Should it concern a college professor that the worst-performing students in her class each semester are black? If you said yes, you’re a racist and should check your privilege.
Students at Georgetown Law are calling for the firing of law professor Sandra Sellers after a video clip was posted online showing her in conversation with another faculty member.
“You know what, I hate to say this,” Sellers says in the video. “I end up having this, you know, angst every semester that a lot of my lower ones are blacks.” She goes on to say, “Happens almost every semester. And it’s like, oh come on, you know, you get some really good ones, but there are also usually some that are just plain at the bottom. It drives me crazy. I feel bad.”
The clip that was posted doesn’t show the full conversation between the two colleagues, but no matter.
The school’s Black Law Students Association said Sellers should lose her job.
“We demand nothing short of the immediate termination of Sandra Sellers as adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center,” the group said in a statement. “Not suspension. Not an investigation. The university must take swift and definitive action in the face of blatant and shameless racism.”
Sellers was concerned that the worst-performing students in her class happened to be black. For that, the little social justice monsters on campus say she should be fired.
It’s ghastly, it’s absurd, and it’s depressing that this happened. But it’s not original. As described in my book Privileged Victims: How America’s Culture Fascists Hijacked the Country and Elevated Its Worst People, this is routine at college campuses across the country. Adults charged with overseeing the growth, development, and betterment of our youth make the mistake of believing they can do that by confronting real problems, even if they wade into race, gender, or sexual identity in an attempt to be helpful rather than to condemn. They try, and they quickly learn that they don’t run things now. The students who profess to be oppressed, aggrieved, and victimized do, whether you like it or not.
In November 2015, private liberal arts school Claremont McKenna College saw the resignation of its dean of students, Mary Spellman, after she made the grave mistake of attempting to comfort a Hispanic student who had complained about not feeling included by the school.
After a Latina student wrote an op-ed in the school paper expressing discomfort about being a minority on a predominantly white campus, Spellman contacted the woman to say, “Would you be willing to talk with me sometime about these issues? They are important to me and the [dean of students] staff and we are working on how we can better serve students, especially those who don’t fit our CMC mold. I would love to talk with you more.”
Spellman had referred to a “CMC mold,” a concept she thought existed in the minds of minority students, but that was interpreted in bad faith as an assertion that there’s a specific type of person who belongs at the school.
Students protested and made demands. Less than a month after Spellman’s overture to the student, she was out.
Yale found itself in the same sewer in 2018 when childhood education professor Erika Christakis, who oversaw one of the residence halls, rebutted a campus-wide instruction to beware of insensitive Halloween costumes.
On the day before Halloween, Christakis sent an email to students in Silliman College, the residence she supervised. “I don’t wish to trivialize genuine concerns about cultural and personal representation, and other challenges to our lived experience in a plural community,” she wrote. (It was as though she were a real professor about to give a lesson on engaging new ideas to young people!) “I know that many decent people have proposed guidelines on Halloween costumes from a spirit of avoiding hurt and offense. I laud those goals, in theory, as most of us do. But in practice, I wonder if we should reflect more transparently, as a community, on the consequences of an institutional (which is to say: bureaucratic and administrative) exercise of implied control over college students.”
Christakis added in her email that “American universities were once a safe space not only for maturation but also for a certain regressive, or even transgressive, experience; increasingly, it seems, they have become places of censure and prohibition. And the censure and prohibition come from above, not from yourselves!”
Students of Silliman didn’t appreciate the note. They responded by demanding that Christakis and her husband, who also worked at the school, be removed from their positions.
Christakis resigned that December, though apparently not at the behest of the Yale administration. She simply no longer wanted to be there.
Who could blame her? Showing concern for students is no longer part of being an educator. According to the social justice monsters, It’s racist.
