In 2014, I was in my final year of college at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, presenting a paper to a seminar on modern French history. The regular professor was away; a visiting instructor had come in as a replacement. I had barely outlined my argument when the instructor started to pull the rug out from under me. The interruptions began: a sentence in, then another. Each point I tried to make was seized, reframed or dismantled before I could finish. The discussion moved quickly and confidently — entirely away from me. When the session ended, I walked out feeling something I can only describe as intellectual erasure: the sense that I had stood up to speak and had somehow not been allowed to exist. A few of my fellow students came up to me afterward, visibly shocked by what had happened. Their reactions created a moment of solidarity in the hallway — the quiet recognition that something in the room had gone wrong. If you have presented your work in a course and walked out feeling smaller than when you walked in, you are not misremembering.
I wrote immediately to a mentor. His reply was short: “Hard lesson in life,” he wrote. “I don’t even know his name. Move on.” What I didn’t understand then — and only began to understand once I started teaching my own seminars — is that “move on” is not actually available to everyone. “Move on” is advice most students receive, and most quietly cannot follow. Some moments don’t move on. They stay in the room with you, long after the room itself has disappeared.
There is a French pedagogical tradition called “la reprise” — the correction, the redirection, the moment when a teacher seizes a student’s argument and reshapes it publicly. Done well, it is a form of intellectual engagement; it says, “I take your thinking seriously enough to push back on it.” Done without care, or by someone who has their own frustrations to displace, it becomes something else entirely. The instructor in 2014 was a “vacataire” — a contingent academic, poorly paid, without stable employment, filling in for someone more secure. I didn’t know this at the time, but I know it now. He had nowhere to put his own precarity and I was readily available. What I experienced as intellectual annihilation was, in part, an institution’s failure traveling downward until it found the most vulnerable target: a student at the front of the room.
This is what seminar rooms do when we are not careful. Classrooms concentrate and redistribute pressure. Senior scholars sometimes forget the asymmetry — they intervene with confidence they have spent decades accumulating, not noticing that the student on the other side of the table has none. But the more insidious case is the one nobody talks about: The instructor who is themselves barely surviving in the institution, exercising authority they don’t feel, in front of students who don’t yet know how to protect themselves. The damage in those rooms is rarely intentional — it’s structural.
I think about this now when I design my own seminars. This semester, my students work with AI and Holocaust survivor testimony — 200,000 hours of it, recorded across decades in archive after archive. The material is about as heavy as material gets. And yet I have tried, deliberately, to build a room where the heaviness doesn’t foreclose speech. I ask questions rather than answer them. I never cold call on people: My classroom is a space of invitation and sharing — what bell hooks once called making the classroom a site of safety before it can be a site of risk. I always try to make the first response to any student contribution something that opens rather than closes. None of this is instinctive — or rather, it is now, but it wasn’t always. It is the result of having spent years thinking about a single seminar session from 2014, asking what was missing from that room and trying to build the opposite.
Recently, four students presented together — one of them a stranger to the other three, brought into the group at the last minute. They were presenting on human behavior: how ordinary people make decisions in extremity, how communities hold together or fracture. The material was precise, the framing original and the discussion they opened excellent. When they finished, the room applauded. Not out of politeness, but because something had happened: Students had taken the floor, held it and given it back to everyone else. We spent the rest of the session inside their questions rather than moving on to the next item.
I still think about the Sorbonne — the memory is there, available, which I have come to understand as useful. It tells me something I couldn’t have learned from a pedagogy seminar: What happens to a student in a room on a Friday morning in November can still remain with them a decade later, on another continent, standing in front of students of their own. If you are reading this as a student, the thing I most want you to know is that the room you are sitting in is not a given. It was designed by someone with particular assumptions about who gets to speak and what happens when they do. You are allowed to notice that. The classroom is not a neutral space — it is structured by the politics of who speaks, how they speak, and whether they feel safe enough to think out loud. Teachers create moments people carry. The politics of how and whether anyone in the room feels safe enough to think out loud — that, I would argue, is the quintessential question. Everything else is content.
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Jan Burzlaff is an Opinion Columnist and a Postdoctoral Associate in the Program for Jewish Studies. Office Hours (Open Door Edition) is his weekly dispatch to the Cornell community — an associate's reflections on teaching, learning and the small moments that make a campus feel human. Readers can submit thoughts and questions anonymously through the Tip Sheet here. He can also be reached at profjburzlaff@cornellsun.com.
