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<p>What’s sad is that I’ve witnessed and experienced the use of concepts such as kindness to stifle disagreement and criticism of students making poorly thought out or even flat out wrong arguments/statements. </p>
<p>One classmate was docked participation points by a prof for merely questioning the relevance of another classmate’s stock answer to any literature question: “Water, a symbol of life!” Something which I found bewildering considering the poem in question never mentioned water or made any references to it. </p>
<p>I personally was criticized once for being “mean” and “unkind” for criticizing a few Marxist-oriented classmates in and out of class for outright denying atrocities committed by some communist regimes. The more I made references to historical sources, literary references, and survivor accounts from childhood neighbors and relatives…the more I was considered “mean” and “unkind” to those classmates. Fortunately, I didn’t have an agreement that was vaguely worded and open to so much subjective interpretation they could have used against me when I forthrightly questioned their intellectual honesty and scholarly integrity.</p>