“It amazes me the number of people who think that shared space is their living room.”
Ok but a student lounge should be a place where students can talk in their native language and feel safe (i.e. not judged) when doing it. The issue would be if a non-Chinese speaker joined them and they continued speaking Chinese and deliberately excluded other students.
@CheddarcheeseMN I agree, I think those two professors don’t exist. “Let me see all the Chinese students so I can blackball the loud ones because they annoy me?” What in the what? Two separate people?
If that happened, then those two deserve to be removed instead.
I think it would be ok for a university to set an expectation that if a grad student wanted to be considered for or has a position that requires instructing students that they speak in English ( the language all courses except a few foreign language classes are taught in, where this expectation woukd not apply) as much as possible and at all times in campus facilities. Other than that that, I don’t think it’s the univsersities business to monitor student speech.
The real problem here is that two professors wanted to see a photo of the class and blacklist students for recommendation letters and internships based on the language they use outside classrooms.
To understand the problem for Duke, it is important to understand the demographic of STEM graduate students by reading https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/10/11/foreign-students-and-graduate-stem-enrollment
If Duke can’t handle this PR nightmare properly and quickly, the next thing you know is that Duke might be blacklisted. It is the first news tag on the front page of Washington Post now. This can’t be good.
Speaking one’s opinion that someone or something is racist is using one’s freedom of speech, right?
What is not talked about in this story is that most if not all of these Chinese students are paying $80k/yr ($160k/yr total) for a degree that does not offer any good job prospect for them here or at home. I speculate that such a master’s degree program has very few takers who are full pay and as a result the program has to get most of their students/customers from overseas, who probably didn’t have the language proficiency and credentials to get into more competitive programs elsewhere.
I imagine many of these kids are there for the American educational experience, some fun time, and of course Duke’s prestige.
How out of touch are you to put this in writing?? That’s my issue. I mean, this woman is a professor at Duke? Has she been living under a rock?
If these students are in line to be TAs I’d want them to be encouraged in some way to practice their English- I remember having horrible classes in college because of TAs who couldn’t be understood.
Typically, only PhD students are offered TA in exchange for a stipend and tuition. These students in a master’s program presumably are not in that position.
Isn’t a biostats masters pretty employable?
@jym626 Correct, I think the original article title is incorrect, and somewhat inflammatory. But then that’s par for the course these days, right? No offense intended.
Not very good if you need an H1B visa.
Often Chinese students in a good masters program will apply for PhD studies but it is true that the masters students may not all be funded.
These days everyone is just looking to be offended. It’s ridiculous.
From private sources (I won’t vouch for their accuracy), it seems that the main issue was them talking very loudly and the professors involved had offices nearby and were seriously inconvenienced. I can totally understand them wanting to know the names of students who were blatantly inconsiderate to others. That said, absolutely nobody should have made this about language. I would have been very disturbed if somebody had told me not to speak my native language with others when I was in grad school.
The problem I have is that the consequences seem far out of line for the supposed offense. Perhaps she should have done a better job of qualifying her statements or wording her email, but losing a directorship over it is overkill. Call her in, explain why what she said and how she said it was inappropriate, give her a written reprimand and have her apologize publicly and call it a day. I really don’t like the idea of targeting people and threatening them when you don’t agree with something they did or said. Social media is becoming trial by virtual mob.
@yucca10 If that’s the case, why didn’t the professors just go out and ask them to be quiet (easy to do with a non-verbal gesture) than to make another professor do their dirty work?
The outrage culture continues. Heaven forbid people on either side actually sit down and talk things over like adults. Much easier to engage in faux social media battles.
@jym626 It’s natural to assume they were asked and didn’t comply, or reversed back to their old ways after a while.
Ok. So the students may have been non compliant after requests, but the professor is being thrown under the bus. Agreed the email was poorly written, but if students are no complying with faculty requests/instructions, it should be addressed (albeit differently). These are grad students too, not freshmen. I would think it reasonable to hold them to a slightly higher standard. (And for the record, I don’t assume anything- just read the facts as they are presented. So don’t know if these students have been asked previously to hold down the volume. But your point is well taken).
I don’t think it is “natural to assume” the students conversing in the student lounge were asked to keep their voices down and chose to speak loudly. Based upon the email sent by Megan Neely, multiple anonymous professors had no problem complaining about students speaking Chinese. I don’t see any clear reason why those same professors would not have also complained about asking for volume reduction and not getting the request met.
For those complaining about excessive consequences for Ms. Neely, please remember that her email (the 2nd one she sent within the last year with anonymous professors complaining about students speaking Chinese) contained an explicit threat that the students whose privacy she did not protect as a school administrator (photos/names shared with the anonymous professors) would not be considered for work/study by those anonymous professors. Sending out an email with an explicit blackballing policy laid out for Chinese students speaking Chinese in a student lounge was unprofessional and incendiary. It was also super racist.