Boilerplate Letter for Reporting Your Professor

Let's workshop this boilerplate letter for reporting your triggering professor, a piece of satire that would have been effective a few years back (but might be less now as the pendulum swings right)

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Boilerplate Letter for Reporting Your Professor

<Addressee>

My teacher, <name>, demonstrates no concern for anyone’s opinion around how or what he teaches. We all are paying customers at this esteemed institution. We deserve better.

As someone suffering from <insert some condition testifying to your vulnerability: complex PTSD is standard>, I have been activated in class on countless occasions. Behaviors (both verbal and nonverbal) have provoked new traumas in me. They have also forced me to relive old traumas over and over again. I feel safe neither in person nor through Zoom with <name>. Molecules of his supremacist hate would seep into my blood even over email.

We all have a choice of whether to take a class. I know this. But no one deserves to be victimized in any class that we pay for. What I get from <name>’s class is nothing but a load of trouble: <insert symptoms like nightmares, flashbacks, brain fog, anxiety, depression, isolation, autoimmune flare ups, avoidant behavior, difficulty concentrating, decreased interest in things once enjoyable, headaches, heightened startle response, nausea, negative feelings about reality, increase in risky behavior or drug use or self-harm or harm of others (such as pets)>. It is all too much to deal with, especially with my other responsibilities: <insert responsibilities like child care, work, classes, extracurricular activities, maintenance of some illness, dealing with the various injustices of the day (cite a case in the news)>.

The reason I do not feel safe is not a decision I make. It is a physiological reaction rooted in past events that have embedded themselves deep in my neurophysiology. Even in rather benign situations I have had physical and emotional flashbacks (which are quite difficult to comprehend for someone who has them, much less someone who never has). The hurt that <name> has exposed me to is immense. <Insert more issues, as in the following example. Being in the class has affected my ability to think clearly for weeks on end. My fibromyalgia has flared up. My daily mood has turned extremely dark. To me the world is black to the core. I lack so much energy to sustain relationships that I had to get rid of my helping animal. I have trouble sleeping and concentrating. I get startled so easily now. I need to have my back to the wall at all times. How many times have I bathed in the last two months? Once! It has become next to impossible to take care of my children.> Until now I have been a stranger to <insert something major to reveal the depth of your pain: cutting, suicidal thoughts, illegal drugs are great examples>. But because of the chronic abuse I experience having <name> as my teacher, they are strangers no longer. Either he goes or I go.

Footage and documentation (see attachments) highlight a widespread history of abuse. Even the mildest of these examples, because they are chronic, are alone devastating to my wellbeing. But not all of them are mild by any standard.

The worst for me was when <insert description of the most severe offenses. Here is a good example. After I told Professor Johnson that every student in the class should get an A on the exam if everyone agreed that every student should get an A, he said “What if every student in the class agreed to kill all the trans people in the school? Should we go through with it? Absolutely not. What the majority says does not suffice.” When my classmates and I told him we were devastated by his brazen bias against trans people, he engaged in his typical picky semantics. “Philosophy classes,” he said (and this is verbatim), are important especially given the growing cultural tendency of plucking phrases out of context and twisting them in order to condemn the speaker. Philosophy classes, which showcase the power of reason to settle disputes, teach us to be critical thinkers willing and able to empathize with where someone else is coming from.” I do not care that he is married to a trans person. No one is entitled to reason their way out of having violated someone (especially when reason, we well know, is nothing but a constructed tool of colonial oppression anyway). “I want to hear an argument. I want an argument.” That is what he would always yell. An argument!? He was actually encouraging us to get into arguments! How can this bullying stand in a logic class, a class—as he himself admits—to teach us how to think correctly?>

Professors, first and foremost, are public servants. It is their duty not to trigger unwanted emotions in us. They should not confront us with potentially upsetting topics or with jarring modes of being. They should not be “helping” us use reason to gauge the plausibility of alternative positions. They should not be “helping” us understand what positions are “bankrupt” or are “unjust” or are “indefensible” or are “causes of major harm.” Since we come from a wide variety of backgrounds and represent a wide range of thinking, many positions said to be “ruled out by reason” are those we most cherish. Such “help,” therefore, is bound not merely to alienate but to downright destroy several of us at the very core of our being.

Professors have been deservedly shamed and fired in the past for much less than what <name> has done. For example, professors have been fired for <pick three examples that, in your estimation, are less egregious than what the professor has done—for instance, repeatedly failing to use the correct gender pronoun; mentioning the work of Chaucer and Kant and Mozart (despite the long history of white hegemony); suggesting that indigenous creation myths do not have equal standing to the natural-selection story of “white science” or that alternative ways of healing (aromatherapy, statement-driven apparel, candle-light incantations) might not work as well as “white medicine” for treating sickle cell anemia; assuming a student’s gender; meeting with students outside of class; interrupting a trans student speaking (as if they do not already have it hard enough still to this day); pushing back—however lightly—on a black student’s ideas (despite the great risk of reawakening epigenetic memories of ancestor trauma); expecting even black students to show how they solved the math problems on the test (which is especially audacious since math itself is a Eurocentric style of knowing). (To spark some ideas, remember: every identity can be offensive to someone—the Chinese with their dishes of chewy pig rectums; African kids with their kwashiorkor bellies; gay men with their fanny packs, neon and full of lube; Germans with their ball torture and feces porn; Japanese with their tentacle porn (and all the other zaniness reminding us they were nuked); Jews with their throaty “Chaims”; Trinidadians with their dengue fever; hipsters with their property-tax-raising artisanal cheeses and lumberjack flannels; Saudi Arabians with their disregard for personal space; Malaysians with their yelling at tourists for wearing yellow)>. Surely <name> deserves full penalty.

The environment would be so much more peaceful and calmer if <name> were gone. We would be able to focus on the class material rather than on our trauma!

I am not alone in noticing these things. Unfortunately, many of my peers are highly intimidated and would rather, so as not to be retraumatized, avoid talking about the repeated abuse. 

There is no way to reconcile <name>’s position as a professor with his status as a known triggerer. Such a disgusting fascist, who has failed in every area that matters to the mission of an academic institution, has no right to express opinions, assume body positions, or mention words that upset paying customers. Let him behave that way in the privacy of his own home. The students are upset and are fearful of predators continuing to work at <institution>. No more will we hide in the shadows.

Since <name> appears to be too cruel to see it as his duty to censor himself and resign his position, we demand not only immediate termination but also public denunciation so that this unstable and unsafe man is not just passed along to some other institution where he can continue his reign of terror! At the end of the day, are you prepared to say that <name> is not accountable for his behavior, no matter how much harm he has caused?

I am happy to discuss this matter further.

Distraught and devastated,

<insert your name>, anti-fascist student

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