Doorstops and Decency

I took this picture the day after Scotty Erik Kaufman's most recent attack. This was last Thursday. Two young women had come to office hours before my 7:30am class, and I recalled Little Scotty's hysterical outburst claiming that I should be fired for posting "half-naked women on my virtual office walls."

Right.

You can see how the door to my non-virtual office has the big door-closer at top. My old office didn't have one, so I could just crack it open. But I noticed the new setup right away. Faculty can't prop open their doors. Even using an extra office chair won't work. Some colleagues asked about doorstops at the recent the Flex Days, but I had already picked one up from Staples:

This is basic teaching professionalism. I've been teaching for 16 years, 10 years as a full-time faculty member. New instructors are taught to protect themselves from sexual harassment claims before they even set foot in a classroom. Never be alone with a young women if possible, particularly in any kind of enclosed space. Office doors should be propped wide open to essentially make the room a public space. Surprisingly, the first thing a lot of young women do, innocently enough, is to close the door behind them upon entering, thinking they're being polite and protecting your privacy. But in my old office I'd immediately say, "That's okay, you can leave it open. Thank you." Which translates into "We'd better leave the door open so passersby can look in and see that our meeting is completely respectful ..."

Anyway, I utterly reject Scotty Erik Kaufman and his pathetic claims to leftist academic authority. Decency and common sense should guide us in our manners. You always treat people well, and I pride myself on my accessibility to students. Indeed, young instructors don't need Kaufman-esque academic ayatollahs telling them what's right. God, these people are mindlessly stultifying - a disgrace, really, to teaching. Leftists infantilize women and subjugate them in the PC mindset of helplessness. Every professor is a potential rapist, and thus for the left a lawsuit lies beneath every potential misunderstanding waiting to happen.

Anyway, this passage below is dealing with a little different subject matter, and hardly a soul in academe would say something remotely like this (for fear of the PC Stalinists), but I can dig some of the sentiments here as they relate to the SEK-types polluting academe:

As self-appointed guardians of modern orthodoxy and rigorous policers of our thoughts, these touchy-feely fascists go after dissenters with preachy and puritanical zeal. After all, to be left-of-centre is enlightened, while to be on the right is regarded as beyond the [pale]. Yet in my experience, the most blinkered, [judgmental] and lacking in common warmth are these brothers and sisters of the Left ...