UCLA Prof accused of racist “micro-aggression” for correcting student grammar
Grammar is bad and racist, right?
That’s the accusation by some students at UCLA who have accused a professor of creating a racially hostile environment through aggressive grammar corrections.
Seriously, it’s called “micro-aggression,” as David Thompson reports:
More crushing injustice on campus, this time at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies:
In a letter sent to colleagues in the department after the sit-in, [Professor] Rust said students in the demonstration described grammar and spelling corrections he made on their dissertation proposals as a form of “micro-aggression.” “I have attempted to be rather thorough on the papers and am particularly concerned that they do a good job with their bibliographies and citations, and these students apparently don’t feel that is appropriate,” Rust said in the letter.
You see, by highlighting spelling and punctuation errors, the professor is contributing to an “unsafe climate for students of colour.” For those of you interested in the policing of tiny tragedies, “micro-aggressions” are defined by one official report as,
Subtle verbal and nonverbal insults directed toward non-whites, often done automatically and unconsciously. They are layered insults based on one’s race, gender, class, sexuality, language, immigration status, phenotype, accent, or surname.
However,
It is not clear whether any workable definition of discriminatory conduct is capable of capturing every such microaggression.
The indefinite and unilateral nature of the term does raise one or two problems. As Ricochet’s Tim Groseclose notes,
I’m pretty sure that by writing this blog post I have engaged in a microaggression.
And by drawing further attention to this story and its comedic possibilities, it’s very likely that your mild-mannered host is also oppressing somebody, somewhere, in ways that aren’t quite clear. And don’t you get all high and mighty either. By reading this you’re almost certainly complicit too. I denounce your wickedness. Now report to the correction booth. Three hours, maximum setting.
Comments
And this is at a school of education?
Social engineers, hoist by their own petard.
GRADUATE school, no less. Yet still feel entitled to be treated as hurty-boo-boo toddlers.
May note, too, my own life experience with college “degrees” in “Education” not necessarily requiring most-rigorous course work. Or intellect.
(Excepting Cornell, naturally, if y’all offer such a graduate degree.)
Nothing new there. When I was in Uni (Studied under Plato, I did.) we had a saying, “You don’t apply to Teacher’s Collene. You sign up.”
Someone better tell Microsoft real quick.. I see a class action suit based on all the spelling and grammar corrections suggested on any Word document for “non-white” college students.
My daughter’s high school English teacher ran into this 20 years ago. She said she was not allowed to teach grammar, but had students begging her to teach them grammar after school.
Now it has moved to the college level.
I weep.
Perhaps Harry Lennox is available to teach the students how to act erudite and educated. (Worked for Prez Breezy)
(See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mITcRDr2Sk ) Cut to the chase at the7:00 min mark.
The black students are essentially arguing that they are not capable of using good grammar. They are arguing the inferiority of their own race. Incredible.
Dat’s da way it iz.