A professor at the State University of New York (SUNY)-Cortland was reported after he told his class that race and gender relations had improved since the 1930s.
The professor, whose name has not been reported, had apparently began his first class of the semester by saying he was not “one of those America-is-evil academics,” according to a student who filed a complaint against the professor afterward.
The professor also allegedly said that younger generations need to understand that America has made progress since the 1930s, and that “we should be proud of how far we’ve come as a society relating to race and gender relations.” The professor apparently went on to say that when he was growing up, “women only aspired to mediocrity,” but that was not the case anymore and that things are better now.
A student taking the class took offense and reported the professor to SUNY-Cortland’s Bias Response Team, an avenue for students and staff to report each other over perceived insults. This particular complaint was uncovered by The College Fix, who received the documentation from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The names of those who were reported, and the complainants were redacted from the documents provided to the Fix.
The student who filed the complaint claimed that “This seemed incredibly tone-deaf, and completely unnecessary and unrelated to our syllabus.”
“It made me sick to my stomach because it was clear that people had tried to educate him, and he was firmly within his beliefs and ignorance,” the student added.
The Fix reported that the student also claimed “the professor had said that many people today blame outside sources such as discrimination for their problems instead of taking accountability for themselves.”
The report against the professor was not the only one discovered by the FOIA request. The Fix discovered about three dozen complaints in total that had been filed since January 2020 (just before the pandemic shut down many colleges in the U.S.), the outlet noted:
Other complaints included a professor who used the terms “redsk*n” and “Squ*w” when discussing Peter Pan, a student who yelled “shut up, I’m trying to sleep” at Black Lives Matter protesters, and a dorm resident who called her roommate a “Dyke-A-Saurus Rex.”
Many cases involved professors getting reported for what they said in class, the Fix reported, including the Peter Pan incident.
“While talking about Peter Pan, for class, because he is the professor, he really did say both ‘redsk*n’ and ‘Squ*w’ out loud,” the student complaint said. “While he was referencing the fact that the depiction of native people in that novel was stereotypical and offensive, he also literally said those out loud. They’re slurs used against indigenous people, he didn’t have to actually say them in order to explain the problematic depiction in the novel?”
SUNY-Cortland’s website explains that the bias reporting form allows students and faculty to report each other for perceived slights involving “(dis)ability, age, ethnicity, gender/sexism, gender identity/expression, nationality/immigration status, physical appearance, race, faith/non-faith, sexual orientation, and/or socio-economic status/class.”
“We at SUNY Cortland are committed to mitigating behavior and conditions that work against the richness of a diverse and inclusive community,” the website says. “Biased related incidents on the SUNY Cortland campus are of great concern for all members of the campus community. A biased related incident not only impacts people at an individual level, it negatively impacts our entire community.”