Math Professor Demonstrates Idiocy

[spork]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/21/us/phuc-bui-diem-nguyen-laney-college.html

[polly_mer]

I'm bemused by the idea that a math professor hasn't regularly encountered a wide variety of names including diminutives for Richard and William that are used in other ways.

[mamselle]

Right.

But then, they're males.

Different culture for them...

;--}

M.

[polly_mer]

Right.

But then, they're males.

Different culture for them...

;--}

M.

Even aside from that, math students and professors should be regularly encountering Asian names as they interact with the large foreign national contingent in physics and engineering.  It's weird to be that sheltered in math.

[spork]

Right.

But then, they're males.

Different culture for them...

;--}

M.

Even aside from that, math students and professors should be regularly encountering Asian names as they interact with the large foreign national contingent in physics and engineering.  It's weird to be that sheltered in math.

Especially at a 16,000-student community college in the Bay Area, location of one of the largest Vietnamese-American populations in the USA.

[mamselle]

Agreed.

In the 1970s, I first encountered large, diverse groups of people who worked together and respected each other in areas like agronomy, astronomy, math, computer science, etc. in university settings where getting the work done was the main idea, and the people who could get it done could look very different but were valued for their ability, not their conformity to some racial codes (although I know there were and still are many other issues).

That diversity probably existed even before I became aware of it (I wasn't in those circles so much previously) but I quickly realized, and very much enjoyed, the various people I met, the different foods, clothing, and interactive family practices they shared, and the fun of finding out how we were both different and alike in many ways.

I recall a few years ago, a [white, Anglo] friend who had also worked in such an environment, coming back from a new job interview, saying she didn't think she'd take the job if it were offered.

When asked why, she replied. "I'd be bored. They were all white people."

M.
   

[Wahoo Redux]

Is this part for real?

"If I lived in Vietnam and my name in your language sounded like Eat a [censored], I would change it to avoid embarrassment both on my part and on the part of the people who had to say it," the professor continued, using an English word referring to the male genitalia.

"I understand you are offended, but you need to understand your name is an offensive sound in my language.

"I repeat my request."

I found it in several places, including ABC news----I'm just profoundly shocked at the language and stupidity. 

[marshwiggle]

Does anybody other than me find it odd that the prof had to use the student's name that frequently? I rarely refer to students by name, and especially in a class with >100 students I wouldn't expect to remember them anyway. (And I can't recall many of my profs addressing students by name; especially if the class had over a handful of students.)

[RatGuy]

I couldn't find much on him, but his RMP goes back to 2013. I don't know how the CC system in California works, but my first instinct was "angry adjunct." I'm not sure that's the case though.

If the guy has been teaching as long as he apparently has, I can't imagine that this is his first outburst of this kind. I figure there's got to me more to this story.

[Parasaurolophus]

Shrug, it's not all that surprising. I belong to the largest national and linguistic minority in Canada, and the first half of my first name (which is what I go by) is not at all uncommon. All that's to say: people shouldn't have a hard time with it, they should have ample opportunity to become familiar with it as they grow up, but...


Nobody on the east coast has a hard time with it, regardless of whether they're Anglo, Franco, or Allo. Ontario is hit and miss. And west of Ontario... Now that I live on the west coast, nobody gets it right. They either misgender it, or Anglicize it. Or, worse, actually tell me that it's not my name, or that it's inappropriate for me to have that name. I have basically zero interactions with people here where I don't have to repeat it a few times and deal with their confused expressions.

I can report that it's pretty alienating. And that's not even getting into the shitty things people say because they assume I'm Anglo, or when they wrestle with my last name, which they routinely (incorrectly and ignorantly) racialize.

[Hegemony]

I think the moral is that if there's an opportunity to be clueless and offensive, people will take it. And half them will go on and take the opportunity to be clued-in and offensive.

I have a completely unextraordinary name, which is to say an ordinary name, and people have even tried to be vile about that. I mean a surname like, say, Baker. And people online will be all like "Yeah, you 're descended from some kind of peasant, what gives you the idea you have any idea what you're talking about??"  Like, it's an extreme stretch to get an insult out of my name, and yet people are trying as hard as they can. What they do with people they can actually aim an established bigotry at is probably unspeakable. Some people are just permanently aggrieved and enraged. I wish we could go back to the beginning of time and let a different creature evolve to take over, like maybe fruit bats.

[mamselle]

That brings one of my favorite children's books to mind....


    https://www.amazon.ca/Stellaluna-Janell-Cannon/dp/0152062874#reader_0152062874

There are days when I'd join in the vote for fruit bats as well....

M.

[Caracal]

Does anybody other than me find it odd that the prof had to use the student's name that frequently? I rarely refer to students by name, and especially in a class with >100 students I wouldn't expect to remember them anyway. (And I can't recall many of my profs addressing students by name; especially if the class had over a handful of students.)

Yeah, I'm pretty terrible at names, so as a result I'm more in the habit of nodding or pointing to a student with their hand up, even when I do know their name. I mostly only use names to point back to something someone said, or occasionally, when a student clearly has a thought but isn't raising their hand, to call on them.

Doesn't that just illustrate the point though? It isn't that this guy was trying to deal with being uncomfortable saying the name, it is that he thinks he has a right never to feel slightly uncomfortable. You could argue that if he commonly called on other students using their names and avoided doing it with this student, that would be wrong, but he wouldn't have gotten in trouble for it. What he really wants is for other people to present themselves in ways that make him feel totally comfortable.

[Puget]

What he really wants is for other people to present themselves in ways that make him feel totally comfortable.

This. I read a book a while back called "Covering: The hidden assault on our civil rights" by Kenji Yoshino, which is about exactly this-- how people in the majority culture often implicitly or explicitly demand that other people minimize their differences (i.e., it's OK to be X, just so long as you don't act too X around outsiders) so as not to discomfort them, and how that erodes the right to be your authentic self. This is a prime and particularly explicit example.

Given all the unhidden assaults on civil rights in the last four years, it can be easy to minimize, but I do think this is an insidious problem because even people who think they are being allies do this-- I'm sure I sometimes do it and I want to be more aware of it so I can stop.

[Juvenal]

The too-familiar story:

It's the usual heady brew: social insensitivity, ethnicity, insult, general umbrage, groveling, ostracism.

I see the digest for today's CHE has about four of these in one or another avatar discussed in separate articles/references.