Darren Locke, who works as an adjunct history lecturer at several colleges in the Chicagoland area, has nevertheless been troubled by Schapiro’s public statements on the incident, believing that the school had taken a stance against “liberty and all the discomfort that comes with it.” “It’s not altogether clear when uncomfortable learning can take place, if at all, when it can be unilaterally vetoed by one specific group,” Locke said. His problems with safe spaces aside, he described his own teaching style as “innocuous to the point of being toothless, mostly just slapping grades on online assignments and ensuring my student customers give me good marks so I get renewed for another academic term.” Locke, who sometimes teaches a half-dozen online courses a semester, characterized his student debt as “crippling,” adding that “the danger of student complaints to my bottom line, in the sense that I might get taken out of a school’s teaching rotation and lose some income, far outweighs exposing students to the libertarian intellectual tradition I value so much.”

At the root of much of this tension is a sense of profound vulnerability that suffuses the 21st-century university. Venerable tenured faculty have spent a generation resisting the orders of administrators and importunities of students, and aren’t about to concede their privileges now. Faculty currently on the tenure-track understand how tenuous their own positions are, comprising only about a third of the academic workforce, and remain worried about offending administrators, colleagues, and students, lest they wind up unemployed again if their multi-year contracts aren’t renewed. Adjuncts live day-to-day and hand-to-mouth, sometimes grading full-semester online courses for as little as $700 (the rate paid at Texas-Arlington during my last semester teaching there). And students, particularly marginalized students who have grown up more cognizant of the systems of oppression that surround them than prior generations, get the absolute worst of it because they recognize that they lack power pretty much everywhere on campus. “There’s this persistent, low-grade dehumanization from everyone,” one Oberlin dropout told The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller about the unhappy climate at that liberal-arts college.

Nathan Zimmerman, a lecturer in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania, has thus far managed to avoid any fraught classroom interactions. “The students I teach pay tuition to the university so that I can provide a specific service—coding skills—and in the context of my class, there’s a financial imperative for them to acquire these valuable skills that perhaps diminishes the sort of conflict you’d see in humanities courses.” Zimmerman, who oversees what he calls “useful-for-employment” courses on the fine points of various coding languages, finds himself too busy conveying information and checking work to have tense or uncomfortable interactions with students. Nevertheless, as both a term-to-term adjunct and a former philosophy student who transitioned to coding later in life, Zimmerman believes “what we all need, both students and faculty, is a safe space from the perverse incentives of capitalism that have victimized each of us to a lesser or greater degree—a place to acknowledge that this entire system must be altered to better protect everyone.”