I’m a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards.

I'm a tenured professor at Ohio State University. I have taught at the college level for more than 15 years — more than five as graduate student instructor, seven as a tenure-track professor, and three with tenure.

More on how professors react to their students

I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me

I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all.

When I read about professors being afraid of their own students and changing what they teach in response to that fear, I'm struck by two things. First, I understand why they're afraid. After my decade and a half in the classroom, I can confidently add to the chorus suggesting that universities increasingly treat students like consumers. As administrators seem more concerned with enrollment dollars than students' learning, instructors receive a clear message: "The customer is always right."

But here's the other thing: I don't have the luxury of simply changing my syllabus to make my students more comfortable. You see, I'm also black and a woman. There aren't a lot of other people like me — women of color hold just 7.5 percent of full-time faculty positions nationwide. My very presence makes some of my students uncomfortable because I do not fit any picture society has given them of an expert. My students, after all, have grown up bombarded with the message that people who belong in authority — especially authority based on intellectual accomplishments and expertise —are men, usually white men.

I challenge my students simply by existing. And this has made me realize that avoiding controversial topics is the worst way for my colleagues and me to react to this insecure, fear-inducing moment in academia. Professors should not cower. If we believe educators should not simply bestow credentials but should create an informed citizenry, then that sort of cowardice in professors is a dereliction of duty.

How professors should approach controversial topics

My students' discomfort with me is especially clear when I teach "general" courses — courses that are not explicitly about people of color. It is not uncommon for students to accuse me of diminishing the quality of their education when I teach classes like this. For example, when I taught an honors writing class, I included two — just two! — reading assignments by nonwhite authors. At the end of the term, a significant percentage of student evaluations complained that the class was skewed because it unjustifiably prioritized African-American authors.

All of my students, regardless of the identity categories they embraced, had been taught their entire lives that real literature is written by white people. Naturally, they felt they were being cheated by this strange professor's "agenda." When your presence generates anxiety that students often cannot admit they have — even to themselves — then you don't have the luxury of simply changing course material to avoid pushback.

What my experience has taught me must become every instructor's priority — that is, if we are in the profession because we want to develop engaged citizens. I have learned to teach students to notice how they are being groomed to join a "docile and contingent workforce" whenever they are not encouraged to think in ways that feel like a challenge. I couldn't do this if I were busy cowering to avoid complaints. Besides, I want my students to be passionately engaged and to feel empowered about speaking up both inside and outside of my classroom. The real question, then, is: how can professors broach controversial topics in a way that does not lend itself to complaints that are grounded more in emotion than in intellectual inquiry? The solution is simple, but implementing it requires courage and tenacity: professors need to directly discuss power and power differentials, no matter the subject area.

After all, power has everything to do with how every discipline developed. The idea that our class veered away from real literature whenever nonwhite authors appeared on the syllabus was not some outlandish accusation my students cooked up. It very much aligned with their experiences in high school and in most college classes, and it certainly aligns with the American media landscape. (A similar tension exists in STEM fields. In the sciences, teamwork is crucial for progress in the lab. And although teamwork is treated as a neutral idea, conceptions of it are inevitably shaped by the fact that men comprise the majority in most labs. Proactively discussing power differentials would empower researchers to be self-reflective enough — and intellectually honest and rigorous enough — to notice their own unstated ideas about who is easy to work with and good at what they do.)

It is worth asking, Who can most afford to teach in ways that are least likely to inspire controversy? Those who are not immediately hurt by dominant ideas. And what's the most dominant idea of them all? That the white, male, heterosexual perspective is neutral, but all other perspectives are biased and must be treated with skepticism.

I am invested in helping my students ask, Why are 90 percent of those in authority here white? I want them to notice that race isn't a factor only when the person in question is black or brown. For every white person in a position, whiteness helped make him or her an appealing candidate. That these people fit the description of what all Americans are taught to see as "qualified" helped them appear to be qualified, even if their credentials were lackluster. (As long as a candidate is white, lackluster credentials can become evidence of potential.) Indeed, their whiteness likely put them on the radar in the fist place because they were more likely to be in networks recognized and respected by the (mostly white) people making decisions. I ask my students, "Have you ever noticed how, even if standards are changed to accommodate someone, Americans never worry about standards being lowered unless the person getting the opportunity isn't white?" Wouldn't it be powerful if all of my colleagues were doing the same?

No matter the topic, power dynamics matter, so it is intellectually dishonest to ignore them in any discussion. To acknowledge power, I call my students' attention to the fact that dominant ideas parade as "natural" "truth" rather than as a particular worldview. (This is not unlike white men molding the world to themselves and then claiming that every policy, tradition, and institution they created is neutral, not oppressive, toward others.) As my students and I work to create an intellectual community, our job is to notice the contours of everything that parades as "natural." That's when students begin to note, for example, that it is never left to "natural" forces to tell them they should be attracted to the opposite sex. They are told from birth what boys like and should like and what girls like and should like. "Nothing is left to chance," my students begin to say. Challenging dominant ideas is always difficult, but it's gratifying to see my students grow from simply demonstrating that they can memorize something I said to thinking through issues by testing long-held assumptions.

Knowing that we all crave these gratifying moments, I wonder if so many professors fail to teach critical thinking because we have gotten out of practice ourselves. When I look at how vulnerable tenure and shared governance have become at the University of Wisconsin, I wonder if professors have wanted to court favor with administrators and politicians so much that we've accepted their claims to being merely pragmatic? Have we actually believed the lie that the only people who engage in "identity politics" are black feminists like me? Could it be that when some white men looked at more powerful white men, they could see them only as reasonable and not politically motivated, so they turned off their critical thinking skills when observing their actions? (Not everyone, of course.) Could it be that we only consider people ideologues when they don't vow allegiance to capitalism? Do we actually believe that religion isn't a corrupting force unless someone mentions Islam? Is this how Scott Walker could drop out of college and still rise to enough power to tell educated white men and women how to run the University of Wisconsin? I really have to wonder. (I wonder because I know it could happen anywhere.)

How problems on college campuses connect to the "real world"

It may be tempting to dismiss what I'm writing about here as an insidery argument that only applies to the "ivory tower." Supposedly, academia is a safe haven for the irrelevant; it is full of people who could not cut it in the "real world." This perspective is misguided: no matter the topic, it is destructive to pretend that academia can be bracketed from real-world issues.

My research centers on violence, and I have found that people are most vulnerable to physical violence when they are already marginalized in society. Vulnerability clings to those whose voices are least likely to be heard because perpetrators know that even if caught, they will not likely face consequences if they victimize someone already devalued. This dynamic enabled lynchings to become a form of entertainment, complete with photographs of mutilated bodies as souvenirs. Being punished for killing an African American was (and still is) unlikely; everyone has been taught that a dead black person does not represent a true loss for society.

Now, I could operate as if my understanding of lynching only matters when I'm writing a book for a university press, or I can use this expertise as a lens that sharpens my interpretation of the various ways people can be victimized and receive no redress. Because I know cultural patterns are enduring but also dynamic, easily morphing to fit various circumstances, I do not hesitate to note in my scholarship, teaching, and lived experience when various forms of violence emerge in a range of contexts.

As a result, I have no problem saying aloud that perpetrators' tendency to focus on the most marginalized never fails. If money commands attention, then those without money are most likely to become victims of violence. If whiteness inspires sympathy, then those who are not white will most often become targets. If being tenured gains you a hearing, then those without tenure will receive the most abuse.

Given these patterns, it is no coincidence that American institutions look like they do. The most influential positions are held primarily by those who are white and male not only because of this country's long history of directing affirmative action toward whites but also because white men continue to insist that their whiteness and maleness has little bearing on their actions. The more that Americans allow this lie to hold sway, the more the culture of fear will expand.

Make no mistake, the culture of fear is intensifying. One need note only a few examples:

• The un-hiring of Steven Salaita by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
• The unauthorizing of ethnic studies hires at the University of Illinois Chicago
• Boston University's tepid support of incoming professor Saida Grundy
• The University of North Carolina's cutting of 46 programs
• The possible dilution of tenure and shared governance at the University of Wisconsin

This culture must be met with courage and clarity.

My willingness to speak out about all this is shaped by the fact that I have tenure. But to the extent that tenure represents some amount of safety and security, what good is it if it only inspires cowardice? If it only inspires you to hold on to it so desperately that you can never be bothered to try to make this world (or your own campus) less hostile for someone else? If it only inspires you to avoid speaking out against unfairness and injustice? We should be asking ourselves these questions not only in think pieces and in our living rooms but also in our faculty meetings and classrooms ... because they are absolutely part of the real world.