That's not correct.
The author's story was the equivalent of a thread hijack. The author's lesson was on the effectiveness of writing and presentation in getting one's message out. The student wanted to debate the subject of the message in the video, not the style and effectiveness of the communication medium that was used. The author wanted to redirect the student's focus back onto the lesson.
This was not an attempt to bully the student into changing an opinion.
-PJ
Except for that fact that isn’t how Schlosser actually responded to the student.
If he’d said “the dispute on the basis for the financial crisis is off topic here, let’s stay focused on how effective this is as a communication example” then no problem. Heck, he could have directly told the student not to troll him by distracting from the topic and I’d be ok with it.
Instead he directly rebutted the student’s assertion on it’s merits, by saying that most experts would disagree (which also happens to be lie), then shut the student down from providing a counterrebuttal.
The truth is that the real point of the article isn’t that “Schlosser” opposes use of these tactics. It’s that he opposes the use of them by more Radical Progressive students against him and his cohort of more “moderate” Progressives.
It is a typical tactic of left-wing nutbag professors to use an ideology-promoting “tool” when teaching an entirely different subject. In this example, the professor was supposedly focusing on the medium and method, but deliberately chose a video that promoted his ideology in a positive way. He could have chosen a video that presented the conservative viewpoint, but by using the leftwing video, he gets to have his class AND expose his students to propanda, AND claim that the subject of the video is not what is up for discussion. Wins all around for him. The student picked up on that and wanted to counter the propaganda. I’ve seen this done when I was a student.