a good reason why universities should continue to be funded in part by sources other than tuition. A lot of what we do at universities is not necessarily defined by a consumer/provider dynamic, and that kind of argument can be easily used to attack academic freedom and intellectual exploration.

The students at my school shell out a lot of money to take classes at Woebegone State. (The State of Upper Oblivion also pays a part of the bills.) The students deserve a 50 minute class period with their instructor, uninterrupted by guerrilla theater, corporate shills, and other distractions. That is ostensible reason they choose to attend college. (Although there are a lot of learning agendas out there, this is the one that is advertised… and presumably the one the parents and the state are writing the checks for…)

Guerrilla theater is silly, and its for upper-middle-class-bourgeois-theater-farts-students, but there are other spaces for it on campus, like the dinning hall, the dorm lounge, the loading dock at the facilities building, etc. It would do immense good for the tender egos and planning skills, of budding theater-farts majors if they actually organized a ‘happening’ and people showed up.

Class went outside one sunny day, and we had to pause while a pro-choice march went by and the chanting made it impossible to hear (incidentally, my usual classroom is such that sometimes a march makes me pause class even when we stay inside). As we stopped and watched, a marcher tried to run over and hand out flyers. I am pro-choice, but my instinctive reaction, as I stopped her, was “oh hell no. You do not just walk up in my classroom like that.” Even if my classroom was currently a circle of students sitting on the grass with invisible walls around, and class was clearly not happening at the moment. But I felt it was about territory, less than a charmed space, and my students just chuckled.

[Random tangent: decided to C&P rather than re-write the story for this comment---but I would have written it *very* differently]

“Guerrilla theater” is fine, so long as it permits its audiences to walk away. Students in a class don’t feel the same liberty to walk away that they would anywhere else on campus.

I worry that my classroom has only one entrance and exit and no windows. I worry that there’s no callbox nearby. I kvetched annually to administrators that universities sponsor first aid courses even as they cut student health services and depend on an overburdened fire department and hospital for emergency service. After years of complaining, I got an administrator to understand that the B & G guys shouldn’t work on elevators during finals week because we’ve students in wheelchairs who cannot get to their classrooms. And that the one dormitory that houses students with disabilities should be the first and not the last to be plowed out in the winter. Only took a decade.

Each semester I suggest to my students that a book cooperative under the aegis of the student government may help them afford books and fund scholarships. I urge them to undertake thoughts that some among them find objectionable, novel, daring, subversive, and–dare I say?–crazy. I’d like to think I am empowering them, helping them move from being spectators to being active players. And that requires that the classroom be a safe haven, at least for 50 minutes three days a week.

Off to teach Intro to Women’s Studies, where the topic is poverty and already students are worried about what they say will be construed as sexist, racist, unfeeling, politically incorrect, etc. But at least we’ve worked together to the point that some frank discussion may take place.