After being suspended for jokes she made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students a month ago, Gloria Y. Gadsden has been reinstated to her job at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania. The associate professor of sociology returned to work on Wednesday after being cleared by a psychologist.
Ms. Gadsden was placed on paid administrative leave after a student complained about two comments she had made on her Facebook page: “Had a good day today, didn’t want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story …” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic] hitman, it’s been that kind of day.”
Though Ms. Gadsden said her co-workers have been either welcoming or distant, a few of her students have been blatantly opposed to her return. She said on her first day back, three of her students “stormed out” of class, complained to the department chair and administrators, and called the media. After that, campus police officers were posted outside her classroom.
The provost of East Stroudsburg did not respond to a request for comment and referred The Chronicle to the university’s public-relations office. A university spokesperson would not comment because the issue was a personnel matter.
Ms. Gadsden still holds that the “radically extreme response” to her Facebook posts was a result of a racial-harassment complaint she filed the month before her suspension, and of an essay she wrote for The Chronicle Review in 2008 that described some of the challenges black faculty members face.
The Facebook comments, Ms. Gadsden said, were intended only for family and friends. She said that she wishes she had never started an account, and that she got legal advice not to take it down at this point.
“I wish the administration had looked at the bigger picture,” she said. “It was a bad joke, but it was a joke.”
11 Responses to East Stroudsburg U. Professor Returns After Suspension for Facebook Posts
mensslin - April 2, 2010 at 4:41 pm
I’m not sure if they are raising the bar here… or lowering it.
kymac - April 2, 2010 at 6:15 pm
Fantastic. A prof. makes a joke on FB and she’s suspended. A student threatens, on campus, to slit my throat and shows people the knife, and there was absolutely no action taken and the admin says I need to relax.I am terrified this generation of students will be running the world one day.
cordelia - April 2, 2010 at 6:26 pm
And the administration wants to know why I am resisting using Facebook for my courses?
jhadams - April 2, 2010 at 6:27 pm
Humor doesn’t travel well, it seems. Too bad. It makes us an increasingly uptight society, with every increasing distance enforced between people.
blesstayo - April 2, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Let me tell you the truth, “black or white, all snakes still bite!!!” There are hostile vigilante professors and students at majority universities. They are white people and people of color. I can write a best-seller book about the new crazy world of academic institutions. On one hand, I see serious academic institutions video-taping their dedicated professors and disseminating their creative lectures world-wide; on the other side, I see whining “so called-teaching institutions” complaining and busy combating “racism, etc.” Wake up American Academic institutions!!! We need to run the mediocre institutions out of business by adopting the effective teaching and learning models at the “Research and Teaching Institutions!”I am presently working on my new agenda for the “so-called teaching institutions.” Stay tunned.
mrmars - April 3, 2010 at 3:36 am
The students who stormed out of the room should be offered the opportunity to transfer to a drama class where they could put their attitudes and histrionics to better use. I teach at another school in the same system as Ms. Gadsden, so it seems reasonable to assume our situations aren’t all that different. Over the years, student opinions and evaluations of faculty have taken on a much greater significance. In a setting such as this, where the inmates all but run the asylum – at least in regard to the power they’ve been given where junior faculty are concerned – its little wonder that some feel empowered to overreact at the slightest provocation.
chroniclebarnacle - April 3, 2010 at 8:21 pm
In general, we have become an overly sensitive society. I mean EVERYONE is “offended” at something. Race issues, sexual orientation, relegion, wherewill it stop????? Yes we have a ways to go in developing equity- I see that. But a handfull of folks get bent on something that someone says and then there is new legislation!!!!! BTW, if you assume a radical position on an issue, you might expect some flak- deal with it and don’t complain. What did you expect to happen?
drschoolpsych - April 4, 2010 at 9:35 am
Interestingly, students in our program can post similar types of comments on their Facebook accounts and no one even blinks. And for future protection, Ms. Gadsden should set her privacy settings so only her family and specifically selected friends can view her status and wall posts. Don’t make them publicly available, and if she has students as “friends”, make sure to have them on a special, restricted list so they can’t see much of anything. The only way to protect oneself is to be proactive, even though expecting the same of students is apparently silly.
rightwingprofessor - April 5, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Just reading the description of her posts they are obviously just jokes, what an overreaction!
prwiggins - April 5, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Since when did it ever become a joke to hint at killing someone or hiring a hit man? Very poor taste for an “educated professor.”Chronicle Reader
tee_bee - May 3, 2010 at 12:14 am
I’m more offended by her misuse of the word discrete. English is dying at the hands of our students; professors are helping hasten its demise.