Universities need to plan now for how they will protect instructors - disproportionately women, Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous scholars, & adjuncts - who teach courses on race and racial inequality from harassment, doxxing, threats, and organized campaigns to get them fired. 1/5

What should unis do? 1) Ignore student evals, unless they identify obvious shirking. 2) Provide additional pedagogical support for these classes. 3) Have plan to protect faculty in case of doxxing, rape threats etc, e.g., w/ optional filtering service for e-mail & mail. 3/5

4) Support the instructors and depts that teach these classes, esp. if large & required. Give the instructors a course release. Give departments the budget to hire enough qualified instructors that individual instructors can take a break from service teaching. 4/5.

5) Facilitate peer mentoring groups, similar forms of informal support for instructors. Provide adequate mental health services, too, though supply of qualified MHPs is a real challenge in many university towns right now. 5/5

@WeedenKim Maybe don’t require those courses then? What is the goal of teaching them and what’s the evidence that they are effective?

@ProfBootyPhD I assume universities are having these conversations too: what's the goal, is a universal requirement the best way to meet goal, how can we decide (& who is "we") which courses meet requirement, what's the trade-off given limits on # of gen ed courses can reasonably require, etc.

@WeedenKim I’m so glad you brought up the required courses aspect. That has been weighing on my mind as we consider more/required curriculum. The optional classes seem to self-select with eager students with the maturity to engage respectfully. I’m nervous about the next step.

@WeedenKim Same can be said for teaching statistics, which I did for 30+ years. Exhausting!