Lucía Martínez Valdivia, a professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, argued in a Washington Post column this week that progressive academics “can’t stay silent” about leftist extremism on campus.
“At Reed College in Oregon, where I work, a group of students began protesting the required first-year humanities course a year ago,” Valdivia began. “Three times a week, students sat in the lecture space holding signs — many too obscene to be printed here — condemning the course and its faculty as white supremacists, as anti-black, as not open to dialogue and criticism, on the grounds that we continue to teach, among many other things, Aristotle and Plato.”
Valdivia, who identifies herself as an “untenured, gay, mixed-race woman with PTSD,” detailed her experience with leftist student protesters who stormed into a lecture and hijacked the microphone from the instructor.
“Along with two colleagues, I was going to offer my thoughts on the course, the study of the humanities and the importance of students’ knowing the history of the education they were beginning,” she wrote. “We introduced ourselves and took our seats. But as we were about to begin, the protesters seized our microphones, stood in front of us and shut down the lecture.”
“At Reed and nationwide, we have largely stayed silent, probably hoping that this extremist moment in campus politics eventually peters out,” she continued. “But it is wishful thinking to imagine that the conversation will change on its own. It certainly won’t change if more voices representing more positions aren’t added to it.”
Valdivia explained that she asks one thing of her students: that they engage with the texts that are assigned to them.
“I ask one thing of all my first-year students: that they say yes to the text. This doesn’t mean they have to agree with or endorse anything and everything they read,” she wrote. “It means students should read in good faith and try to understand the texts’ distance, their strangeness, from our historical moment. Ultimately, this is a call for empathy, for stretching our imaginations to try to inhabit and understand positions that aren’t ours and the points of view of people who aren’t us.”
Valdivia was lauded on social media for her courage in speaking out.
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