If may remind all intending to post or comment on our pleasant water cooler of a blog: please use pseudonyms, change genders, allude to climates opposite than your own, construct discipline-elusive references, pretend to work at a SLAC when it's really an Ivy, etc etc etc...
Another professor is in trouble for bitching about students on social media.
Smart smoke screens, people!!
This is why people shouldn't Twitter. Or go on Facebook drunk.
ReplyDeleteMy question is: Is the guy still employed? There was a "no comment" about that. Is this bad enough to get fired over? The guy apologized--and frankly to me it seemed as if he was commenting on the student's name being similar to particular liquor, not commenting on race. If a student performs poorly, "What do you expect from a person named Tequilla?" doesn't have to be racially charged.
But it was awfully stupid and insensitive to tweet it. Seems more of a FERPA problem.
I've learned my lesson via life experience. I've sent...ummm...I think about three letters in my life (all to men I was in love with) that I wish I could go back and just burn.
And this was in the stone age, when you actually had to write a fucking letter and stuff it in an envelope and mail it and shit.
I don't know...I guess I don't see CM as the equivalent of Twitter. It would take someone a lot of time to figure out who any of us are, fur realz, and then, because we're all supposed to be shielding our identities anyway, there's deniability.
At most, I think someone could say "I just know that Beaker Ben is Fred Q. Puntlicker from Alabaster Heights Community College," but barring Beaker Ben admitting it, how would anyone know for sure? And even if he admitted it viva voce, he could be lying.
But a Twitter feed, or FB...that's harder. Unless you leave your FB page up accidentally like my friend does, only to find that her 12-year-old son has hijacked it with a joke update about the smell of her farts.
I, too, was puzzled by the grim tone of racial injustice in the article. The Prof was an idiot for posting the comment, but it seemed pretty clear that he was commenting on the kid's name.
ReplyDeleteI'm hesitant to post students' e-mail messages on CM. And I teach online, so lord knows I have a lot of material to work with. But even if I change details and paraphrase the original, I'm worried that I could still run into trouble over privacy violation. I would imagine that, legally, the e-mails are the property of the college as well, which adds another dimension to the issue.
"Fred Q. Puntlicker" cracked me up. Thanks, Stella!
ReplyDelete@Surly, I don't know the exact legalities but I don't know how it could be a privacy issue if "names have been changed to protect" the stupid...
ReplyDeleteThe bottom line: if you bitch about students, for the love of heaven don't use their *real* names. That's just plain common sense.
That story comment thread is just yobs yelling yobishly at each other on a website managed by yobs.
ReplyDeleteAs for the original professor, this is just another tempest in a tea cup....remember the economics prof who was caught on video yelling at his class? That was far worse than this.
I think that as new people come to our blog, it warrants the occasional reminder about the beauty of anonymity. I posted a similar reminder about 8 months ago, when I noticed people's profiles were not blocked and I could peruse at will.
ReplyDeleteAs for race, does anyone really think that "TeQuila" is a white name? Forgive the broad generalization, but social norms in white communities lead to names like "Tom" and "Caitlyn." This is a reference to the black community, who carve a space for themselves by rejecting traditional European names for something unique to their experiences. It's a product of generation after generation of inherited social disadvantage.
This is about a minority student, in a traditionally white college, whose name (and the culture that produced it) was publicly mocked by her professor.
It's funny that she is named after a type of booze. It would be funny if a guy was named Jim Beam or Johnny Walker. TeQuila is an even funnier name because it's unusual (from my perspective, the person who is laughing), in the same way that hippies' kids' names like Rainbow, Sunshine and Freedom are funny.
ReplyDeleteYes, but she wasn't mocked for being a member of a minority, she was mocked because her name was the same as a brand of alcohol commonly imbibed by college students, and she wasn't a very good student.
ReplyDeleteWe had a kid here a few years ago whose first and last names, if run together, became synonymous with "Idiot Dick". The kid was an underachieving stoner and kind of a jerk, so people made note of his name from time to time as being particularly apropos.
The tweeting professor was wrong and foolish, but whether he was or is deliberately racist is unclear. And the most important issue at hand here is the violation of a student's privacy and the public denigration of a student by her professor.
Finally, I get a fairly wide array of first names in my online class, and for years I made unconscious assumptions about students' ethnic and racial heritage based on the names. I know this because the college recently started encouraging the students to post pictures to their student profiles. When I started seeing photos next to the names, I was floored by how mush I had casually assumed about the heritage of my students, and how dead wrong I was in many cases.
@Stella: I have (or rather no longer have), a couple of those letters. But fortunately the embarrassment was limited to two people (the men with whom I have fallen in love, though not always reciprocating the feeling, have at least been decent fellows). Conveying such sentiments electronically, let alone at text/twitter length, is definitely riskier.
ReplyDeleteI, too, tend to think this is more of a FERPA issue than anything else, with a side of failure of logical reasoning thrown in (the young woman didn't name herself, after all, and we all know highly capable people with problematic parents). But the name also is, in the context of American culture, identifiably African-American (I'm not sure exactly why, but I think it's some combination of it being unusual as a personal name, the reference to a brand or consumer product, and the additional capital letter in the middle of the name), and the creation of unique names is an aspect of African-American culture that some members of the community see as a sign of pride and resistance to the homogenizing tendencies of racism (I've heard Cornel West make this argument, and Condoleeza Rice -- whose first name reflects a more sophisticated variation of this phenomenon -- seems quite comfortable using, and explaining, the moniker her parents chose for her). If a career counselor had gently suggested, in private, that the young woman think about going by Quilla or a middle name as she began her job search, and the young woman had then cried racism, I'd be sympathetic to the counselor (just as I'd be sympathetic to a counselor who suggested to Frederick Quintilian Pudlicker that he might want to boil his name down to Fred where possible). But I do think there's a level of racial insensitivity in making fun of "TeQuilla," and that would be especially problematic at Berea, which has long had an explicit mission of combating both racial and economic injustice by making a college education available to those who couldn't otherwise afford it. Between that and the FERPA violation, this just might be a firing/non-renewal offense for a non-tenured professor at Berea (which makes very sure, from the job ad stage, that applicants understand their unique character; while I've never gotten to the interview stage, I have applied to them, and the requirements were noticeably different, somewhat in the way that requirements for some Christian schools are different -- except that I could meet Berea's. In any case, you can't end up there without being aware that you're signing up for something a bit different from the normal college-teaching experience).
But no, I don't think this has much to do with CM, where we and our students are pseudonymous. I avoid posting my students' exact words (spoken or emailed), not so much for legal reasons as because, as an English professor who regularly reports plagiarists, I'm very aware that the unique combinations of words my students produce,however ridiculous, (1) belong to them, and (2) are quite identifying, of them, and therefore also of me. I think they would have justified cause for complaint were they to run across them here. I have to admit, however, that I enjoy some of the posts of student email. I just hope the posters are rewriting to convey the flavor of what they received, but with not only identifying details but also exact wording changed. Such creative rewriting also allows for a degree of satire through hyperbole, which, at least for me, adds to the enjoyment.
OK, I think we can all appreciate the cautionary tale about being circumspect in our various rants and screeds.
ReplyDeleteBut I am conflicted about the discussion of the racial overtones of the student's name. This totally unscientific, of course, but after teaching scads (that's a scientific term!) of online classes where I only know the student by the name I read on a screen, I would predict that TeQuilla is going to be a challenge of a student.
The vast majority of my trouble students -- both academic and behavioral -- sport some sort of "creative" moniker.
OK, someone is likely going to attempt connecting SES to those who might choose to add flair to a child's name. However, I would venture a guess that there are just as many Toms, Ricks, and Debbies from disadvantaged backgrounds and their names don't pop up as often.
Just observin' ...
I once had a student whose last name was "Faggert."
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't help that he was just about the gayest man in gayland.
I would like to point out that her name was not just "Tequila" but rather "TeQuila."
ReplyDeleteLike "LeShawna" or "TreSean" this name ties into a cultural heritage, not just a form of alcohol.
But again, yes, cautionary tale.
"I would like to point out that her name was not just "Tequila" but rather 'TeQuila.'"
ReplyDeleteI think he was drinking tequila when he sent that Twitter...is he a racist? Was he dumb drunk? Who knows?
I shouldn't have used the term "yob" - "git" seems to fit better. And yes I was talking about the story source, not here.