Cate Denial

Another day, another op-ed piece about students who live in “safe spaces” being utterly unprepared for The Real World.  This time the opinion comes from Bret Stephens, a columnist for the New York Times, who published the May 14, 2017 commencement speech he gave to the students at Hampden-Sydney College.  “Safe spaces, physical and intellectual, are for children,” writes Stephens. “You are grown-ups now. If your diplomas mean anything, it’s that it is time you leave those spaces behind forever.” …

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Dear Seniors – In the run-up to my undergraduate graduation ceremony, I despaired. I felt so many things, almost all of them contradictory, and it seemed impossible to imagine that my body could contain them all. I was so glad to be done – I had had it with papers and seminars and the reach of professors into my life. I was proud – I had earned a BA with Honors and that was no small accomplishment, especially as a…

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A distressing column in The Chronicle of Higher Ed has been making the rounds this week – Gail A. Hornstein’s piece on why she doesn’t honor disability accommodations in her classroom. Many people more articulate than I have taken issue with the column – my favorite is Robin M. Eame’s response – but I want to point to a trope at the heart of Hornstein’s column that is often used to denigrate students and minimize their experiences. Hornstein’s focus is…

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Last weekend I joined Jacki Rand (University of Iowa; Choctaw), Leah Slick-Driscoll (Meskwaki Settlement School; Meskwaki), and Mary Wise (University of Iowa graduate student) in facilitating a professional development workshop for Iowa teachers, K-12. Part of the Iowa Native Spaces project being run by Jacki out of the University of Iowa, the workshop was an opportunity to bring teachers together on Meskwaki land to learn about the Native communities of Iowa, and begin to rethink the way Iowa history is…

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The conversation about trigger warnings in academic settings is seemingly perennial – my twitter feed this morning had two different threads about trigger warnings and what to do about them, encompassing multiple, conflicting perspectives. What I haven’t seen much of in these conversations is any discussion of what it means when a person is triggered. There is a vast body of psychological literature that can described this in clinical terms, but what it feels like to be in that moment…

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I’ve been puzzling over timelines a lot recently. I experience time very linearly, and have an excellent sense of how much time is passing when I’m working on a given task. I can estimate how much time has elapsed since class started without looking at a clock, and I can count off seconds to myself pretty accurately. My brain experiences time precisely, and organizes itself with ease. Timelines were meant for me. But I have a friend who has ADHD,…

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I’ve had a number of students come visit me over the last couple of weeks, unsure as to how to balance a life of activism with their classes and their paying work. Here are the words of advice I’ve offered, in the hopes that they might be useful to others, too Check in with your boundaries Ask yourself, where do I need to draw boundaries in order to give myself time and space to replenish my reserves? Are you someone…

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Many of my students get furious in my courses. The subjects that I teach – American Indian histories, the histories of gender and sexuality, histories of race and ethnicity – demonstrate just how much of their history has been kept from them, and how ruthlessly power structures seek to replicate themselves. There’s a fair bit of guilt on the part of those students who hold privilege of one kind or another, and there’s a lot of anger at systems of…

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On Sunday, Nicholas Kristof published a column in the New York Times condemning college campuses for being liberal “bubbles” and echo-chambers. The one example of such a college he offered was Oberlin, a small residential liberal arts school like my own. Elizabeth Lehfeldt has written a beautiful rebuttal to Kristof, pointing out that SLACs hardly characterize the vast majority of American college campuses. But I’d like to rebut Kristof on a different score: by pointing out that his characterization of…

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One of the most provocative chapters in Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber’s The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy advocates for a pedagogy of pleasure – for approaching teaching with joy. It’s a chapter that made me sit down hard and pay attention. I absolutely agree with the premise that one of the conditions of teaching well is to enjoy what you’re doing, but the suggestion that we should feel joy around teaching has proven…

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