My University Treated Me Like a Criminal Over a Joke

Parent Cafe
101

@tonymom I was in Pakistan as a CIA operative, front line so the FBI didn’t have to deal with it on US soil. Profs can mouth off about what they don’t know. Sometimes, that makes the jokes even funnier. Ignorance is bliss. It wouldn’t have made my job harder.

@TheAtlantic I work in the operating room now. Inappropriate conversation runs deep. If people reported inappropriate conversations, only the patients would be left in the operating room and many of them would be gone too. It’s not that the conversations are always acceptable, you just quickly ignore conversations.

The assumption here is that people either believe that the professor is a bigot or it could be that he is cleverly poking fun at a political taboo that requires the listener to put that together. I don’t know we can say either way. But I get the sense that people don’t want him to say anything perceived to be offensive. Well, get your list out because the coddled are really sensitive.

102

Coddling does not matter. People should know that being gratuitously offensive is not necessarily helpful to themselves or others. And they should know that if they say racist things, people will judge them to be racist.

Then again, perhaps some people find that being gratuitously offensive or racist helps them find and fit in with a crowd that they want to be with. Since that crowd seems to be getting more mainstream now, perhaps they see a benefit for themselves there, even if increasing racism and hostility will increase conflicts that will diminish America’s greatness.

103

@ucbalumnus

I’ll rephrase to be more explicit: if everyone reported everything to HR that HR or management said was against company policy, HR would need to be triple its size just to process all the complaints, at least where I’ve worked.

104

But this did get the U’s attention. The U did chose to do something.

And not having resources to go after every situation doesn’t somehow make the offenses just fine, doesn’t turn an unnecessary “joke” into something desirable.

It’s a bit silly to insist, “But I thought it was funny.” Fine. But keep it to yourself or your own circles. Have that sense.

105

At the end of the day, he was being paid to teach a course.

In doing so, he repeatedly offended some of his students.

The university was well within their rights to choose to pay someone else, someone who would teach the same course without being offensive.

106

The joke is a red herring. He didn’t get fired over one joke; he got fired, it appears, for a pattern of behavior. And while I often think PC culture has gone too far, I’m a-OK with the idea that it isn’t acceptable to tell ethnic jokes in the workplace or classroom. That just seems like basic respect.

If this were the only issue, or if this professor had been tenure-track faculty, I might say that the response was disproportionate. This was an adjunct with repeated complaints over at least questionable comments. No sympathy here.

107

And shouldn’t we at a bare minimum expect professors to model a semblance of appropriate communication in a classroom? Singling out one culture and making disparaging jokes sets the wrong example on a college campus that should be an inclusive community. How did he think that joke would land with any Pakistani students that might be in the class? Clearly he didn’t really care – in my view that sets the wrong example.

This is behavior that encourages division which is the last thing we need any more of right now.

108

I work in corporate HR and guess what- we have found that we did NOT need to triple the number of people we have to handle all the complaints about inappropriate speech and behavior in the workplace.

One SVP was let go for repeatedly (and after counseling, interventions, diversity training) making comments about women’s physiques. A very high priced, talented corporate leader was fired for discussing his administrative assistant’s cup size.

Funny- we didn’t need to hire more people to handle the complaints. The other boorish and rude and obnoxious employees learned to keep their mouths shut while at work. They can be as obnoxious as they want when they get home at night, but they can’t do it in the office.

So the argument made by many here that it would be impossible to deal with “all” the inappropriate behaviors, comments etc.-- I don’t buy it.

If I ever had a surgeon make a clearly out of bounds comment to me as a patient— that’s a matter for the head of the hospital and the board, not to mention the state licensing board. And no- the hospital wouldn’t need to hire more people to deal with the complaints. One arrogant physician let go or put on leave or put on warning – that’s all it takes. The rank and file learns really quickly that way.

109

How can you know this? How can you know what percentage of boorish, rude, or obnoxious comments are never reported to HR?

110

Sue 22: If we are quoting the article, I found other parts relevant:

"Bertrand also said that a student last year complained to him about his Pakistani call center joke. That student was struggling with her mental health and considered his lighthearted treatment of the matter as an impediment to her education. In response, Bertrand advised the student not to let comments like that get to her.

“I told her I was in Afghanistan for 18 months, and people threw acid in the faces of little girls who were going to school. That’s an impediment to education,” Bertrand said.

(snip for brevity)

Another student currently in the class, junior Will Bryden, felt that Bertrand’s comments might offend some, but that Bertrand was not intentionally creating a hostile environment.

“He meant it simply as he did, which was to be humorous, and that’s understandable from my viewpoint,” Bryden said. “You’ve got to try to view things from the other person’s point of view and see how they meant it as well.”

Bryden said that sometimes students were responsible for creating the “hostile environment” in class.

“He was never aggressive with his viewpoint,” Bryden said. “He was aggressive in debating it and trying to defend it, but he wasn’t aggressive in his tone of voice or anything like that, while some of the students would get aggressive.”

The sensitive people on this thread would not have survived my tax law class. This guy’s is a teddy bear compared to that guy we had. We wore black clothing to blend in, so he wouldn’t call on us.

No, of course, this professor should be told to knock off the racist sort of comments, like that one about Chinese people looking alike. But no, this is not remotely an offense for which he could be fired.

An “impediment to her education” to hear an ill-advised joke? Give me a break.

111

My 9th grade HS foreign language teacher was so harsh with his students that a HS classmate who is now a tenured Prof at an elite university nearly dropped out and had serious anxiety attacks as a result and made 3/4 of our class cry at one point or another. I was one of the 1/4 who didn’t.

Thankfully, the now tenured Prof HS classmate had clued in parents who figured out what was going on and was advanced enough in the field that they forced the school to transfer him to a much more amenable and frankly better teacher.

Just because some students can withstand and sometimes even thrive in such an environment doesn’t mean that the students who couldn’t were “oversensitive” or that the teacher should have been kept on.

IMHO…such teachers/Profs with such attitudes/behavioral traits should be assessed and declared unfit to teach in the classroom.

It might be a different matter if we’re talking military basic training or officer training like what my father received during his university years in Taipei in the '50s…but that’s not the purpose of K-12 or most colleges…and most students didn’t sign up to be treated as the captive audience by teachers who have delusions of being star comedians or sadistic military drill instructors.

112

Hmm. Ill take the bait.
If it’s ok to tell a student, in effect, grow up, it could be worse (an acid attack being a truer hindrance to education,) where’s his similar perspective re: his own situation?

He could have been yanked out, brutally tortured, maimed or murdered, for teaching. If she was supposed to settle, why isn’t he?

Because…it’s all about poor him. His self absorption is about dishing it out, being able to do as he pleases. It’s about his power to impose on others, judge their concerns unworthy.

It doesn’t matter that he could find a few supporters, students. Of course now *he’s * all bent out of shape. Somebody slapped his “wittle hand.” Oh, poor me.

113

In short, a precious little snowflake,

114

This wasn’t one joke. It was a pattern of racist comments going over all 6 years of his employment there.

The only thing that should even remotely be a scandal in all of this is how long it went on unchecked

115

Let me make the point again: an adjunct not getting a contract for the next semester is NOT a person getting fired. It is merely normal adjunct life. And anyone who wants to keep the position and get the contract ought to know that, and ought to know what sort of behavior, semester after semester, is liable to lead to that non-tendered contract.

If he can’t understand that, I seriously question his judgment and critical thinking abilities.