Seeing the individual

This is the first embargoed post during break. (Standard  note: any comments will be approved and posted AFTER I return)

There's been a lot of discussion various places about an African-American professor at Boston University who made a declaration about "white masculinity" being a problem at colleges in the US.

Now, this has been discussed to death like everything else like it. And I'm not going to speak to the race angle, because my experience is different and there may be things I'm not seeing. I'm also not going to speak to the academic-freedom aspect of it: some people have argued that the comments fall within the realm of academic freedom

But I will note that to me, it seems perhaps ill-informed to make sweeping statements about an entire group of people, under your own name, on social media or anywhere. (Social media just lets people be awkward to a bigger audience. I knew people when I was growing up who made some shockingly racist or prejudiced-against-various-other-groups comments but the circle of people who found out about their belief was fairly small)

Granted, lots of people (probably everyone) holds prejudices*. And some teachers (or college faculty) are known for theirs - I had several times in my life where people warned me, "Oh, that professor is SO SEXIST" and my response was along the lines of "well, I guess I'll have to work harder in his class then"

(*I have to work hard against some bad experiences I had early in my teaching career with self-identified "sports stars" in my classes. Not all athletes are poor students who are rude to the professor, but when someone comes on the first day and tells me they're important to whatever team they're on, I'm on my guard. Because I had a couple of students who told me just how "important" they were and then proceeded to goof off in class and then demand special treatment because they were special because they were sports stars.)

And yeah. If a prof constantly made nasty remarks about a group I was clearly a part of, I'd be put off and think it was extremely poor manners.  Well, it's also poor manners to make derisive remarks about any group, whether or not members are clearly present, for that matter. If there were another section I could transfer to, I would. I'd warn other potential students. I'd comment on the evaluations. But the thing is: most people in a department know the weaknesses of their colleagues. For contingent faculty, some weaknesses are easily enough to fail to renew a contract (We had that happen once). For tenure-line faculty, it's a little harder to terminate someone for things like being difficult to the students or "non collegial." In a way, that's how it should be. But in another, I tend to feel someone who is regularly verbally abusive to students should find another line of work. (And yeah, I've seen it, once or twice. Not on this campus but on places where I attended. And by "abusive" I don't mean someone who is blunt or who tells students to straighten up and fly right; I mean someone who really was nasty and unpleasant to the point where students would not go to their office hours for help)


When I criticize, I try to criticize individuals' behaviors. When I complain about plagiarists, their gender or complexion or religious affiliation or whatever doesn't matter - they broke one of the rules on campus, one of the big ones, they did something wrong. It has nothing to do with what group or groups they identify with.

Another thing I've learned: if you get to know the person, in some cases, the stuff you see as "problems," you see it more as vulnerabilities or weaknesses the person has. Instead of seeing it as something done to harm YOU, you see it as something the person struggles with.

A case study: I had a student one semester who was always in my office. Always stopping by to ask stuff. This student - let's call him Marlin, not his actual name nor is male necessarily his gender - was always wanting to know what his grade was at that point. He asked me multiple times the guidelines for the projects in class, even though I had handed them out and gone over them.

Marlin was also absent a lot. This annoyed me because here was this guy coming asking for extra help when he didn't seem to be able to be in class. I labeled Marlin in my mind as my "problem person" for the semester.

Until one day. Marlin came in with one of his periodic concerns about his grade, and how could he do better on the exams, and so on, and so forth. And in the course of discussion he mentioned that a very close family member had been in the hospital (he never stated for what but I assumed it was something like cancer) and he had hoped this family member would be able to "see" him graduate, and now it looked unlikely (Marlin was a senior that semester). And suddenly, he was doing that thing some people do, where he was crying a little but trying really hard to make off like he was not.

And then I saw him differently. Here was someone who was carrying this heavy load of a chronically ill family member, who was absent a lot because he was seeing the person in the hospital (that was later confirmed). I also realized as the semester went on a little more that Marlin had some anxiety issues. And then, I saw what he was doing not as "He's pestering me and bugging me to wear me down so I give him a better grade" but as "he's really nervous about doing well in this class and coming to my office every week is one way he can relieve his own anxiety." Again, it comes down to seeing the person, seeing them as someone with fears and hopes and dreams and not someone put there to thwart your own happiness.

Maybe that's harder at a big school where you have classes so large you never really learn all your students' names. Maybe it's harder when you're part of a group that has historically been oppressed and so lots of things make you suspicious people are biased against you. Maybe it's harder when you have had a harder time in life than I did. But I find when I look as students as individuals rather than as part of some homogenous group, it's easier for me to write off the behaviors that bother me and instead to see the person as someone I can maybe help somehow.

A lot of times I sort of throw up my hands here (or on Twitter, or on Ravelry) and declare that I "hate people." That's not really true. To stay in teaching you do, on some level, have to love people and want to help them. When I say I "hate people," that's shorthand for "People behave in ways that are counterproductive and depressing to me and I become really frustrated with them and am tired of dealing with all the nonsense that people put out."