Are all voices respected in the classroom?

  Grating and demeaning: how a Professor is being as they stand before you and mock or disregard your beliefs, and only yours, under the illusion that only their beliefs are true and that everyone else agrees. As a student, there are many reasons we’re afraid to question them: we don’t want to disrespect them in front of the class, we don’t want to take up valuable class time by defending our opinions because it’s an inconvenience to others, we don’t wish to offend people of other belief systems etc. The Professor, however, can say anything they want without fear of the class retaliating—it might be valid, propaganda, or their own personal opinion. Instead of blindly accepting authority figures opinions (or sitting silently and pretending to), students might begin to use their voices and avoid being subject to this kind of treatment.

There are two topics that are the easiest to cause contention: politics and religion. I’ve met Professors whose blood was raised at one or the other and occasionally both. Christian conservative views are singled out and made to feel like they’re unacceptable or outdated in various classrooms at Yuba College. According to a New York Times writer Nate Cohn in his article A Big Drop in the Share of Americans Calling themselves Christians, the Christian share of adults in the US fell to 70.6 percent from 78.4 percent between 2007 and 2014. Still, 70.6 is something of a substantial number. This raises the question: why am I the only Christian Conservative voice in most of my classrooms? It’s not that they don’t exist, but that they’re too intimidated to speak out against the classroom narrative. My sister was in a geology class here at Yuba College and the teacher spent most of the first lecture degrading Christianity and saying anyone who believed in it was certifiable or inane. While it’s his right to believe that, it’s unfair to students to spend a lecture on the matter. It wasn’t a philosophy or religion class, it was about rocks—and the Professor could have said: science suggests the earth is much older and that new earth creationists are incorrect. Instead he took the better part of an hour to dishearten a specific group—Christians. If he had spent the hour mocking Sikhism (whether there were Sikhs in class or not) it would have been equally offensive.

In a Political Science class, the teacher encouraged everyone to vote, and she showed democratic candidates. She encouraged we listen to news, and that we be open minded but she only presented Democratic news sites, and then played mocking videos of conservatives. Myself and other Christian conservative students in her class noticed this scale tipped in the Professor’s perspective, but she dismissed conservative evidence as theory while hers was fact.  In an English class my Professor played a video the first day that mocked conservatives and assumed everyone was amused. I’m still unaware if I was the only Republican in both his classes, but it felt that way because no one else spoke up. We read an arrogant, white supremacist American narrative of the new world, and the English Professor mirrored it with President Trump as if this was something we all knew—I gave an example of a Democratic President who had an arrogant perspective. My Professor was completely taken aback.

In a second class with the same English Professor I disagreed with his left wing perspectives and was met with sarcasm and disapproval. I had no time in one class to explain my views let alone change anyone’s mind—he rephrased my opinion allowing the class to take his definitions of my words. I was frequently the only one speaking up for my beliefs and after speaking with some conservative Christians on campus I learned I wasn’t alone. Other Conservative Christians in classes such as Political science, Geology, English, Psychology and many other subjects felt they’d been singled out or disrespected. Some of my favorite Professors had different beliefs than me and we had no problems because their class was curriculum centered. One Professor taught philosophy and was very respectful of my Christian beliefs even though she didn’t personally identify as Christian. I was respectful to every Professor I’ve listed and others that disliked my beliefs. I spoke up in English class to contribute to the discussions because I disliked how uninterested some of my classmates seemed when the Professor was putting a clear effort to make them involved. And the English Professor and I even parted on respectful terms; but we never should have had any contention to begin with. Respect should be provided to both sides of a class room.

Professors may play mocking videos, speak poorly of beliefs that are not their own and in turn try to make any exceptions to their opinion in the classroom, feel like they had best keep quiet for fear of embarrassment or scrutiny. However, if some Professors continue to exhibit this behavior they should know that students have voices—and if they continue to make us feel like our beliefs don’t need to be heard we may take the gloves off. If we were allotted time to address their arguments, Professors who do this would be surprised how much we actually know, and that if the setting were not their classroom in which they control time and topic, the playing field would change. I encourage students to speak up even if it is in someone else’ arena, because even if the Professor does close the topic a witness in the room who feels the same as you may be willing to speak up in the future.