‘I Don’t Feel Safe in This Classroom’

After taking a social-work course at Colorado State University in 2023, one student had striking words to share in a course evaluation: “I don’t feel safe in this classroom,” they wrote, adding that “judgment and rejection” came from the two instructors. “This makes me shut down.”

One of those instructors was Quinn Hafen, then a Ph.D. student at Colorado State and now an assistant professor at the University of Wyoming. Hafen, who uses they/them pronouns, was surprised by the comment. Their counterpart, a senior instructor named Marie Villescas Zamzow, was not. She receives this sort of comment every semester.

“I can actually predict who’s going to write that it’s not a safe learning environment,” she said, according to a recent paper that she and Hafen wrote called “Exposing and Disarming Whitelash to Advance Anti-Racism: A Collaborative Autoethnography on Interracial Co-teaching.” “And the reason that it’s ‘not safe’ is because it’s actually not a safe environment for hate.”

In the article, which was accepted for publication by the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research, Hafen and Villescas Zamzow prominently featured their experience running two social-work courses. They draw on classroom interactions and student feedback as evidence of defensiveness exhibited by white students in response to instruction about racial injustice.

When those students felt guilty, or sad, or angry, they “lashed out” to “re-establish white comfort,” Hafen and Villescas Zamzow concluded. That, in their view, is something to be embraced. “[We] want the tension, [we] want the discomfort among people who hold privilege,” Villescas Zamzow is quoted in the paper as saying. (A primary data source for the study is 10 recorded “processing sessions” between her and Hafen. Neither responded to my interview requests.)

For the two instructors, unsettling their white students’ biases is a necessary condition of an antiracist education. What they call “white emotional hegemony” must be disrupted, to support the learning of all students. But to critics and skeptics, what Hafen and Villescas Zamzow depict is not only ideologically stifling. It’s potentially discriminatory.

After learning of the paper, Fair for All (FAIR), a nonprofit dedicated to “overcoming identity politics,” per its website, alerted the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. It alleged in a September complaint that the teaching methods deployed by Hafen and Villescas Zamzow amounted to a hostile learning environment based on race as well as sex.

“If we had flipped Black to white in this situation and imagined Black students being made deliberately uncomfortable,” said FAIR’s executive director, Monica Harris, in an interview, “I think we all agree that would be unacceptable.”

Several years ago, Colorado State’s School of Social Work, like many other schools, assessed where it needed to improve on fulfilling diversity, equity, and inclusion principles and standards. The review found deficiencies — chief among them that the school centered “whiteness,” according to a report provided to me. Among other data sources was the work of a team of master’s students who asked students and employees about their experiences in the school, relying on a framework that taxonomizes “characteristics of white supremacy,” such as “perfectionism,” “objectivity,” and a “sense of urgency.” (That the grievance policy was frequently brought up as the avenue for raising concerns was also evidence of white-supremacy culture, per the report. It reflected “worship of the written word.”)

The report, which Hafen helped write, identified problems with the curriculum. The vast majority of textbooks for the bachelor’s-degree program were written by white people, and only one core assignment within the program required students to engage with racism and antiracism specifically. “There is a need for all courses to address dismantling white supremacy in some form,” the report says. That goal aligns conceptually with the field’s education policy and accreditation standards. As of this summer, all baccalaureate and master’s programs accredited by the Council on Social Work Education are expected to “recognize the pervasive impact of White supremacy.”

Hafen and Villescas Zamzow’s courses, as described in their study, fit that bill. One was geared toward freshmen; the other was for juniors in the social-work major. The paper does not describe specific lessons but says that students tackled content on settler colonialism and genocides of indigenous populations, chattel slavery, mass incarceration, and police brutality. They also discussed “social work’s role in perpetuating whiteness.”

While teaching this content, Hafen and Villescas Zamzow used the “pedagogy of discomfort.” First conceptualized by Megan Boler, now a professor in the department of social-justice education at the University of Toronto, the methodology maintains that students and professors should challenge their previously held assumptions and self-conceptualizations and grapple with negative emotions that follow, which can be indicative of unexamined bias. According to Boler, some are better suited to that process than others, particularly when it comes to issues around race. “The invitation to question cherished beliefs is not one all students readily accept,” she wrote in a chapter of her 1999 book Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. “A number of my white students’ responses explicitly stated they felt ‘angry and confused and blamed.’”

That’s how at least a few of Hafen and Villescas Zamzow’s students felt, too. According to the paper, white students would attempt to “derail the class from content about racism and white supremacy.” When Hafen, who is white, and Villescas Zamzow, who is Latina, “doubled down and set a firm boundary that we would not defer to white emotional comfort,” students, in turn “lashed out in an attempt to relieve negative emotions and ease feelings of shame and guilt.”

They include two examples of said “whitelash.” One took place during a class session on settler colonialism. A white student said it was difficult to engage with this course content “and not be told to have time to take care of yourself while you’re listening to all of it,” according to a partial transcript of the class recording included in the paper.

Villescas Zamzow told the student that what he was feeling — “being overwhelmed and seeing us and feeling super frustrated” — was “absolutely spot on and real,” and that there was no way for her to sugarcoat what they were teaching. Hafen added, “I think what it comes down to is that it should suck because it’s nothing compared to the lived reality of it.”

The next class period, while “processing racial power dynamics among students and instructors,” that same student “expressed his desire not to engage with negative emotions,” according to a summary of the interaction. Villescas Zamzow said that discomfort is part of learning. The student replied by telling her that she was “an oppressor” and asked how it felt.

Reflecting on these exchanges, the instructors considered the student’s “placement of blame” on Villescas Zamzow as “a form of disavowal that relieved the student’s racial discomfort.” Villescas Zamzow noted during a processing session that this student is “at the center of the whiteness and the maleness.”

The second example occurred during a class discussion that drew connections between slavery and modern-day racial oppression, the paper says. What exactly occurred is not clear. But according to a summary of the incident in the article, there was an unnamed guest speaker — a Black man who was there to talk about his experience with police brutality. A group of white students “interrupted the speaker to argue with the instructor that they should not be graded on their engagement with material about race and racism.” Hafen then “called out the student behavior as being a form of white centering that deeply invalidated and harmed People of Color.”

That prompted the “rage, indignation, tears, and shame.” Some students “responded with raised voices that their integrity was being questioned while other students began to cry and attempted to seek out the presenter after class to apologize.”

In the aftermath, Hafen grappled with the role their own whiteness played in the saga. A student commented — it’s unclear in what forum — that “as I watched you comfort the one gal who proclaimed that her integrity was being questioned, I realized that we all just witnessed white fragility and coddling.” Hafen seemed to agree, saying in a processing session: “I have been centering on the negative emotions white students have been expressing to the detriment of other voices.”

Some students were thankful for Hafen and Villescas Zamzow’s methods, and their teaching about harsh racial realities. The content was a “slap in the face I didn’t know I needed,” one student commented, according to the paper. The student from the first “whitelash” incident came around, too, according to end-of-semester feedback quoted in the paper: “I’ve never seen a college professor care so much about the class they are teaching while also challenging our personal beliefs so well.”

Students of color referenced in the paper were similarly appreciative. During the first whitelash incident, one of those students spoke up to say it “felt really good to her” that the instructors were, in the article’s parlance, “centering BIPOC learning instead of caving to white comfort.”

Rowen Kimble, a master’s student in Colorado State’s social-work program who got her bachelor’s degree there, has taken a course with Villescas Zamzow and one with Hafen (neither are the courses described in the study). In a phone interview, Kimble described both instructors as incredibly knowledgeable and welcoming. While Kimble, who is white, said she could understand a white student feeling uncomfortable or singled out when discussing racial oppression in the classroom, she does not think that was either instructor’s intention. “They want us to learn,” she said, of Hafen and Villescas Zamzow. “They want us to do great in this field.”

But when Bruce A. Thyer read the paper, which appeared in unfinished form on the journal’s website this summer, he was “rather appalled” by it. To Thyer, a distinguished research professor in the College of Social Work at Florida State University, Hafen and Villescas Zamzow “seem to be implying that their white students were responsible for social injustices in the world, and seem to be deliberately trying to make them feel hurt and guilty,” he said in a phone interview. “Which, to my mind, is not sound educational practice.”

To Arnold Cantú and Nathan Gallo, the study read as more confirmation of a general ideological dogmatism they said they experienced within Colorado State’s social-work school. Cantú, a licensed clinical social worker, started in the Ph.D. program in the fall of 2021 but has since left. Gallo graduated from the master’s program in May. Both wrote about what they depict as a rigidly conscriptive intellectual environment in an issue of the Journal of Teaching in Social Work published earlier this year, to which Thyer also contributed.

As one example, according to Cantú, word got around that he’d called the term “anti-oppressive” a “buzzword” during a class presentation, and that he’d not included a “pronoun commitment” statement in a mock syllabus. Both things were brought up by a professor who met with Cantú and, he recounts, “explicitly asked if I did or didn’t believe in systemic racism, structural oppression, if I was taking seriously the idea of anti-oppressive research … My defense was to say that I was grappling with these ideas, as all students should be able to in a university setting.”

Gallo in his article — which he published pseudonymously — mentions a lesson taught in an introductory course that detailed facets of white-supremacy culture using the same framework from the school’s DEI analysis. “Space to debate the legitimacy of the idea was swiftly quashed, the professor imparting a lesson in a non-negotiable capital-T truth,” Gallo writes. “Students’ discomfort — regardless of racial identity — was downplayed as not being open enough, rationalized as ‘it takes time to get used to the idea.’”

Charlotte Bright, who directs the school, did not respond to an interview request about criticisms voiced by Gallo and Cantú or the “Whitelash” paper.

When Gallo and Cantú read Hafen and Villescas Zamzow’s article, they were troubled. (Cantú was in the same Ph.D. cohort as Hafen. He says they were cordial but not close.) They told me they know someone affiliated with FAIR, which challenges identity-based policies and practices that Harris, FAIR’s executive director, described as “well-intentioned” but ultimately “regressive.” Gallo and Cantú discussed with FAIR the viability of filing a federal complaint, which it ultimately decided to do, arguing that Hafen and Villescas Zamzow’s methods amount to race-based and sex-based discrimination under civil-rights law.

Meanwhile, the paper no longer appears on the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research’s website. It was withdrawn at the authors’ request, Todd I. Herrenkohl, the journal’s editor in chief, said in an email.

That withdrawal occurred “due to a failure to follow research protocols for human subjects,” a Colorado State spokesperson told me in an email. (The study says that Hafen and Villescas Zamzow sought approval from the university’s institutional review board and that the board determined they were not conducting human-subjects research.)

The spokesperson also said that Colorado State “took immediate steps to ensure an appropriate educational environment for our students. This includes adherence to research protocols and CSU policies that protect all students from discrimination.”

The spokesperson did not respond to questions about what steps the university took, or whether it investigated.

As for a potential federal investigation, the Education Department’s website says a complaint generally must be filed with OCR within 180 days of the alleged discrimination, and the courses took place in 2023. (An email to the department’s press office prompted a bounce-back message referencing the federal government shutdown.)

But FAIR is arguing its concerns should be taken up anyway, given that the organization first learned of the paper in August. Plus, the complaint says, Villescas Zamzow still teaches at Colorado State and was “proud enough to publish” these methods. So one should not assume she has “abandoned such practices.”