This discussion is currently happening. A student on the Reddit forum asks if they have the right to question something about their class. I copy and pasted this language to assure the learner they have every right to question their instructor and can appeal any decision involving their academic standing to the Senate as an institutional policy:

No officer may interpret policy without being signed off on the personal risk involved in giving anyone a misinterpretation of the language. But then the faculty got involved:

I advised them they’d just committed an institutional error and strongly suggested they delete their comment. Instead, they trusted that the University Counsel responsible for the following travesty didn’t write the Request for Decision without understanding the purpose of Requests for Decision. So naturally, the prof — if that was their real username — doubled down:

Institutional errors will continue until employees know “protected” is a protected term, regardless of which policy it was improperly tacked onto.

Edit:

The institution has a solid history of faculty members believing if they don’t know what someone is talking about, the automatic assumption is they are wrong and not that a learner might know something more about something than they do, regardless of their actual specialty:

Subject matter experts must know the possibility they might be wrong inside and outside of their field of expertise exists. That’s the academic culture of humility.

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