A professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh is making students sign a contract that asks them to immediately drop his class if they are easily “triggered.”
James “Duke” Pesta, an associate professor of English, developed the two-page contract over a year-and-a-half ago in response to a growing number of college students who become outraged over different opinions.
The contract’s Statement of Purpose, published in The College Fix Thursday, lays out the professor’s rules for attending his class.
“In this course, we study literature from cultures that existed before you were born. Their world is not our world. Their beliefs may not be our beliefs. No one asks you to believe or endorse any premise, attitude, precept, theology, political system, or ideology contained in these books or expressed in class. Nor will you ever lose points or be docked grades because of your opinion (written, oral, or otherwise),” the contract says.
The Statement of Purpose goes on to condemn any attempts to judge content under the false guise of “social justice.”
“We will not malign or trivialize these texts because they do not always parrot our values. We will not assume these books are racist, sexist, or homophobic because of the period in which they were written, or because of the race, class, gender, or religion of the authors,” the contract adds. “People who approach alien cultures with such preconceived notions are bigots masquerading as critically sophisticated advocates, often in the name of ‘social justice.’ Persons who so diminish the past are neither social nor just, especially when they compel students to adopt their biases.”
A list of rules also tells anyone easily-offended to “drop the class immediately” if they feel the need to censor different ideas and opinions.