LT wrote: "Several professors talked about how they worked with students to
find an alternate which I think is not only fair but truest to a genuine
spirit of education."
As a graduate student, whose career goal it is to become a university
professor, I must respectfully disagree. By offering an alternative
professors are not being fair to the "genuine spirit of education." On a
practical level, how will that person contribute to class discussion on the
film he or she chose not to subject him or herself to? If the student had
seen the offending film, then they can reasonably defend their position.
They can discuss why the film is offensive to them with a certain degree of
intelligence (one hopes) to their fellow classmates. Students should not be
allowed to act like ostriches burying their heads in the sand instead of
dealing with things that offend them. Part of an education is giving
students the skills to defend their viewpoints, to do that reasonably a
person must have knowledge. By allowing students to bypass what they find
offensive takes away that knowledge and replaces it with ignorance.
Patricia Reiko Shawe

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Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite
http://www.tcf.ua.edu/ScreenSite