A student always has the option to not fulfill course requirements, they just don’t have the right to avoid the grade penalties that come from that choice.
@dfbdfb True, though there was an attempt at Columbia this year to have students offered an “alternative” reading list. This proposal was soundly rejected by the faculty.
exlibris: Do you have a link for the information in your post #139. I’m googling “Minister for Universities UK. Trigger warnings” in various combos and not coming up with anything. Thanks in advance. I would like to read about this and I’m not a great researcher.
I only went through four pages of results before giving up. At that point, I thought it was just easier to ask for help.
@alh I’ll get it. It was on the BBC yesterday and on Newsnight a bit earlier when the Oxford controversy was being debated. The Universities Minister was appearing along with Claire Fox who, as you probably know, has been speaking widely about this along with Oxford University’s new Vice Chancellor, Louise Richardson.
The important point the Minister made was that, unlike the USA, individual faculty members in the UK do not make decisions about reading lists and what is covered in lectures, but that this is solely the responsibility of faculty departments. Louise Richardson has also pointed out that Oxford’s Law Faculty has withdrawn the “advisory notice” about the content of law lectures.
Thanks - I don’t have TV.
@alh If you are in the UK, you can access via BBC iPlayer.
I am in the USA, rural south, without anything but very slow internet service. So again - thanks in advance for some links on this.
For several days, I have been trying to look up Claire Fox, the author of the book you recommend. She has an institute:
http://instituteofideas.com/aboutus/person/claire_fox
I can’t find an on-line CV, though I’m sure it exists someplace. There is this wikipedia entry:
I think I have the right person. There is also an American academic named Claire Fox.
This isn’t necessarily so much different from the US, really. Yes, individual faculty members do have such control, but for courses taught by multiple faculty, textbooks and reading lists are often standardized across courses by the faculty in those departments, even if it’s technically each individual faculty member’s prerogative. Further, I have a number of friends who are faculty in the UK, and if they’re teaching a course nobody else covers, yes, technically it’s the department that sets the texts to cover, but the individual faculty member generally gets to set the list.
So basically, the systems are de jure different, but they’re de facto the same.