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On the last day, he dropped the course. I asked the administrator to channel these students away from the block-week course to the many 13-week versions of it. Yet he dismissed my concern, saying, “The human rights people would be all over that.” I could not convince him that no one, under the crown of rights and reasonable accommodation, is entitled to enroll in, and destroy for others, a week-long course.

Another student told me he had not only suffered a brain injury, he also had a criminal record. On the final exam, he met a question he did not appreciate. As his answer, he wrote that it was “a dirty question” and that he was “furious.” In the end, he passed the course, but apparently did not receive the grade he thought he deserved. “I know this is a malicious attempt from you to try to fail me in your class. I am in Montreal right now unfortunately … next week I am coming to see you,” he wrote. Nothing came of it, but I was not certain my employer would have protected me if he had come after me.

That lack of confidence stems from an event a few years earlier, when a student came into my office at the start of a course and asked me to “just give (her) an A in the course, like the other profs,” without having to do any work. I refused and soon found myself the target of her fury.

She did the work and passed with a good grade. But after the course was over, she embarked on a campaign of cruel cyber-harassment that my employer basically ignored. From a fake email account, she tormented me with anonymous, insulting and threatening emails. She called it “payback.” She did not deny the email harassment after I confronted her with it.

As far as I know, none of the university’s administrators were concerned enough to give her a call and have a chat. This experience sent the message to me that all the institutional nattering about safety and respect is about securing those things for students. Faculty members are on their own, if and when students want to rough them up. We just hope our names don’t make it onto a student’s kill list.

National Post

Peter Bowal is a professor of business law at the University of Calgary.