A professor teaching a business ethics course assigns certain films (“Thank You For Not Smoking”, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”, “Wall Street”) but has had a request for alternate films from a student who doesn't watch 'R' rated movies.
The professor posts a question on AskMetafilter looking for alternate selections but in addition to giving suggestions, people respond with proposals covering a range of ideas from assigning the print-version of the scripts, assigning a paper instead of allowing the student to view alternate films, or simply requiring the student to watch the assigned films or suffer the stated consequences (lower grade or whatever.)
There's no explanation why the student won't watch R rated films – one poster speculates that they might be religious, another speculates they're just trying to get out of work.
There are a couple good quotes in the thread defending each point of view:
“Don't most ethical violations come from seeing oneself as an exception to a rule somehow?”
vs:
“If
they can make a solid case for it (and isn't that what most of
business/professional life is all about), then I'll allow them to come
up with an alternative…[plus] their ability
to find a creative solution to the issue and pitch it to me
successfully was a teaching opportunity in itself.”
Unless I had more details, I'm not sure what I would do if I were the professor in this situation. It's possibly a bit more work for the prof to come up with alternate suggestions but if they're willing to do so and can find films with themes along similar topics to the ones assigned, if it doesn't unfairly unbalance the class in terms of both workload and discussion, I don't see why something like this should be a problem.
I had a similar situation in my “Collection Development in Academic Libraries” course – I wanted to focus on public library-related issues for my assignments and approached the professor about doing this. After some discussion, we reached a compromise where I could do 1-2 of the five assignments on public library-related topics. I ended up only doing one like this, (I think) it helped add a different dimension to the class when I presented it, and in retrospect, I'm glad I wasn't allowed to focus completely on public library topics because as much as I want to, there's no guarantee I'll end up working in a public library so the exposure to academic topics has been invaluable (I got a slightly panicked IM from a classmate – “tell me everything you know about collection development in academic libraries!” right before they went for a job interview. I was able to send them the assignments I'd done for that class and hopefully it helped them out a bit.)
As for the issue at hand about respecting the sensitivities of people, I'm reminded of what a friend on the Writers Guild of Alberta mailing list wrote around the time of the Dutch “Mohammed” cartoons controversy.
“Just because you can give offense, does it mean that you should?”
I'm usually a “people should be able to see and do anything” and it's the other person's problem if they're offended. But this person was heavily involved in the Calgary Freedom to Read Committee and I respected them a great deal. So that perceptive comment really stuck with me.
Here's a link to the full thread:
PG Alternatives for R-rated Business Ethics movies | Ask MetaFilter
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