Evan Gurney in The Hedgehog Review:
“You need to work on your face.”
I am neither an actor nor a clown and certainly not a model—I teach literature at a university. Far from friendly advice from a colleague, these were serious instructions from an administrative superior. I was meeting with an academic official after the first few weeks of the semester, having contrived to be the school’s first faculty member whose teaching triggered a new “bias response” system that allowed individual students to register anonymous complaints. It was an anxious experience: After being notified of the accusation, I was compelled to wait a week before meeting with the administrator, who withheld any contextual details of the allegations and chose not to consult any details of my prior teaching record. During sleepless nights I racked my brain for a memory of some potential offense. What was it I had said about Plato? Had I criticized a senator, or worse, a celebrity singer?
So when it turned out that my offense amounted to “exclusionary non-verbal facial cues” (it was never clear if these were the student’s words or the administrator’s), I was relieved, a little frustrated, but mainly confused: I hadn’t slept for a week because a student felt like I looked at them the wrong way?
More here.