Microaggressions: everyday offenses or digs, sometimes subtle and unintentional, directed at a person based on his or her race. It’s a divisive term which some say has helped enable the “coddling” of college students nationwide. Other still say it’s given a name to the kinds of insidious discrimination that students of color and others have faced in the college classroom for generations. Like it or not, microaggression is now part of the mainstream college climate vocabulary, as a recent, public case at Mount Holyoke College and others like it illustrate. But are such cases -- in which a student accuses a professor of discrimination -- destined to become high-profile incidents? Or are they best settled between students and professors in private, if at all possible? And what’s the right way to talk about race in the classroom, if there is one, to help prevent such problems in the first place? Academic freedom and education experts say it’s all a delicate balance.

October 5, 2015 ・ From Inside Higher Ed