On January 11, 2012, MU students, faculty and staff received an email containing Executive Order No. 38. What the hell was this about? Did it ban the Add Sheet guys from campus? Can you be expelled for starting rumors about celebrity visits to MU now? Unfortunately, especially regarding the latter, no.
Executive Order No. 38 extended the UM System’s commitment to “academic freedom” to students. Oh, and you can’t share recordings made in class with people who aren’t in that class without permission from involved parties. Uh, that’s important.
So here’s the deal. Some students taking a course co-taught between UM-St. Louis and UM-Kansas City recorded their professors’ lecture and de-contextualized the content to make it sound like the professors were advocating violence. It blew up online, prompted an investigation and caused quite a ruckus. Some college students are assholes, which is apparently a shocking discovery. As a result of this, we get a system-wide decree that attaches strings to the very thing we theoretically spend the most time in during college: lectures.
The power that professors, teaching assistants and the like have over students is immense. You attend their classes, do the homework they assign, take their exams and ultimately receive a grade based on their evaluation. Effectively, whether or not you leave with a degree is up to you and your professors. Since they hold about half of the key to your degree, professors are in quite the powerful position. When that professorial power is in the wrong hands, students are at a disadvantage.
We, as students in the 21st century, are incredibly lucky for the technology and freedom we have. The classroom is not some old school tyrannical brainwash station where the professor impregnates students’ minds with scary ideas. Executive Order No. 38, in its attempt to protect students and emphasize their freedom to express themselves, instead gives the impression that it’s OK to say whatever comes to them. By restricting redistribution of material, it allows a free reign if students or professors decide to choose the dark side, meaning, thorny discussions in sociology classes about race or class that start off with “I’m not racist, but…” (a scientifically-proven tip-off to racist comments) cannot lead to “learning conversations” since they cannot be shared.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that sealing off information in classrooms as a means to protect students is stupid. As far as reputation goes, if a student leader or anyone else has an unpopular opinion and people talk about it outside the classroom, that’s life. Don’t coddle me and support my unpopular opinion or place a lock on classroom material because two students fuck up. Also, given the amount of power that professors have in the classroom, there needs to be a means to protect everyone.
Thankfully, a bill has been introduced by Missouri Representative Paul Curtman, which would allow students of public universities to share course material, basically overriding Executive Order No. 38. I’m going to go out on a limb and support this. If your professor says crazy shit in class, you should be able to expose that. You never know what might go down during that “Beowulf” discussion. We’re advised to be careful with what we publish on Facebook and Twitter. We should be careful with what we say not because it’s what we’re supposed to do, but because it’s the right thing to do.
What to do in the meantime, now that we can’t share lecture material? Meh, share it anyway. If something noteworthy happens in class, you do what you need to do.
