Union: Professors Should Award Extra Credit for Protesting Trump

The Federation of Teachers, a faculty union for staffers at Shoreline Community College in Washington State, is asking members to consider awarding extra credit to any of their students who attend an upcoming Trump protest rally. According to College Reform, the union is encouraging professors to invite their students to attend a “Day of Resistance” event and perhaps even turn it into a class outing.

“If you would like to bring your class to an event, please RSVP,” wrote Professor DuValle Daniel in an email to the Shoreline faculty.

But the email went much further than a simple invitation. In advertising the upcoming events, Daniel asked faculty members to “support this effort in one or more of the following ways.” She then listed a number of possibilities, including handing students extra credit for attending one of the events, talking about the history of May Day marches, and publicizing the ways in which the students can participate in the “2017 Day of Resistance.”

Daniel even suggested that professors may wish to avoid “assigning work that students cannot make up on May Day if they decide to join the immigrant march downtown.”

From College Reform:

According to the email, the Day of Resistance was organized in “resistance” to alleged “attacks on immigrants, workers, organizations and people targeted by intolerance, climate, [and] education,” with several events on such topics scheduled throughout the day, including “Climate Change in a Trump Administration,” a training on “civil disobedience,” and another dubbed “White Fright: From Redemption to Donald Trump.”

The “White Fright” lecture is even sponsored by the school’s Office of the President and Student Leadership Center, but spokespersons for Shoreline did not respond to Campus Reform’s request for elaboration on the school’s involvement with the Day of Resistance.

Well, it sounds like yet another academic institution has decided that protesting the new Republican administration is at least as important as anything students might learn in their classrooms. And if the people sponsoring events like these are the same people teaching the classes, we suspect they might just be right.