Exercise 7: Assignment too far? In 1998, a journal titled Lingua Franca published an article written by Ruth Shalit. The article, titled “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” outlined how a successful professor at a small university was terminated from his employment over a controversial assignment that was held to be “inappropriate” by the university administration.

Adam Weisberger was a professor at Maine’s Colby College. He was well regarded as a successful teacher who was engaging with his students. His student evaluations were consistently very strong. In his Sociology 215 class, in an effort to make some of the critical theories more interesting, he developed an assignment to have students analyze their families using the material discussed in class. His syllabus read as follows:

What I am aiming for in the assignment is for you to reflect on the class readings and discussion by means of analyzing an important part of your lives—namely, your family. I am willing to entertain other ideas as written work, but you must make a persuasive case. You may be as personal or impersonal as you wish. . . . The outward form of the papers is less important than your using ideas to investigate the relationships of your family.

Some students became upset by the assignment, criticizing that it asked them to reveal too much about their personal lives. After considerable pressure applied to the administration by some students, Weisberger’s employment was terminated.

Do you think this assignment is ethically justifiable? How far can a professor probe into a student’s life? Is it ever ethically permissible to ask students about their personal lives?