Disruptive Student Behavior (T-Shirt Slogan Edition)

I see no reason to abridge the first amendment rights of either student merely because I or the students feel “offended” by the message. The first amendment does NOT guarantee freedom from being offended. I believe it would provide an opportunity for a “teaching moment” to discuss what those freedoms are and what limits can be placed on them. My being offended doesn’t make something offensive.

Well, a judge has jailed a woman for wearing an offensive t-shirt to court.http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/2238170,CST-NWS-logo05.article

drnels — courts have dress codes — no tank tops, no see-through, nobare mid-drifts, etc. A judge can decide what is permissable in the courtroom. A classroom is completely different. Courts have ruled against public schools many times when they have forced students to turn shirts inside-out or sent them home to change.

Dress codes do not abridge “freedom of speech;” rather, they can work to ensure a certain level of decorum. I have had a young man come to class in a shockingly minimal, torn shirt and shorts after LaCrosse practice, and I requested that he put on a complete shirt before class next time, because it was enormously distracting. As for the t-shirts with slogans, while I wouldn’t agree with the first one’s politics, I would probably ignore it. The second, on the other hand, is deliberately offensive, and not appropriate. One makes a political statement that, while potentially disagreeable, is nonetheless a legitimate position (albeit, to reiterate, one I do not share.) The other is simply vulgar and not a legitimate political statement, but simply bad taste. In the second case I would speak to the student after class and explain my position and ask him to refrain from wearing that or similar shirts to my class.

I’ll go ahead and add my answer to this. If the question is what would I do (or simply “do”) when students wear shirts that offend my sensibilities? Nothing. If the shirt in question has visibly upset the class such that we cannot move forward with the lesson (note that it may or may not have offended my sensibilities in this situation), I’d ask the students to get it out on the table in some calm and rational manner. Teaching moment and all that. If the shirt in question was a clear violation of a student conduct policy already in place, I would discuss it individually with the student after class. But there really aren’t any clear violations (at least at my current school) unless they’re specifically threatening to a person or group of people (e.g. “kill all [x]“), and I’d escalate through appropriate channels as soon as class was over.Otherwise? Free speech. Even vile speech is free. _If_ it has repercussions in the classroom, I’ll address it, but if it’s just vile (for my personal interpretation of vile), then…so it is.

In each of these cases, I would ask the student to turn their shirt inside out because they were violating university guidelines about free expression and sexual harassment.#1 – Dead FetusesMy university’s freedom of expression policy states that people will “demonstrate civility, . . . *respect* for those who may disagree with their message…” “Additionally, any activities that are unlawful or *disruptive* to the normal operations . . . including classes . . . will not be tolerated.”#2 – Kneeling ObamaThis falls under my university’s definition of sexual harassment: “use of sexually oriented photos, posters, *cartoons* . . . unrelated to instruction and/or the pursuit of knowledge.”

These are very interesting comments. It’s clear that students don’t want to be told what to wear and it’s even clearer that we (as faculty) don’t want or need that responsibility. We are not students’ parents. However. And this is a big “however.” Who assumes that responsibililty when the student doesn’t assume it for him/herself? Of course, there is the first amendment, and students have the right to free speech. But when does their right infringe on the rights of a majority? If one student wears a shirt that is highly offensive (and disruptive) the the majority of the students in the class, are the majority just supposed to ignore the offense because, after all, the one student has the freedom to wear what she/he desires? Is the individual more important than the collective group? When ProfHacker posted the “Disruptive Student Behavior (too much skin edition),” one commenter posted his/her students about how they feel about a professor mentioning their (lack of) wardrobe to them. The students–as a majority–did NOT want to be singled out that way. They said (and I’m paraphrasing), “we are adults and we can choose our own clothes.” I wonder, however, if in their adulthood, they sometimes neglect to realize the audience for their sloganed t-shirts and the affect those messages can have on others. If we don’t mention it to them? Who will? No one?

@supertatie These examples are just that – examples. Everyone is free to substitute their own so that the question being asked remains clear.

@spertatie thanks for the comments. It’s important to realize, as @swish mentioned above in #13, that while the comments about Bush were offensive in their own right, the comments about him were not sexualized or racialized the way they are about Obama.Anyway, it’s even more important to recognize that the two examples I provided here are mere examples. As I noted in the post, there are thousands of other examples of t-shirt slogans that fit the same bill: offensive or insensitive to others.

In both of the cases described, I would do nothing. If students seemed bothered by it, I would do one of two things. 1) I would tell them that the messages in the shirts are not the topic of class at this time, so we need to bring our focus back to the topic at hand. 2) I would stop class and talk about what arguments the shirts are making. #2 is quite easy for me since all of my classes are rhetoric and/or gender studies based, and each of these specific shirts fits into both of those areas (I’d love to talk with students about the homophobic implications of that particular Obama shirt). All t-shirts with messages are arguments, so I could talk about them from taht perspective easily. Even a blank t-shirt is an argument about not wanting to engage in those arguments.Some of the arguments being made in this thread are the kinds that have been troubling free-speech feminists for years. The shirt about mensturation is offensive, and most feminists would find it offensive, but not all would want to ban it or kick the student out of the room. I took a grad class on law and feminism where we spent weeks talking about these issues (and that particular shirt!) but never came to consensus. It’s the same debates that helped tear second-wave feminism apart. The Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s tried to grapple with these issues. There were some pretty horrible moments trying to find a way to bridge the two sides.I often bring these shirts to class myself to talk about. I mean, I’ll often pull up the websites of the places that sell these shirts and talk about them, usually in the context of rape jokes, which is one of my research areas and something my students know I study, so they are often sending me examples. I’ve often asked questions like, “When someone wears this shirt, what is she or he trying to make rape survivors feel or do?” That really freaks some students out.I do think that anyone who wears any of these shirts is calling for attention. Frankly, I spent many days in the 90s wearing my “I don’t mind straight people as long as they act gay in public” and “I’m not gay by my boyfriend is” (and “I’m not a lesbian but my girlfriend is”) t-shirts, and I did it because I was tired of feeling so silenced and invisible. I still feel silenced, invisible, and sometimes scared for my life, but I sometimes try tactics like t-shirts as a way to feel like I’m doing something.Students on my campus do wear por-life and pro-choice shirts. I also see a lot of shirts targetting homophobia and rape. One of the rape-awarness groups on my campus has shirts that have “I LIKE SEX” in all capital letters on the front. On the back, there’s something about sex being about choice and force having no place in it.In a nutshell, any student who wears any shirt of this type to my class knows that she or he is probably going to be the topic of discussion for at lesat a little bit. Sometimes, the dicussion centers on praise and celebration (as in the “I LIKE SEX” shirts the day they were released and one of my male students came to class in one). Sometimes, it’s criticism. But that’s what my classes are often about, anyway.

I will never, ever forget having been a student in a creative writing workshop, a million years ago, in which we had a guest instructor for one session: Ishmael Reed. There was one member of the workshop who was outspokenly conservative (not as in “voted for Reagan” but as in “voted for David Duke”), and his story was one of those being workshopped by Reed. The kid wore, and I swear I’m not kidding, a German iron eagle t-shirt that day, with “Deutschland Über Alles” emblazoned across the top. And he sat front and center in the room.Reed came into the room, sat down at the instructor desk, lowered his glasses, looked at the kid, and said in the most level voice imaginable, “I take it that t-shirt is a joke, right?” The kid nearly fell out of his chair agreeing that yes, obviously, it was a joke, of course. And then Reed went on to give an extremely sensitive and positive reading of the kid’s story.I like to think that I could be that cool about it. But then, I am not a 6-foot-1 man with a basso profundo that could make anybody agree.

Here’s a question for today’s forum — this incident came up less than two weeks ago, and faculty colleagues are divided. A student came into a test situation (habitually a few minutes late), but this time wearing a shirt with a (very) thinly veiled obscenity — one of the famous seven words. What are college instructors to do? In this instance (test in progress), I said nothing and took no action. What if this had been a regular class? Just where do we draw the line, and how do we enforce the policy? HELP!

Ignore him/her. There is probably some correlation between the dippiness of the T-shirt and the grade received for the course, but I don’t know that you could get a Master’s thesis out of that.But what if someone shows up with a T-shirt depicting The Prophet in a highly unfavorable/sexual light? And what if one of your Muslim students then gets very upset and starts yelling and threatening, where do you go with that?(I teach on-line, so all this Glory is denied me)

Isn’t part of the university’s job to prepare students for the adult world and for jobs? I haven’t taught in years having found myself an office job. But wouldn’t it benefit the student to point out that most employers wouldn’t tolerate that kind of in your face professional dress. It used to be that at least University of Notre Dame was the last bastion of professional dress in the classroom but am I talking decades ago? I have difficulty thinking that this kind of dress is tolerated in classes. Can’t you ask them to turn their shirts inside out, or cover it with a sweater or jacket that buttons over it? Or tell them that they risk leaving a residual disrespect that others might not even tell them about. If employers can demand professional clothing, can’t classrooms? Flaunt your insults out of the classroom but not in. Am I completely out of the loop?

#24 back again — It was a “woman” wearing the offensive shirt described above, with a universally-recognized cuss word in six-inch-high pink letters (nothing subtle here). “Turning the shirt around” is an interesting idea, kind of like throwing a match at a leaking gas can, don’t you think? Only a contortionist could “turn the shirt around” without taking it off, and neither the hallway outside the classroom, nor the campus green beyond, would be an obviously more appropriate changing room than the classroom itself. Indeed, merely calling attention to the attire might be considered a provocative action on the part of the instructor in today’s PC climate. For the record, this was an elementary foreign language class, where the emergence of an unplanned “teaching moment” (especially during a test) was not an option.

i cannot imaging the t-shirt that would lead me to either discuss or prohibit. people who are upset are free to leave, as always. it is difficult to take an education without becoming uncomfortable from time to time. similarly in what laughingly passes for the real world.

Were I at a public university, I’d probably take the approach George and others have suggested above and leave it at that: if the slogan or image on the t-shirt disrupts the class, address it in whatever way seems most appropriate at that moment; if it doesn’t, ignore it.I’m not at a public university, though, and while I think the above approach works as a good general rule, I’d likely go a bit beyond it in my own classroom. I teach at a Catholic institution (all women, though we occasionally have men from neighboring institutions in our classes) that takes the notion of human dignity very seriously, and I think it’s entirely appropriate for me to back that up in my classroom. So, in addition to the question about whether the shirt disrupts the class, I’d also ask whether the shirt shows blatant disrespect for persons.With that question as the standard, I’d have no problem with the “F__k the draft” shirt that rswolff mentions, or something similar. Though I understand that some might find it offensive, it doesn’t show blatant disrespect for particular persons. The t-shirts in the two scenarios in the original post, however, both fail according to respect for persons standard (#1, ironically, fails in that it arguably disrespects the very persons the student would have us protect). I’d more than likely have something to say to the student about either of those two shirts.Unless the shirts were clearly disruptive to the class, though, I’d simply pull the student aside privately after class and explain to her why the problematic shirt should not make a second appearance in my classroom.

In each of these instances, I would do nothing. Unless the disruption became intolerable, and then the issue would be with the person causing the disruption be it the wearer of the shirt or otherwise.

When I was an undergraduate, in the mid to late 1980s, professors or instructors at Auburn University, would tell the class rules for classroom behavior on the first day of class. I recall a certain Industrial Engineering faculty member that had quite elaborate classroom rules – among these, he did not permit men to wear hats while they sat in class, he required men to wear socks, he did not permit open toed shoes, he required long shorts or pants, shirts with collars that were free from printing, and many other expectations. These rules were all explained on the first day and enforced. If a student came to class improperly prepared, in the wrong clothes, they were not allowed to attend the lecture that day. If you didn’t like these rules – you, as a student, had the option to drop the class early in the first few days for a refund and take it another quarter, perhaps from another instructor who had different rules. If you missed too many classes (I think it was three) you would fail. You weren’t permitted to argue with the instructor and take up class time about it. If you had complained to the dean, the dean would have invited you to apply to another college within the university if you didn’t like it. Or go to another university, or follow the rules and get on with learning the material of the class. What is the problem with this? Why can’t professors, even in public institutions, demand a certain level of decorum in their classroom? They set lots of other rules: some professors had mandatory attendance requirements, expectations about the color of pen used, or certain types of paper or how to fold your assignments and where to write your name on the outside of your paper. When I was a senior, taking a class called the Thermodynamics of Power Systems, when a fellow student asked what was going to be on the next test, Dr Dyer replied, “everything you’ve learned since kindergarten.” And he was serious. He counted off for grammatical and spelling errors on an engineering test that was mostly equations and calculations. Why not set the ground rules and expectations early and take control. I’m sure now, that I learned the most, not necessarily just the course material, from the professors who expected the most from us.

Dress codes are an issue for high school teachers, not instructors in a University environment.At least these students are putting their sentiments on their backs and owning the messages (and reactions thereto), as opposed to spewing hatred on anonymous gossip sites where there are no personal consequences for the content.Young people will learn by the reactions of those around them how they fit into society. The instructor’s role would be to moderate a discussion if it arises. Any other response is an invitation to a First Amendment lawsuit.

So, editor, why did none of the posts denouncing “conservatives” get your note? Why mine?
[Editor's note: All of the comments above refer in some way to the question asked in the post and are not wholly about something else. Everyone in this space, regardless of political opinion, is expected to adhere to the ProfHacker Commenting and Community Guidelines. From this point we will simply delete comments in this thread that are wholly off-topic, regardless of who they are from.]

It’s a bigger issue than just what occurs in your classroom. I would approach Student Affairs, the Career Office, or some other unit on campus and devise a way to work with them to show students how to present themselves at their best, at all times (including in the classroom), in preparation for life after college. (Deliberately being offensive is not showing yourself at your best.) Out of respect for everyone’s right to free speech, which must be acknowledged, students can come to understand that the other clothing can be worn on the weekends. I don’t think this approach would be any less worthwhile in a public institution than in a private one.

Just ignore it and conduct your class as usual. Let the T-Shirt message define the character of the student wearing it; and rely on your students to judge that student in accordance with their own value systems.

Unless something totally disrupted my class, I’d ignore it. Consider both the South Park reference and the repeated comments here about offensive attacks on politicians. I’ve never seen South Park but I occasionally catch an episode of Family Guy. The humor is often extremely crude and graphic and attacks particular groups (handicapped, religious, ethnic, etc.).Our traditional-aged students are being raised and a relatively vulgar society. Jokes that in a previous generation would have been spoken at only adult clubs or small private gatherings are now on prime-time TV and “news” commentaries (from both the left and right).If, for example, my students have seen jokes on TV about having sex with Jesus and they bring that message into my classroom on a t-shirt, I’d be wasting class time making a fuss about it. In their minds it’s just my opinion of appropriate against the opinion of the network executives. Guess which side my students will choose?However, if something disrupted my entire class, then I’d have to address it somehow. I’d probably try to get their input on what is socially acceptable public communication today, compare it to my memory of when I was their age, and then ask them to get actual data (perhaps through youtube archived commercials or shows) comparing communication standards in the 70s/80s to today. Since I teach business stats, the “let’s find data” approach would be relevant to the course and could teach them about how to communicate to different age demographics today.

Our society has developed into a violent one in which we become insensitive to things which confront us, unless it is something that is significant to us. In one sense, it means that we develop different degrees of skin thickness. In another sense, it means we check out from situations and deny our life from engaging with things that offend us. That means there are many things which we tolerate so that our energies are saved for the things that really matter. The use of shirts that demean and degrade people through racial, homophobic, misogynistic, and anti-semitic messages have no place in a class whose purpose and focus is something other than these topics and issues. It seems as a society we have become insensitized to shame. The shirts are emotionally inflammatory, although the aborted fetuses are a result of choice and the shirt’s message sticks to the topic. The second shirt is derogatory and shameful. Does it make it funnier because Obama is mentioned rather than someone else? Those who are willing to tolerate the shirts seem to be saying that degrading people seems to be OK. I am sure that would not be the case if your name appeared on the shirt. The shirts definitely provide an opportunity for a teaching moment even if it is not the purpose of the course. The teaching moment relates to respecting others as well as ourselves. So does the instructor change topics for the day to address the distractions and open the class to a discussion about respecting others as well as ourselves? Or do I, as the instructor, become authoritarian with my views that say shirts which demean and degrade people have no room in my class. You may wear them anywhere else, but not here. Return to class with the appropriate dress.Education has become fragmented because issues other than education have gotten in the way and created a lost focus and purpose. Values have become liquidated because insensitivity has been created with the constant barrage of violence within our society. When will we say, We are mad as hell about violence, and we won’t stand it anymore? Will I use my anger to squash violence? There is nothing like demeaning or degrading myself to impose my values. Unless we treat each other with respect in both speech and manner, the battle shall continue. Violence wins and we continue to demean and degrade each other. The shirts are an advertising or promotional vehicle for some business. Perhaps it is in the spirit of capitalism and making a buck. After all, whoever produced the shirts are the richer. Or are they?

It’s encouraging to see this topic attract so much attention and so many comments: clearly this is a community concerned with considering and improving pedagogy.However, perhaps for some of our commenters a bit of clarification is in order with regard to the ProfHacker mission.As we wrote in our first post written specifically for the Chronicle: “we’re interested in finding out what other people are doing that works well for them.” In other words, please share your experiences with us and with our readers so that we may benefit. Do not, however, leave comments telling us all what the Only. Right. Way. to do something is or to tell someone else that what they’re doing is wrong. That’s not what our comments section is for.So if you’ve had a situation similar to the one described above–whether it involved a t-shirt or some other kind of disruptive student behavior–please describe how you handled it and whether or not things turned out the way you’d hoped they would.Thanks!

Hey everybody, only #11 is on the right track. If the student’s behavior violates one of your college or university policies, you can (perhaps should) intervene. If you use the institution’s resources (office of student affairs, judicial system) then the student can use the built-in constitutional and/or fairness checks (‘rudiments of fair play’ – notice, a chance to be heard, or an appeal). That way, you have some sort of second opinion just in case you are wrong. Ignoring it, if it disrupts the classroom or, say, creates a hostile environment in violation of policy, opens you to both ethical shaky ground and maybe legal liability (if it is severe or on-going.)The hard part here is deciding whether a particular action on the part of a student is “disorderly” or “impedes the academic mission” or is “sexual harrassment.” Whether or not you (or anyone else) is offended might be a clue to that, but it is not the deciding factor. Can you make a case that it is? It depends on your university’s policy, and the conduct process. Call the student conduct office, dean of students, or ombudsman and talk it out!

One of the expectations that I set for students in each of my classes is an expectation that each individual contribute to the learning of others. Rather than focus on the content of the t-shirt, or any other provocative attire, I would focus on the disruption of the class and disregard for the learning environment.

I have a question that takes the conversation back to an early post in this series on the pattern of disruptively excessive student talk (the know it all nancys in class). If the group is too far past that topic, feel free to disregard :-) Does anyone have stories, advice, insights on handling the student who talks too much, talks on topic, but talks in a consistently devil’s advocate style (I have been calling this student style, The Thwarter), coming up with extreme counter-examples to the arguments being presented in class. I have tried the solution of bringing attention back to working towards understanding the author’s points, rhetorical style, and position within intellectual trends in a particular field, but this solution works better in my head than in real life, where I am sometimes too close to the moment to resist being triggered or led off path by The Thwarter. Another similar form of excessive student speech in class is the student who talks too much, talks on topic, but doesn’t understand the topic and makes remarks that are so off base I feel compelled to correct or reframe them. In this case, the Thwarter and the Professor end up turning class into a Wild Goose Chase. I’d be curious to hear if other profs encounter these dynamics and what strategies worked for you :-)

o