A law professor definitely had time when he decided to teach a lesson to a few “concerned students” who took offense to his wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt on a law school campus. After receiving an anonymous letter from law students, citing their grievances to what they deemed “inappropriate and unnecessary conduct,” the professor fired back with a response that diminished their argument to temper tantrum proportions. He also took the time to correct them on how they could propose a stronger argument for sake of their future law careers.
Although the students’ letter proposes that the professor only wore the shirt “on at least one occasion,” it was one occasion to many as they cited to the professor that “As someone who is charged to teach criminal law, it should be abundantly clear to you and beyond any question that all lives matter…”
The professor took his time to respond with a two-part letter, with the first half outlining a detailed, four-page critiquing lesson in which the law students were schooled on how to better affirm their argument. The second half of the read draws attention to the lack of writing skill in the aforementioned letter and offers a grammar lesson that could easily be transcribed into an Intro to Shade 101 lecture series.
Take a moment to read the full text from both sides but, this excerpt from the professor’s response detailing the purpose of Black Lives Matter illustrates how this educator went IN on his students.
“Black Lives Matter is about focus, not exclusion. As a general matter seeing the world and the people in it in mutually exclusive, either/or terms impedes your own thought processes. If you wish to bear that intellectual consequence of a constricting ideology, that’s your decision. But this does not entitle you to project your either/or ideology onto people who do not share it.”
In the future, whether those anonymous students make the choice to correct the error of their ways or not, they know better, all thanks to this brilliant professor. Poetic justice definitely won this case.
If you were a student in an Intro to Shade course, who would you want to be your professor? Share your picks in the comments.
