Saturday, March 19, 2011

This Is How Universities Kill Their Reputations

I'm sure everybody has heard the name - or at least the inspiring story - of Dr. David Protess, a professor of journalism at Northwestern who started the Innocence Project and helped exonerate people who had been wrongly convicted and often even placed on death row for the crimes they'd never committed. Now Northwestern University where Protess works demonstrated that it has no respect even for scholars of his stature. As a result of some vague rumors of somebody's possible wrongdoing of some unknown kind, the university decided to prevent Protess from teaching his trademark course on investigative journalism:
A Northwestern University journalism professor whose investigations of wrongful convictions were cited when Illinois recently banned the death penalty has been sidelined amid allegations that some of his students may have violated the law.In a one-sentence e-mail, the university notified David Protess, the director of the Innocence Project, that he will not be teaching his investigative journalism class this spring. That course, which Protess created 12 years ago and has taught ever since, has resulted in the exoneration of 12 prisoners, including five on death row.
Good investigative journalists are hard to find as it is. Nobody wants to go to the trouble of conducting actual investigations. Why make the effort when you can simply sell uninformed, badly written opinion pieces on subjects you know nothing about? The majority of American print journalists do exactly that. So Northwestern decided to add to the pool of students who aren't getting educated on how to be good journalists by preventing Protess from teaching his class. 

It's scandalous that some nobody of an administrator has the gall of notifying a famous professor in a one-sentence e-mail that he will be prevented from teaching a course he wants to teach. While we are sitting here terrified of telling college administrators that their job is to shut up and do what we tell them, they become more convinced of their own importance with every passing day. For how much longer will we allow them to entertain the illusion that they matter? These ignorant, useless creatures need to be prevented from playing any role in the education process apart of making sure that we have enough paper in our printers.


P.S. Thank you, J., for sending me this link!

14 comments:

Rimi said...

I remember when a professor who taught Public Culure and Politics or Politics and Popular Culture was fired because a student took exception to his use of the term 'wetback' in class. The class was on the use of denigrating, racist epithets used by the white mainstream to stereotype/demonise racial minorities.

Another time a friend was informally told by a peer not to use the word 'négritude' in class (as in, the Négritude Movement) because it brought to mind the word Negro, which was the root of the racist colloquial term for black American people, and therefore was offensive. It takes a very special kind of mind to see the Négritude Movement as 'sounding offensive' to black men and women, but there you are.

Clarissa said...

How ridiculous! For the Négritude to be offensive. . . that's just insane.

One day we'll get to the point where we'll be afraid to say that the weather is nice because it might sound offensive to somebody.

NotaBene said...

If I remember correctly, the students were accused of paying for statements . . . the University, students newspapers, etc were very clear about the accusations at the time. Here is another scandal at NU, one that complicates the picture you draw here: http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/campus/class-sex-toy-demonstration-causes-controversy-1.2501746

Clarissa said...

Over 60% of students in my Hispanic Civilization class plagiarized their final essays. Should this mean that I'm to be prevented from teaching this class in the future?

Professors choose what courses they teach. Student misconduct - or pretty much anything else - has nothing to do with it.

Spanish prof said...

How do you guide them through choosing the topics for the essays? I used to have that problem, until I started giving them very narrowly defined topics and told me that if they wanted to write about something else, they had to get my approval first. I already told a student that no, she can't write about how Diego Rivera's murals represented the plight of indigenous people in Mexico, because that had already been said thousands of times.

Spanish prof said...

About doing or not doing things in class for fear of offending a student:

I did my PhD in the South. My first semester as a TA doing my PhD, I was of course teaching Beginning Spanish 1. I thought that a good way of practicing vocabulary was playing "hangman". After I did it for the first time, an African-American student approached me after class. He was very respectful, and told me: "I know that you don't mean anything bad with this. However, I just wanted to let you know that as an African-American in the South, this game has some unpleasant connotations to me. I'm sure you were not aware of it, but I would appreciate if we don't do it again".

I never played "hangman" again in a class.

Rimi said...

And it's fair to note, isn't it, Clarissa, that the university doesn't do much -- or anything at all -- to punish students to rampantly cheat?

Clarissa said...

"And it's fair to note, isn't it, Clarissa, that the university doesn't do much -- or anything at all -- to punish students to rampantly cheat"

-It's a very sore topic. Nobody wants to deal with it. Which is beyond annoying.

"no, she can't write about how Diego Rivera's murals represented the plight of indigenous people in Mexico, because that had already been said thousands of times"

-That's actually a lot better - in my opinion - than the perennial "Frida Kahlo couldn't have babies and her husband cheated on her so she channeled her energies into art."

The hangman story is disturbing. But thanks for the warning. Now I'll know not to play it. Are the crossword puzzles still OK? Or might the Muslim and the Jewish people get offended with the word "cross" that's contained in them?

Spanish prof said...

I've never had a problem with crossword puzzles so far. I'll let you know if I have.

"-That's actually a lot better - in my opinion - than the perennial 'Frida Kahlo couldn't have babies and her husband cheated on her so she channeled her energies into art'"

If somebody wants to do something like that, tell him/her that you expect a critical reflection on how her affair with Leon Trotsky influenced her art.

Clarissa said...

They just want to be able to use what they saw in the movie Frida instead of engaging with Kahlo's art.

This is the reason why I now don't allow any essays on Eva Peron. They keep retelling the movie. And I didn't even like the movie in the first place.

Spanish prof said...

Which movie? The Argentinean one, or Madonna's?

Clarissa said...

The Madonna one, of course. Imagine the quality of those essays.

Spanish prof said...

Ughhh.

Although it's far from perfect (and the actor playing Peron seems to be made of wood), try the Argentine one:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116238/

Or you can tell them that if they want to write about the movie, they have to make a comparison between both, and to offer some intelligent insights about their differences.

Clarissa said...

That sounds like a good idea!