Adrienne Pine, an assistant professor of anthropology at American University (AU) in Washington, decided to bring her cold-stricken baby daughter, too sick for the daycare center, along with her to teach her opening class for the fall semester in “Sex, Gender, and Culture.” Some 40 undergraduates enrolled in the class watched on August 28 as Pine first lectured with the feverish infant girl, Lee, strapped to her back, then let her crawl around the classroom floor in her blue onesie. A student called out, “Professor, your son has a paperclip in his mouth.” Pine rushed to extract the clip “without correcting my students’ gendered assumptions,” as she later put it. Little Lee also crawled dangerously close to an electrical outlet but was rescued by her mother. A conversation ensued between Pine and her teaching assistant that resulted in the assistant’s rocking the increasingly fussy baby for a while. Finally Pine took hold of the baby and began to breastfeed her, all the while going on about the “origins and consequences of patriarchy” and “[h]ow economic systems, social structures, and values construct and redefine biological distinctions between women and men” (that’s from AU’s official course description of Pine’s class).
That bizarre spectacle wasn’t the end of it, however. As word of Pine’s conduct traversed the gossip grapevine on the AU campus, the student newspaper, the Eagle, dispatched a reporter, Heather Mongilio, to contact Pine, first by email and then in person after Pine’s next class. Incensed by Mongilio’s daring to quiz her about the incident, Pine on September 5 published a 3,800-word diatribe titled “Exposéing [sic] My Breasts on the Internet: The Dialectics of Breastfeeding on Campus” in the leftist online newsletter Counterpunch. The target of Pine’s polemic was the Eagle and its band of 18-22-year-old reporters and editors. Arguing that Mongilio had been “hounding” her, exacerbating the cold that she had meanwhile caught from her baby daughter, Pine decided that the Eagle was waging a GOP-style war on women against mammary glands, especially her own. “The naïveté of [Mongilio’s] questions was not promising, nor did there seem to [be] anything newsworthy in the story other than the thrill of joining together the words ‘university professor’ and ‘breast,'” Pine wrote. She complained that a female Eagle news editor had addressed her in an email as “Ms.” instead, of, say, “Dr.” or “Prof.” Pine quipped: “[A]pparently my breasts got in the way of her letter-writing.”
