There are amongst students, sadly - as in any area of life - always a few petty bullies and habitual unjustified complainers (we all know people like this - and I say unjustified because some complaints are of course justified, but I’m talking about people whose complaints aren’t). Years ago you’d encounter the odd student like this and they could make your life a misery for a while, but it generally tended to be just bitching with other students, filling in feedback forms with vitriol and making complaints to your manager. They would tend to be few and far between though, and the unjustified complaints relatively easy to disprove. (I’m not talking about things like course content or political issues or whatever, but stuff like long complaints about your dress sense or accent on feedback forms (or, as I once had, a student who made a complaint to my manager that I was not “supportive” to students because I wouldn’t move all my scheduled seminars to accommodate her rehearsals for a campus play).
I always estimated that in any group of students you’d get about 20 percent who absolutely adored you, 60 percent who were neutral but generally well meaning, and 20 percent who took a dislike to you, and that’s just how it is - like with any walk of life. People’s personalities clash, they have likes and dislikes and prejudices - one student finds you too posh, another finds you too common, another too political, someone else thinks you’re an establishment stooge and another doesn’t like your sense of humour or whatever and then there are some who really do like you and think you’re great; and the vast majority don’t care that much.
Now, however, the ones with a grudge can get online and drum up a righteous fury with a whole mob of other random strangers, and turn it into a national issue that you can’t reply to with any facts or reason. I feel for Kathleen Stock as we pretty much all live in fear of being found inadvertently wrong by the student thought police these days, and having no right to reply or redress. I know of this happening in regards to race to a lovely colleague of mine who is not in the least bit racist but was targeted by a (white) student who disliked her with an unjustified complaint, and made to go through all sorts of public ritual retraining and “diversity education” - even though everyone knew it was malicious - to satisfy the student reps.
The irony is that a lot of academia is still very unwoke and sexist, so on one hand you can be getting put down by older male colleagues for having children and constantly coming up against entrenched sexism, homophobia and racism; yet the students think you’re a right wing bigot who needs educating in rightthink and hate you because they think you’re a living representative of the oppressive establishment.
It feels like clinging to a small slice of sanity between the boomer men and the woke students sometimes.