I don't know if there is anything more ironic than white males objecting to being forced to confront the realities of their privileged position in society and in return getting the messenger disciplined for doing so.
According to Gibney in an interview with City College News, a white male student asked her, “Why do we have to talk about this in every class? Why do we have to talk about this?”
Gibney says another white male student followed the first, saying “Yeah, I don’t get this either. It’s like people are trying to say that white men are always the villains, the bad guys. Why do we have to say this?”
Um, maybe you have to keep learning it, until you have learned it?
The boys took their complaint to the Legal Department of the university, in response to which the professor was given a formal disciplining.
A faculty member at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, Shannon Gibney, received a formal reprimand for her handling of a discussion about structural racism in her Introduction to Mass Communication course.
She claims she was shocked, because “[h]is whole demeanor was very defensive. He was taking it personally. I tried to explain, of course, in a reasonable manner — as reasonable as I could given the fact that I was being interrupted and put on the spot in the middle of class — that this is unfortunately the context of 21st century America.”
The Vice President for Academic Affairs then appended a letter to Prof. Gibney's personnel records which contained the following?>
he found it “it troubling that the manner in which you led a discussion on the very important topic of of structural racism alienated two students who may have been most in need of learning about this subject.”
“While I believe it was your intention to discuss structural racism generally,” he continued, “it was inappropriate for you to single out white male students in class. Your actions in [targeting] select students based on their race and gender caused them embarrassment and created a hostile learning environment.”
Gibney told lawyers at an investigatory meeting for an anti-discrimination lawsuit she and six other professors are filling against MCTC that the vice president’s words “have helped those three white male students succeed in undermining my authority as one of the few remaining black female professors here.”
How dare she! She obviously has not learned her place!
Actually, I do know. There isn't anything more ironic.
11:27 AM PT: Apparently this is Gibney's second reprimand. A former editor of the school paper spoke up when he heard about this incident. He also filed a complaint against Gibney for speaking about racism in the college paper which lacked any editors of color. Here is the letter "Ryan" wrote to her and a quote from his complaint. He graduated with a Bachelor's degree in English.
I found the nature of your comments to be inflamitory, racist, and sexist--"its been white men." A statment such as this that implicates some hidden discrimination within our instituion in one blanket hatefull generalization is both unprofesstional and violates the mission statement of MCTC. I would ask you to stop such gross generalizations because they are indeed racist, sexist, and simply hatefull. It would be the same as standing up in class and stating that, "I hate all these black women because they always are irationaly screaming at other people."
"To public airing of my private correspondence with an educator opened the flood gates for me to be harassed and criticized by multiple individuals that became privy to the private email conversation," Ryan said in an email to City Pages.
1:12 PM PT: A lot of discussion in the comments about what we do know and missing facts, but what is being overlooked is the obvious: we know what the white students told the VP and he took their words at face value and put them into a reprimanding letter. There is no discussion whether she had an opportunity to give her side of the story, no apparent hearing, the two sides didn't meet, so one can infer that the students' version was accepted as truth. She has had to hire a lawyer to 'defend' herself (as someone put it in the comments). Taking their claims as the unquestioned truth without any investigation, is the height of white privilege. And how much do you want to bet what color the VP is?