A bizarre controversy has been unfolding the past few weeks at Iowa State University where a professor threw a student out of her class because he disagreed with her political views.
Student Jay Gardner, 38, took a graduate class on “Ethnicity, Class and the Media” from professor Tracy Owens-Patton. After a few weeks, Owens-Patton threw Gardner out of her class on the grounds that he was a white supremacist who was disrupting her course.
Among other things, Owens-Patton complained that in class Gardner defended racial profiling, pointing out that African Americans commit more crimes. Owens-Patton also said that Gardner criticized the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — a charge that Gardner denies.
Gardner told the Desmoines Register,
If you’re going to make claims that white America is intentionally suppressing, holding down, oppressing African-Americans . . . you have to let some students give their opinions on it, and that wasn’t happening.
Owens-Patton also complained that in a discussion Gardner said that he was biased against minorities, but Gardner told the Ames Tribune,
Patton asked if we had any problems with stereotyping and others, and I gave both pros and cons for stereotyping. I said that some probably use stereotyping as a quick way to communicate since people tend to think in schemas or generalizations.
When it comes to deciding who to believe, Owens-Patton did not help herself by apparently lying in her complaint about Gardner. In her complaint addressed to her superiors at ISU, Owens-Patton claimed that police told her that Gardner “could be a third person” in a new white supremacist movement at ISU.
The only problem is that the police officer she cited, Capt. Gene Deisinger, told the Des Moines Register that, “There are no police reports that I know of, nor any groups that have identified themselves as white supremacists at Iowa State.”
The best summation of this controversy came from ISU vice provost Howard Shapiro who told the Des Moines Register,
Whose right it is to determine what is taught in the class and how it’s conducted is the professors’. It’s not a democracy. It’s a classroom.
Apparently once students step into a classroom at ISU, they leave democracy behind and enter a mini-totalitarian state where the whims and dictates of morons like Owens-Patton have absolute authority to quash any dissent. So much for that vaunted ideal of academic freedom.
Source:
White student fights removal from ISU class Staci Hupp, DesMoines Register, May 22, 2002.
ISU grad student denies making ethnic comments. Jason Kristufek, Ames Tribune, June 4, 2002.
Ames police unaware of racist group. Staci Hupp, DesMoines Register, May 24, 2002.