Union asks profs to give extra credit for anti-Trump events
Faculty members at a Washington college are being encouraged to award students extra credit for attending a “Day of Resistance” featuring a slew of events condemning the Trump administration.
The event, sponsored in part by Shoreline Community College’s Federation of Teachers, the union representing the school's faculty, was advertised in a faculty-wide email by English Professor DuValle Daniel, who asked her peers to consider bringing one of their classes to the May Day program.
[RELATED: Pitt students offered extra credit to attend anti-Trump march]
“If you would like to bring your class to an event, please RSVP,” Daniel wrote, according to an email distributed using a faculty listserv and obtained by Campus Reform.
The email, containing a schedule of events for the “Day of Resistance,” then went on to ask faculty to “please support this effort in one or more of the following ways,” such as giving “students extra credit to attend events on their own,” discussing the history of the “May Day marches and rallies in [their] classrooms and [sharing] information about the 2017 Day of Resistance,” and even avoiding “assigning work that students cannot make up on May Day if they decide to join the immigrant march downtown.”
According to the email, the Day of Resistance was organized in “resistance” to alleged “attacks on immigrants, workers, organizations and people targeted by intolerance, climate, [and] education,” with several events on such topics scheduled throughout the day, including “Climate Change in a Trump Administration,” a training on “civil disobedience,” and another dubbed “White Fright: From Redemption to Donald Trump.”
[RELATED: Prof offers extra credit to demand free tuition from state legislators]
The “White Fright” lecture is even sponsored by the school’s Office of the President and Student Leadership Center, with Executive Director of Communications and Marketing Martha Lynn telling Campus Reform that the school "upholds and supports the rights of faculty to academic freedom and their ability to organize events on campus," adding that "the college does not, however, encourage faculty to offer credit of any kind to students for attending political events or activities that fall outside the topic or the learning outcomes of a course."
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