The day after Barack Obama was sworn in as our 44th President, I got an email from the chair of my department and the Associate Provost telling me that a student's parent called the school complaining that several of his daughter's classes were canceled and he assumed this to be case because it was Inauguration Day.
The Associate Provost wanted me to know that "this is not an acceptable reason" for canceling class.
There is only one problem.
I didn't cancel class on Inauguration Day. But undoubtedly it was "assumed" that I did because I am African American.
I, along with 2 other instructors/professors in my department, were accused by a student and their parent of canceling classes. None of us had. I am currently trying to figure out if the two other accused are faculty of color.
At first I thought the accusation came from the fact that the class meeting place was changed after the first day. But the class met on the Thursday BEFORE Inauguration Day and that was one day AFTER our first class; so two class sessions would have had to have been missed by the student...and, when I looked on my attendance sheet, only one student was absent for two days in a row...a male student, and the disciplining email I received said the complaining student was female. This means the student WAS IN CLASS but still accused me of not holding it.
I have no idea who the student is or why she would make such a baseless accusation, except that she wants to punish me for being African American. It is hard not the read the entire incident as black president backlash. But the fact that she willingly signed up to take an African American literature class boggles the mind...
Furthermore, if I HAD canceled class for Inauguration, I'd have every right to especially since the class is a contemporary African American writing class, and the inauguration was filled with "texts" we could analyze, from Lowry's speech to Elizabeth Alexander's poem.
I have asked my chair for an accounting of what happened here as well as revelation about who the student is, as well as what other faculty members were accused of canceling class. If we were all faculty of color, this is clearly discrimination and the student needs to be punished.
I am angry with the administration of my university for immediately issuing a disciplinary response to the faculty without verifying the student's story and for now protecting the student. I am not going to let the matter drop, but I am going to get the bottom of what happened here and if this was indeed something of a race-motivated "prank," I will work to see the student be held accountable for his or her actions.
A colleague of mine (at another university) suggested that perhaps the students was skipping a class and her parent called when she was supposed to be in class...hoping to cover her own hide, she then said, "Oh Dad! There's no class today because it's Inauguration Day!" And her father, angry about this, then called the school (perhaps to the student's horror). But if THAT is the case, we deserve to know this as well so that we do not feel (or fear) that we are working in a truly hostile environment.
Updated--A little more
A lively debate in the comments has ensued. Many of you feel that all of the fault lies with the administration and that the student is just doing a "prank" and that as a teacher, I have all the power, and should essentially scold the administration and ignore the student.
I disagree with this. While it is true that teachers have a lot of power, power is not always and only unidirectional (as Foucault so wonderfully illustrates) and the fact is--I am a black woman teaching at a predominately white midwestern university. The administration behaves in a repugnant way because they fear censure by the parents who pay tuition. In my response to the initial disciplining, I did indicate to the Associate Provost that I thought they had handled it the wrong way and I suggested that they handle such matters differently next time.
There has also been the suggestion that I am on some vendetta to "punish" the student. Some of the vitriolic response below make it sound like I'd suggested waterboarding the accusing student. If it seemed that this is what I meant, I apologize. This is NOT what I meant.
For 8 years of working at this school I have endured all kinds of racism, from students and colleagues, and administrators. Most of the time you can do absolutely nothing about it. This may also be one of those times. What I want is two things: 1) I want to know what really happened. Did the student make the accusation out of an attempt to cover her own butt (b/c she was skipping class or whatever), did she do it as a prank? Did she do it because she is resentful of faculty of color? Why? I think wanting to get to the bottom of this in that way is not unreasonable.
Second of all, in terms of holding her accountable, I would like for her to sit down with someone--it doesn't have to be me--and have a talk about the damage these accusations do. Even if it was not racially motivated, she needs to understand how injurious it is to cast racial aspersions on minorities. Susan Smith's accusation of a black man was not racially motivated; she did it to cover her own crime, but race played into it anyway. And that is the case here as well. Even if the other two accused faculty members are white (which increasingly I doubt), there is still a racial element here since her citation of the Inauguration of the first black president of the US as the reasons her classes suppossedly didn't meet involves its own kind of race baiting.
I do not want her expelled. I do not want her branded with a scarlet letter. I simply want her to understand what she has done and the consequences of it. I don't have to be the one to do it. Someone else can do it, a third party. But nothing can convince me that she shouldn't have some sense of why she should not do such things.