Hilarious and clever joke. Jokes are funny because they poke fun at taboos or place unrelated items into unimaginable situations. Jokes are why so many comedians like Lisa Lampanelli can say some of the cruelest things and everyone know she is kidding. I’m disappointed that the students and Johns Hopkins jumped to that conclusion. If they only knew the jokes we told in their own operating rooms. The school is more concerned with appeasing future donors than the teachers who made the school great.
@frugaldoctor
The students in his class didn’t pay to see a comedy show! Inappropriate. As I’ve said if he wants a career as a comedian then he should take his routine on the road. Nobody is arguing edgy jokes can’t be put out there. We are arguing that the classroom is not appropriate for a variety of reasons.
It’s also self-consumed not to know the difference…that the classroom isn’t the place to indulge in your own amusement just because you think it’s clever and others be danged.
Assuming there are peers/mentors who don’t feel he blew it so badly on the professional front…especially considering the pattern of multiple student complaints that their mentoring/advising time is better spent on more promising colleagues/younger mentees.
One major difference. The audience comedians have the choice to attend, boo*, or even leave the comedy venue without fears of having their grades docked or having university sanctions levied against them for “disrespect”/non-attendance as would be the case with students and Prof.
Especially considering the students are effectively a captive audience if they must take his class to fulfill a requirement and/or he didn’t reveal his penchant for making jokes targeting certain racial/ethnic groups until the add/drop period had already passed.
Very different types of relationships…especially the power/hierarchy dynamic.
- Not too long ago, some lower-end venues....especially open-mic types tolerated or even encouraged patrons to go beyond booing to express disapproval for bad performances/jokes.....such as tossing rotton vegetables or sometimes even beer bottles.
@tonymom I am sure he didn’t do monologues of comedy every lecture. This joke is WAY overblown. So, do you really think lectures are being presented at our universities with no jokes, with no off topic discussions, and without difficult political topics? I think the problem here are kids that have been coddled and finally heard something with threatening keywords. They ran to mommy and administration to protect them. Same kids getting plastered at the bar, assaulting other students, and believing in stereotypes themselves. I live in a state where a man drove a truck and killed 168 people, I take terrorism seriously. I’ve spent several weeks in Peshawar, Pakistan back in the 90s working for our country. By the way, they aren’t kids. They are adult. But is this appropriate humor for the classroom among adults, absolutely! These adults need to get over it. It would be a different situation if he just stated as a fact that Pakistanis were terrorists.
Sorry @frugaldoctor still not appropriate venue. I work in education and there are strict limitations to what you can say…for a good reason. No coddling going on just plain old do you job and keep your strange humor for your friends and family.
As to terrorists…I have a cousin who has spent many years deep in countries where terrorism is an issue. He’s FBI. He doesn’t need idiot profs mouthing off about stuff they don’t know making his job more difficult because erroneous sterotypes are out there. There are people who deal with this and this prof is not one of them. He wasn’t aiming to enlighten or educate with his sad joke. Assuming he thought he’d come off “cool” to his students but the opposite occurred.
The bottom line is you don’t get to use your workplace as your comedy club. Be professional. Do the job you are paid to do!
I’d assume your workplaces encourage you to report employees engaging in sexual harassment, racist comments, offensive jokes, and the like to HR or some authority.
I’m not sure why kids my age are considered “coddled” or “snowflakes” for not tolerating this behavior, when I’d assume most workplaces wouldn’t tolerate it either.
Maybe instead of saying “back in my day people weren’t so easily offended” recognize that back in your day people weren’t able to freely voice when they were offended.
The reason why people stopped saying “that’s gay” at things they didn’t like, or calling people they think are dumb the “r word” is not because people became softer, it’s because people became bold enough to stop tolerating nonsense.
This isn’t to say that oversensitivity doesn’t exist, but just that people shouldn’t be dismissive when someone complains about a statement.
I had a prof who, after the first few weeks, managed to bring up sex in every lecture. Wanton, drug encouraged sex. It was some era of French lit. Not interesting and not relevant. Memorable? I guess so, since I remember his behavior (tho not what I learned.)
It’s not whether you think, privately or anonymously, that there’s some humor in there. We all have times or issues where we might titter with friends.
But it IS about having the sense to have a filter, knowing when the front of the classroom isn’t your private stage. Knowing when and how to resist. When to stifle it.
My prof lost his job and the next two. And more.
Filters, folks.
And how DO YOU know that?
Some have made the same assumption about a former supervisor and older friend’s account about an electrical engineering Prof who spent nearly the entire year discussing his political campaign for mayor in some upstate town.
Unfortunately, from my friend’s account, things were so bad the entire class literally had to sit in on other EE sections or self-teach themselves the entire material.
Also, the chairperson of the EE department was aware of this problem…but unlike the adjunct…my friend’s EE prof was a fully tenured Prof who was once a great professional Prof who in the last decade before my friend had him found talking about his political campaign for local office much more interesting than covering EE.
Depending on when “back in my day” was…
20 years ago, bigotry against some groups was minimal, compared to mainstream now. Less bigotry meant that fewer people were offended.
30 years ago, it was considered a bad thing to be racist in polite society, so racist jokes were less common, so fewer people were offended by them (PC police calling everything racist notwithstanding). A politician who was rejected for an appointed job back then for being too racist then can be confirmed today, for example. Making a textbook definition of a racist comment is now not enough to prevent a prominent politician from endorsing the maker of the comment, showing how racism has returned to the mainstream.
60 years ago, racism was mainstream enough in many places so that anyone who dared complain about anything racist was probably chased out of town even before sundown by local police who did not even pretend to protect and serve anyone but white people.
What you’re really speaking about is the level of acceptability in publicly expressing one’s bigotry…and even that varied greatly depending on region/areas.
For instance, several racial/ethnic minorities in southern and parts of the rural midwest and even NE states(i.e. upstate NY) recounted experiencing racist epithets being routinely expressed while growing up in the '70s, 80’s, and '90s.
Heck, I’ve experienced racist bullying…including violent assaults as an elementary school child and again in middle school in the '80s and early '90s in NYC…both in the formerly rough parts and on the UES aided and abetted by public school admins because they felt the racist bullies(including one outright neo-nazi) were “misunderstood:”.
I also witnessed the town locals in a White majority rural NE Ohio region openly stare at and even utter racist remarks about interracial dating couples from my undergrad and experienced locals hurling racist epithets towards yours truly while driving by and in one case…an obnoxious local townie telling me to speak English when I was happening to speak Mandarin with some international students near the town square.
All of this took place in the mid-late '90s. It’s a reason why I and several other classmates from the urban NE or urban west coast felt we’ve time-travelled back several decades.
@ucbalumnus I think your definition of bigotry assumes blatant and unapologetic displays/actions. I also don’t know where you get the idea said bigotry was “minimal”, but I don’t think that’s a good debate to have…
The fact that bigotry has been brought to the “forefront” due to the current state of affairs, doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening or existing before, it means certain people weren’t aware of it before.
SNL did a great skit on this last season where Dave Chapelle laughed while white people commented on how racist and messed up America is post-election.
Certain groups (the groups that actually have experienced and seen this bigotry firsthand all their lives) know it isn’t a recent phenomenon.
The idea that “racism (or homophobia or anything similar) wasn’t a big deal before [insert President 44 for the right or 45 for the left]” is generally said by people on both sides of the political spectrum that falsely believed that we live in a post-racial (or post-homophobic or anything similar) world.
Just because certain people are more emboldened now, does not erase the bigotry of the past (that either existed by law or by public action). Even as specific incidents of racism draw widespread attention, there is also a widespread number of people now disavowing and speaking out against these incidents. It cuts both ways.
I wrote that for some groups that the bigotry went from minimal to mainstream. Of course, that does not mean that it was minimal for all groups back then, since it obviously was not.
However, it is hard to dispute that racism, whether open or covert, is greater now than before, and has official backing now, rather than bipartisan nominal disapproval (not necessarily effective, of course) in the past. The more obvious opposition exists mainly because there is more to oppose.
Call me stupid, but it took several posts down before I got the joke. Probably bc Pakistanis are not actually terrorists.
PS: the joke would make more logical sense if he had called a job counselor?
@ucbalumnus so when you make the claim “less bigotry meant that fewer people were offended”, are you saying that there was less bigotry 20 years ago in general, or less bigotry 20 years ago for certain groups. If your argument is just that in the past 20 years? different groups have become larger targets of bigotry while other groups have become smaller targets, that makes sense, but isn’t really responsive since I was speaking more on bigotry in the general sense.
Honestly, I don’t think that argument is necessarily hard to disprove, and I think racism has always had official backing, this also possibly depends on when you’re defining “before” as.
Reread carefully. It was for specific groups.
Of course, an “in general” statement is a lot harder to make without lots of exceptions and regional variations.
I reread it several times before asking the question to begin with. I asked because it would seem odd to point out “but for certain groups bigotry increased” when I was discussing bigotry writ large. It isn’t really responsive to the original claim I was making. The rest of your post discussing the other time periods also read as a very general statement so I was confused… 
You also proceeded to make the general statement that “racism is greater now than before”, so I wasn’t really sure if that argument went hand-in-hand with your earlier one.
“30 years ago, it was considered a bad thing to be racist in polite society, so racist jokes were less common, so fewer people were offended by them…”
The definition of “polite society” depends or depended on where you were. It’s a big country. Some may have lived in bubbles where they heard less of this, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. Even in liberal areas.
This is a case where maybe you should have specified the groups you meant. And where.
No one can really blame those who take the brunt of this for being offended. That’s a form of shooting the messenger. Or, “I’m not offended, what’s wrong with you?” Sometimes, a little sensitivity is s good thing.
HR has such policies, yes, but how they work in practice is a different matter. If anything that could potentially create a hostile work environment was reported to HR, HR would be a lot busier than they are. Nor is it an issue that exists with just one subset of employees. Some of the people I’ve heard curse the most or make the most sexually suggestive comments in the workplace are women.
Perhaps in a workplace of boorish bullies, but not every workplace is like that. Also, it can matter whether something actually creates a hostile environment.
(Yes, women can be guilty of inappropriate workplace behavior. Why would you find that surprising?)