Playing Cards

I've been teaching full time at the college level since 1970, and I've been accused of discrimination twice. In both cases, the students were angry about receiving a D in the class.

The first time was at Wayne State University, in a community outreach course, taught at the Canfield Center, about three miles away from the main campus, in a very depressed neighborhood. This one African-American student wrote poorly, but when I tried, in individual conferences, to explain what his mistakes were and how to correct them, he explained why he was right. After 45 minutes of increasingly frustrating conference, in which he was right and I was wrong, I had to move on--and these were not judgment call mistakes. He was genuinely a person who thought the writing style he had cultivated (apart from grammar and sentence mistakes) was remarkable and compelling. It was over-inflated, misused words, and often obscure. He consistently got Ds, but consistently refused to hear anything I said. At one point I had to tell him that if he was as good a writer as he considered himself, he would be teaching the course, not me.

At the end of the semester, I gave him a D, and he filed a discrimination complaint with the university ombudsman: I had given him the D because he was black. When I went in to the ombudsman's office, two other professors, from Humanities and Art History, were there--the same student had filed grievances against them. When they heard I had given him a D, they applauded me, admitting they had not had the nerve. The ombudsman had my roll sheets in his hand. Students had gotten the usual array of grades--a couple of As, some Bs, some Cs. The only question the ombudsman asked was, how many African-American students were in the class. I replied that the whole class was African American students, except for one. End of grievance. [The unfortunate aspect of this situation was that the student seemed to have consciously tried to develop a style; he employed some sophisticated vocabulary and had a kind of oracular, proclamatory tone. But what he meant was too often unintentionally obscure and ambiguous, and he did not have mechanics under control. If he hadn't been so obstinate, I could have taken a more helpful tack with him.]

The other incident involved a Muslim student who took my Bible as Literature course at Pasadena City College. About five weeks into the semester, I noticed that his attendance was spotty. He came to the office to explain that his father from Iran was visiting, and he was responsible to show him about. The student also filled in a bit of family history: the mother had brought the kids to America and the father could not understand why neither his kids nor his wife obeyed him any more. The ongoing conflict made life difficult for the son.

The student asked for some leniency on my part, and I said we could work out something equitable, and then, thinking that his attendance would improve, I hardly saw him again until the final. He had missed a good 75% of the class meetings, and had not submitted a major assignment. There was no way to make up the missed classes, and the college catalog stipulates that a student who misses more than two weeks of class, can be failed. I told the student he was going to get a D.

Then the arguing began. He insisted that if he took the final, he would get an A. I told him there was no point taking the final: he had been absent too much, and an assignment was missing. We went back and forth for a good twenty minutes. His strategy was to wear me down. I finally told him that he could take the final, but he would have to get his A in order to earn a C in the class. He went away, satisfied. My office mate was there during the whole haggling conversation.

The student took the final, failed it, got the D in the class, and filed a grievance against me for discriminating against him because he was Muslim. He added that I had identified him in class as a member of a terrorist organization (this was a lie--I don't believe I even knew what his religion was, and I certainly did not automatically equate Islam and terrorism), and claimed that I had given all the Christians in the class As (this was a lie--he could not possibly have known--not to mention laughable; my grade sheets told a different story). Finally, he claimed that I had promised to give him a C if he took the final. I called on my office mate to verify what I had actually said, and the grievance was dismissed.

There was a third case, though it did not consist of playing the race card in the same way as the previous incidents. This occurred at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, where I was teaching a freshman composition course. Art Center has many, many remarkable, intelligent students, but one Caucasian fellow took me to task for giving him a C on a paper. He was irked particularly because I had given As and Bs to several Asian students. "Are you telling me that those Asians write better than I do, when they can't even speak English?" I didn't know which papers by which students he was referring to, but there were certainly Asians who spoke and wrote fluently in the class. I just said, "It's the same eyes grading both, so I guess they must be better." I didn't get any more complaints. He had played a race card against his classmates, and it didn't work.