Professor Faces Termination Petition Over Falling Asleep During Asleep During Anti-Racism Meeting

Turley fans rejoice! @jiggyfly @Major

"New York Professor Faces Latest Termination Petition Over Allegedly Falling Asleep During Anti-Racism Meeting":

https://jonathanturley.org/2020/07/...ly-falling-asleep-during-anti-racism-meeting/

New York Professor Faces Latest Termination Petition Over Allegedly Falling Asleep During Anti-Racism Meeting



For many professors, a story out of New York may seem like an academic sequel to the 1982 horror film “Don’t Go To Sleep.” Students are seeking the termination of Marymount Manhattan Theater Arts Associate Professor Patricia Simon after she appeared to briefly fall asleep during an anti-racist meeting held on Zoom. Simon denies the allegations but Marymount Manhattan student Caitlin Gagnon started a petition which features this picture and also accuses her of “ignoring … racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.” The petition has roughly 2000 signatories. It is an ironic twist on the woke movement where literally not being awake is now cause to be terminated.Professor Simon insists that the picture was a false image due to her bifocals and how she changed her angle to rest her eyes:

It is certainly true to have such false light images. We previously discussed how President Barack Obama was unfairly accused of inappropriate conduct through such false light publications. Obama was accused of checking out a female staffer with the use of a single photo. However, the full record showed that Obama was moving his head to speak with another world leader at a photo op and that frame just caught him at a misleading angle as the staffer walked by.

However, even if true, why is a professor dozing off in a meeting now a matter for termination? Faculty meetings are a well-known cure for insomnia even when you care deeply about the subject. I have seen colleagues virtually cause self-concussions by sleep-induced head bobbing. Even Vice Presidents and United States senators have been accused of falling asleep in the middle of a meeting in the Oval Office. A senator appeared to fall asleep during the presidential impeachment. Indeed, during a judicial impeachment, I was the lead counsel arguing on the Senate floor. My family came to the floor to watch my closing argument and my youngest, Madie, fell asleep in my wife’s arms. A Capitol Police officer came over to say that “there is no sleeping on the Senate floor,” even an infant. My wife looked over at a Senator who had his feet up on a desk, head back with his mouth open, and snoring so loud you could barely hear my closing. The officer contemplated the scene for a second and responded “YOU can’t sleep on the Senate floor.”

The point is that Professor Simon denies the allegation but, even if true, the first response of these students is to seek yet another termination of a professor. It is an example of why many academics feel that they are living in an increasingly intolerant and hostile environment. Some faculty are afraid to speak on contemporary issues or even defend colleagues (or free speech) due to the ubiquitous petitions to fire faculty deemed insufficiently supported of Black Lives Matter or the protests. Simon is not being accused of racist statements but a failure to be sufficiently active in fighting racism. As is often the case, the petition lacks specific incidents that are now deemed unnecessary in this environment:

“This action has only capitalized on a pattern of negligence and disrespect that Patricia Simon has exhibited over and over again in her time as an Associate Professor, and Coordinator of the BFA Musical Theater Program. Professor Simon has a history of ignoring instances of racism in the form of racial profiling within the program, and enabling the racist and sizeist actions and words of the vocal coaches under her jurisdiction.”

She is accused of being “known to use her power to intimidate and bully the students in her program who have made efforts to advocate for themselves or for their fellow peers.” That is unrelated to the alleged dozing depravity caught on Zoom and virtually impossible to refute even the absence of any specific incident. Students later added that she is “fatphobic”and rejected her claim that “I listened with my ears and heart the entire meeting.”

I obviously come to this with the bias of a faculty member who is disturbed by what I see has the loss of tolerance and free speech on our campus. We have been discussing these stories of petitions for the terminations of faculty throughout the country. I can understand why students are upset at the image of what they view as a professor falling asleep at meeting dealing with racism. However, this comes off like a rule that you cannot be woke unless you are literally awake. It belittles rather than reenforces the importance of the underlying movement to bring attention to the problems of racism and reforms.

Academics cannot function in an environment where even dozing off in a meeting is evidence of racism. We should all engage in this national debate while retaining a modicum of fairness and toleration. This includes not assuming that a statement is motivated by racism or an image (like this one) reflects some deep-seated hostility to reforms. This could be a case of sleep deprivation or a case of sleep depravation (or not, as claimed, sleep at all). It seems like the only response for many is compliance or termination to demands. I recently reported good news that one such controversy at Creighton did not result in a demand for termination after a professor called supporting police evidence of white supremacy. Conservative students did not start with a petition for his termination. Yet, it is not clear if the university and other students would have taken such an approach if the content of his criticism was directed at protesters rather than police.

There is an alternative for these students then a petition for termination. You can ask for an apology or explanation. On these other issues, you can raise specific complaints against the professor with the Administration. These avenues allow for due process for all parties.


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every day is like having been to a university:

"Had a dispute with Father about the use of my making this sugar when I knew it could be done and might have bought sugar cheaper at Holden’s. He said it took me from my studies. I said I made it my study; I felt as if I had been to a university."
Thoreau's Journal: 21-Mar-1856

http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/2014/03/dispute-with-father-thoreaus-journal-21.html

 

related:

"‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?":

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html

This is a lengthy article about Robin DiAngelo's book in The New York Times Magazine--too long to quote in its entirety. But here is an excerpt:

During a training in January 2019 run by Amante-Jackson, which Chislett recorded, Amante-Jackson sounded notes that were anti-intellectual by mainstream standards, declaring that “this culture says you have to be most expert; you have to be perfect; it has to be said perfectly.” She continued, “The more degrees you have, the more expert you are. I think back — the most brilliant people in my life don’t even have diplomas from middle school. But we have been taught that you can only value people when they’ve got letters behind their name. All of that is coming from the water” — the water of white supremacy. “Eighty-eight percent of the entire world are people of color,” she claimed earlier in the session, “but 96 percent of the world’s historical content is white.” She went on to present “some characteristics of whiteness,” prominent among them “an obsession with the written word. If it’s not written down, it doesn’t exist.”

According to Chislett, during a June 2018 Courageous Conversation workshop that she attended, Ruby Ababio-Fernandez, a designated co-facilitator, who is also a D.O.E. official, proclaimed, “There is white toxicity in the air, and we all breathe it in.” The trainees were instructed to work with their tablemates, list qualities of white culture on a sheet of poster-size paper and hang their paper on the wall for everyone to read. Chislett felt she knew well by then the sorts of things they were meant to be writing, values that were critiqued at previous sessions: “individualism,” “Protestant work ethic,” “worship of data,” “worship of the written word,” “perfectionism,” “ideology of whiteness,” “denial.”

She told her group that she wasn’t going to take part; this derailed the table’s effort, and they wound up displaying an almost-empty sheet of paper. A young, white assistant principal at the table started to cry, Chislett recounted, and announced to the room, “I don’t want to be affiliated with this poster.” Chislett told everyone that she took responsibility for the barren sheet of paper. A Black principal at another table called out to her, “I feel you’re a horrible person.” Many of these details are outlined in Chislett’s lawsuit. A Chislett colleague and critic who was at this workshop confirmed most of Chislett’s account but contested the use of the word “toxicity.” The colleague noted that the Black principal was “extremely triggered” but didn’t remember exactly what the principal said. Ababio-Fernandez also confirmed the tenor of the session but disputed Chislett’s recollection of specific language.

Chislett eventually wound up demoted from the leadership of A.P. for All, and her suit argues that the trainings created a workplace filled with antiwhite distrust and discrimination. Some of her distress about the workshops is keenly personal, and if you listen to her complain about being “stereotyped” as a white product of a supremacist society, it’s possible to hear her as DiAngelo surely would: as fixating on her wounds to evade self-reflection.

When I spoke with several members of her former team, they praised the workshops. Courtney Winkfield, a white colleague and sometime facilitator, talked about her own “dysconsciousness,” a term antiracist educators use in discussing mind-sets that preserve oppression. She said that the trainings “gave me the opportunity to unpack my own socialization as a white person — socialization that has been really subversively hidden from me.” And there were plenty of lancing words about Chislett’s leadership. “It was her way or the highway,” Deonca Renée, a Black team member, said of Chislett’s peremptory style, claiming that Chislett favored white colleagues.

Yet whatever the merits of Chislett’s lawsuit and the counteraccusations against her, she is also concerned about something larger. “It’s absurd,” she said about much of the training she’s been through. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees, and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values? How do all these people not see how inconsistent this is?”

This apparent inconsistency, which seemed to lurk within all the workshops I attended, might feel peripheral in a moment dominated by video of a white police officer’s knee jammed fatally against the neck of a Black man for more than eight minutes, but the implications may be profound and even crippling. I talked with DiAngelo, Singleton, Amante-Jackson and Kendi about the possible problem. If the aim is to dismantle white supremacy, to redistribute power and influence, I asked them in various forms, do the messages of today’s antiracism training risk undermining the goal by depicting an overwhelmingly rigged society in which white people control nearly all the outcomes, by inculcating the idea that the traditional skills needed to succeed in school and in the upper levels of the workplace are somehow inherently white, by spreading the notion that teachers shouldn’t expect traditional skills as much from their Black students, by unwittingly teaching white people that Black people require allowances, warrant extraordinary empathy and can’t really shape their own destinies?
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more at the link

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