Barbour recounts his experience as a teacher of religious studies to students whose political and social stances are related to conservative religious views. Differentiating between students who are thoughtful participants or silent observers and those who stridently label the academic community as liberally-biased, Barbour describes his encounters with a student identified as Rick, who aggressively asserted his conservative views in a course on Christian ethics, expressing his views in class in ways that provoked other students, sometimes referring to gays and lesbians, members of racial minorities, or poor people as if they were outside the church. When other students challenged Rick's opinions in what to Barbour seemed a respectful manner, Rick said that he felt both "personally assaulted" and unsafe to be surrounded by people with radically different views. Barbour writes of trying to point out that Christians can and do conscientiously and politely disagree with each other on certain ethical issues. Throughout the course, Barbour struggled with the question of how to grade Rick, considering the student's work to be about average in terms of the quality of his reasoning and the way he presented his views with a limited capacity to consider other points of view. But, worried that he was so opposed to the student's views that he was not fairly evaluating his work, Barbour gave him better than average marks on both an essay exam and a paper. Some time later, when discussing grading practices with a colleague, Barbour found that Rick had exhibited the same confrontational behavior with another teacher who also felt, in retrospect, that he had graded too highly. Barbour began to consider that Rick's behavior may be driven by character and psychology, rather than political and religious beliefs, that he needed to be embroiled in controversy and to feel that he was standing up for the truth against an oppressive liberal orthodoxy. Noting that he has taught other conservative students who were better than Rick at engaging in dialogue, and who considered other points of view in a more reflective, disinterested way, Barbour writes that his particular slant on what makes a good student may also reflect his own preference for a more thoughtful and considerate approach to an aggressive, confrontational style. Much as the writer might like to, he does not feel that he can completely blame his difficulties with Rick on the student's psychology, and that Barbour's own orientation contributed to what may have been bad judgment in grading. The teacher wonders if he may be representative of a larger pattern, in which liberal professors bend over backward to be sure that they are being fair to conservative students and, in trying to be fair to points of view with which they disagree, override their own better judgment.