My view is that the professor was looking to ruffle feathers and try to convince the student that their request was absurd. I think trying to sway someone over

My view is that the professor was looking to ruffle feathers and try to convince the student that their request was absurd. I think trying to sway someone over to a particular side nowadays when it comes to morals or ethics is asking for a figurative belting, and I don't think he was blind to this possibility. It is despicable that he was made an example of in the way he was, that being said, while the professor's response was not in any egregious moral violation as far as my standards go, I would not have responded like that at all. The real issue here was that some students were affected emotionally by something significant before an exam and this particular student was asking that leniency be shown towards them, if you strip away demographic descriptors. My response to this would have been to ask the student to refer _any_ students affected by the events to contact me to determine leniency on an individual basis. It puts onus on that student to refer people. If they were only looking to stir the pot, they likely wouldn't have referred anyone and that would have been the end of it. If there were students referred who were not in the right headspace to handle the exam at 100%, then that's fine. At my university, we had exemptions for exams based on personal circumstances. I wouldn't see this as any different from that. With that aside, I do believe this particular student was being an ideological charlatan and that their request was not sincere. The excerpts in the post read like bait imo. This seems congruent with immediacy of the outrage that followed, and the petition. edit: grammar mistake