June 23, 2008

Columbia U. Fires Teachers College Professor Accused of Rampant Plagiarism

Columbia University’s Teachers College announced today that it planned to fire Madonna G. Constantine, a tenured professor, for plagiarism. The announcement, which came in a memorandum delivered to faculty members, said Ms. Constantine would be suspended immediately and would be dismissed, subject to a review by a faculty committee.

A law firm hired by the university to conduct an investigation reported in February that Ms. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education, had committed more than two dozen instances of plagiarism. Ms. Constantine has vehemently denied the accusations and has, in turn, accused others of plagiarizing her work. She has also accused colleagues of envy and racism.

Last October, Ms. Constantine said a noose was placed outside her office door. The New York City Police Department’s hate-crime unit investigated the incident, but months later still had no suspects. —Thomas Bartlett

Comments

1. I cannot help but recall how Ward Churchill’s first response to accusations of research misconduct was to complain that he was receiving racist letters and that his car had been vandalized. Apparently people without the imagination to do original scholarship also lack the imagination to come up with original excuses for their misconduct.

   — Elaine    Jun 23, 04:49 PM    #

2. It became obvious, early on, that there was something fishy about the “noose” incident at Columbia Teachers College. But the school and its officials remained very skittish in dealing with this hot potato a la Tawana Brawley, since frankness would have required abandoning their reflexive piety about “racism.” Only the subsequent investigation into Constantine’s plagiarism made it possible to face up to the srong possibillity that the infamous noose may have been a sham concocted in order to cloak Constantine in supposed martyrdom, shielding her from the consequences of her misdeeds.

   All this points to the grim consequences of abandoning hard-headed realism in our discourse about social problems in favor of a premasticated pack of cliches and taboos. Too many universities have taken this course, to the detriment of scholarship and education.

   — Fossil    Jun 23, 05:05 PM    #

3. There have been so hoaxes of this kind I reflexively assume any similar incident is a hoax.

   — Gerard Harbison, UNL    Jun 23, 05:16 PM    #

4. Fossil —

   The investigation was nearly complete by the time of the noose incident. It was not “subsequent”. Besides, neither TC nor the NYPD has concluded that Constantine planted the noose herself. She is being dismissed for plagiarism, not because of any accusations about the noose.

   — CU Alum    Jun 23, 05:19 PM    #

5. Wake up, folks! Racism is alive and well in the US, including in the hallowed halls of academe. I see no connection between a case of likely plagiarism and the racially motivated harrassment of the person accused of such breaches of academic standards. I’ll bet that, if one were to conduct a survey of those who plagiarized in a give time period, all sorts of people would be found to have lied in print, even those with the whitest skins in Christendom!

   — barbara    Jun 23, 05:28 PM    #

6. In the digital age, it is so easy to uncover plagiarism, you wonder why faculty are still attempting it.

   — Kyle David    Jun 23, 05:29 PM    #

7. In my experience the person bringing the plagiarism complaint often is vilified and blamed. See Stolen Words—not sure of the author’s name. I’m sure there is a story there about what the accuser has gone through.

   I am also surprised and delighted that the university apparently didn’t give her a package and agree to be silent about it.

   — Suzanne England    Jun 23, 05:32 PM    #

8. One of the reasons racism exists is because we keep holding to this false image construt of race. Sociologists have discovered that there are more differences within a given ethnicity than there are differences between ethnic groups, and although it currently violates every copyright and IP law out there, I believe that the rapid transfer of information avaliable in the 21st century will someday make it very hard to pinpoint just who “first” came up with an idea or string of words. With that being said, using other people’s work without credit is morally and ethically wrong. In addition, it is currently illegal. Professor’s must hold themselves to a higher standard. If she did it, she needs to go. If she didn’t, Columbia needs to apologize and dig into their coffers and offer her a settlement.

   — OMW41    Jun 23, 05:33 PM    #

9. Wow, see how ugly the converstation gets almost immediately? Dishonest folks come in all shapes, sizes, colors, and religions, no doubt about it. Like stupidity, dishonesty seems to be evenly distributed throughout the human race.

   This could be another “vast right-wing conspiricy”, but 12 instances of plagiarism? I’ll go out on a limb, here and declare this misguided colleague a victim of her own making.

   — Fred    Jun 23, 05:36 PM    #

10. My experience with students who are confronted with obvious plagiarism is that their standard defense is either to attack the accuser, reject the evidence, or declare it is merely accidental. However, I never confront any student unless I am certain that accident or any other excuse cannot be responsible for the problem.

    It troubles me greatly whenever any of my peers is caught making the same mistake as a college freshman. We should hold ourselves to higher standards, and we should refuse to cut any corners in our research and our presentation of that research. To do any less is to shortchange our profession, as well as our students. If we plagiarize, how can we then hold students accountable when they plagiarize?

    In a case involving plagiarism, race is not an issue. Most of the students I have discovered plagiarizing are of the same basic ethnic background as myself. And each time I am surprised when I find a student has plagiarized, because I believe all my students—of whatever ethnicity or cultural background—are capable of doing good, honest work. Plagiarism always feels like a betrayal of my confidence and trust in them.

    — Charles    Jun 23, 05:44 PM    #

11. When you have hundreds of researchers pursuing a field for which there are only a few invented, trite, core ideas, an enormous amount of writing is going to look similar. In essence everyone’s recycling the same old ideas over and over, with everyone afraid to admit, “Hey, we got nothin’.”

    — Dr. Derek Nobles    Jun 23, 05:48 PM    #

12. If a witch hunt actually bags a witch does it lose its connotation?

    — Leslie M. Corcoran III    Jun 23, 05:53 PM    #

13. The whole story seems sad, as do the diverse efforts to draw general lessons from a case that should be treated as charges of individual misconduct investigated (let us hope) with due process.

    — Alan Charles Kors    Jun 23, 06:02 PM    #

14. Personally, I think the noose episode to be a red herring to confuse the investigators. Why do we (black and white) start throwing the race card into every little situation that arises these days? Ms Constantine knows this works so well in our litigious society. Shame on you ma’am! One would expect someone with the academic credentials such as yours to elevate yourself, above this gauche behavior.

    — David    Jun 23, 06:02 PM    #

15. I think the faculty members who identified the plagiarism and had the courage to bring it to the attention of the administration deserve the gratitude of the academic community.

    — John Krumboltz    Jun 23, 06:37 PM    #

16. the tragedy is that it took them so long to do it and they had to go through so many hooks and it cost them a ton of money to get it done and establish that gravity indded brings grave things back to earth. Image if they had to verify that the earth was round! People really don’t get how medieval things have become.

    — vinnie    Jun 23, 06:42 PM    #

17. My experience with some of these folks has been that they cannot seem to abandon the old habits that were necessary to survive in their old country.

    — JAI B. Kim    Jun 23, 07:43 PM    #

18. One hopes that this is the last we hear from this professor. I have no idea who hung the noose, but it does make me suspicious that a person under investigation for plagiarism suddenly finds a noose on her door — and this at one of the most liberal-left campuses in the United States, if not the world.

    Somehow, I do not think that Columbia University really is a secret cell for the Ku Klux Klan. Thus, I will remain suspicious about the origin of the noose, especially since she appeared on Good Morning America soon afterward (with a sympathetic interview by Robin Roberts).

    My sense is that the Columbia administration has done a thorough job of research in this case. Plagiarism IS a serious offense, whether it is committed by students or professors.

    — William Anderson    Jun 23, 08:08 PM    #

19. I suppose that we are all to believe that when Constantine arrived at Columbia she suddenly discovered the “art” of plagiarism. It is more likely that she was quite “seasoned” in the “practice”, at the time of her employment at Columbia. If this was the case, the University did a very poor job screening this candidate and checking her references. Ergo, they invited this problem right into their living room.

    — Bill    Jun 23, 08:50 PM    #

20. Nothing against the University of Memphis, of course, but I was surprised to see a Phd from U Memphis as a full professor at Columbia.

    — Charles Nicholls    Jun 23, 09:10 PM    #

21. “Nothing against the University of Memphis”??! “Of course”?!!

    I cannot begin to express how loathsome that cretinous sentence is.

    — chuck    Jun 23, 09:18 PM    #

22. Dawg, you must not be familiar with higher education. Columbia has very diverse people in positions of power. Most universities are looking to hire minorities and have seach chairs that are people of color. And who gave you the name Dawg? Did your parent’s hate you?

    — Kami    Jun 23, 09:37 PM    #

23. I was a student at Teachers College, Columbia University. I was treated with such intellectual disdain because at the most conservative educational school in the country, I stuck to a Marxist- oriented view of education: an institution that reproduces the society in which it stands. Not a very radical idea in retrospect, but there were more significant problems.

    There is a insistent effort to make Doctors of Education (especially minorities) seem less worthy by insisting that their dissertation be simple studies and not real research dissertations that can compete with the Doctor of Philosophy Dissertations across the street at Columbia University. The pressures of being “just a T. C. student” are not understood. The staff and faculty at T.C. dehumanizes you and then you find your ally in some southern cracker: it just confuses the hell out of you.

    So you become disoriented as presumed “Anglos” turn out to be “Zionists,” and Southerners (who you distrust because of their drawl) become your strongest allies. Better yet, a faculty that basks in Anti-Semitism attempts to recruit minority students into their “at least we kept Jews out of our Department”…and that’s the worst sin. Against your best instincts you smile to not create waves knowing that you are a minority student on scholarship and have been given an opportunity to attend T.C.

    I do not blame Prof. Constantin, I blame T.C. as she is a victim of what a racist institution can do, to what seem healthy people – seem. No matter how good a scholar, you need someone that will back you up. I thank Prof. Maxine Green every day, for having stood up against the most racist onslaught against my dissertation by my advisor – who walked out of the dissertation hearing room and didn’t shake my hand, after my dissertation was approved. My dissertations is today a Historical Dissertation of Columbia University – possibly one of the five most important dissertations out of T.C. All I can say is I should have followed my father’s profession and become a plumber: – I would have been better appreciated. Prof. Madonna G. Constantine is not the problem. She only forgot, (which is easy at T.C.), that she was nothing but a raisin in the snow and behaved like many others at T.C. faculty who made their reputation on student research but

    — ouramericas    Jun 23, 09:55 PM    #

24. Teachers’ College may have taken a little longer to do the right thing than some of us would have liked, but it is to be commended for the action it has taken. Apart from the general odiousness of plagiarism, this is not a victimless crime. The graduate students and fellow faculty-members from whom Prof. Constantine stole research that she then published in her own name have been materially damaged in their professional careers. Although much of the damage, at this stage, is probably irreparable, this initiative will at least afford them and their good names—which Prof. Constantine has publicly and shamefully traduced—with a certain measure of vindication.

    — Gustave    Jun 23, 10:46 PM    #

25. #22, the sentence was surely not meant to be offensive. It just seemed somewhat out of the ordinary to see a graduate from U Memphis in a full professor position at Columbia. If this is in fact not surprising, and it is normal for a Phd from U Memphis to be a full professor at Columbia, then my apologies for offending you.

    — Charles Nicholls    Jun 23, 10:54 PM    #

26. I’m glad to know sociology has recently discovered what scholars in critical race studies, anthropology, and other disciplines have long held: that race as a term for the heredity of practices, skin color, and other markers, on the body, does NOT exist. But of course, what socology and I imagine many other disciplines forget is that the experience of racism DOES exist and race consequenlty became a site of social and political struggle. A noose is a politically and symbolically powerful form of racism, REGARDLESS IF ITS SUBJECT PLAGIARIZED.

    — Gilberto    Jun 23, 11:21 PM    #

27. Madonna, Madonna, how could you stoop so low? Racism again? Oh hum. Accusations of plagerism equals racially-motivated discriminatory bigotry. Yes, well, I’m familiar with a similar case, at least similar to the extent that a black female professor, inept in many ways, fully self-absorbed was, nonetheless, brought up on academic charges of plagerizing much of her various papers, works, even syllabi. She “vehemently” denied any such doing and immediately, predictably played the race card. The evidence demonstrated beyond any doubt that she had on more than a few occasions “copied” other people’s work. We here in academe like to attach more sophisticated verbiage in our use of descriptives so we call what she did, “plagerism.” Anyway, this female black professor raised such a “hoot and holler” that the school caved in, as I knew they would, and instead of being fired as she ought to have been, or at the very least suspended without pay for 6 months and placed on 3 years probation, the university promoted her in a compensatory genuflect apologetically seeking her forgiveness for their wrongful act of accustation. So what did she do? She brought a civil suit against the institution and won remedies for injurious defamation damages . The amount won? Well, I don’t know if the amount I had been told was actually the amount given by both triers of fact and of law, but one copper penny would have been too much to remit to this immoral and unethcial black female professor who was in clear violation of abuse of process, as well. Where is she now? She heads up a department and copied, I mean authored a book manufacturing a prodigious litany of falsehoods about all of the horrid abuses she has endured at the hands of white-ruled academe. Meanwhile, she continues to receive a relatively handsome salary direct deposited into her bank account every two weeks, and not a penny of it is she worth.
    So, I suspect if Madonna, oh Madonna, another victim of the white-driven machine of imperious-callousness toward the “ … if only you’d kno’d the troubles I’z seen” plays her cards right, she’ll be laugh’n her big round rump all da’ way to da’ bank.
    Whitey, you deserve to be ripped off. I’m afraid my vote would be for Madonna and not because I think she’s a principled woman. But because the white caste in academe spends much of its time “plagerizing” each other in their incessant need to be liked or at the very least, “approved of” by their black counterparts – so whitey is reduced by his/her own undoing to appease. But you black folk aren’t off the hook, either. You lack character, honesty and the termerity to be stand-up men and women when you see this blatant abuse of process and larceny being played out by one of your own. Where’s your intellectual honesty? Remember this, whatever you refuse or fail to handle will keep coming back for you to handle. I didn’t author that. Another person did who is far wiser and more certainly gifted than most in academe. So this problem of dishonesty and lack of spiritual nobility will continue until both yuz’ people learn to handle your differences correctly. But you won’t.
    And as for you, Madonna, remember that you will one day pay for your deceit. The Laws of Compensation are immutable and inexorable. Tables will turn. So enjoy your victimization while you can.

    — Dr. Howard Tierney    Jun 23, 11:41 PM    #

28. I quote from one of the Chronicle articles: “Professors at the Teachers College also received an e-mail message from Karen Cort, the other graduate student whose work Ms. Constantine was found to have copied. In the message, Ms. Cort says that Ms. Constantine, who was her mentor, had told her that her work was not good enough to be published. She later saw portions of that same work in print, under Ms. Constantine’s name.

    Ms. Cort, who is African-American, says Ms. Constantine’s claim that the investigation is motivated by race is “what pains me the most.”

    In the e-mail message, Ms. Cort calls her former mentor “the most hypocritical person I ever met in my life.” — end of quote.

    What Constatine has done, by invoking race to protect her actions, is nothing less than utterly destructive for those of us fighting the consequences of racism. Shame on you, Ms. Constantine!

    — Chris K    Jun 24, 01:00 AM    #

29. Gilberto-
    I hear this frequently and it makes no sense to me: If “race” as a marker does not exist, then how exactly does “racism” exist? I mean if the marker isn’t there, then how can I be racist to any person? How can a “white” person be racist to a “black” person, when the very color boundary itself is an illusion? And if that’s true, then the assertion of one person’s being racist to a person with a different phenotype makes no more sense than being “racist” to my brother or my mother. It’s not a real marker, right? So how can you insist on the existence of racism, but then deny the existence of race? It’s like denying the existence of speciation, in the prelude to a longer study of how animals of different “species” interact to one another differently. This is confusing.
    And note that while this may be accepted wisdom in such hard disciplines as sociology and critical race studies, those pikers over in genetics and immunology and psychometrics are still cataloguing the striking consistencies within racial groups.

    — Ludo    Jun 24, 03:20 AM    #

30. Dawg,that was awesome! That was the best critical race studies parody I have read. You’ve got the rap down pat. I salute you, Sir Dawg.

    — Fernando    Jun 24, 04:05 AM    #

31. Why do people always make the excuse for misconduct by saying, “I bet lots of other people did it too”! No one takes responsibility for thier actions anymore. Its’ always the fault of others.

    — Joe    Jun 24, 07:46 AM    #

32. Ludo: rubbish and academic babble. Less of this nonsense is needed.

    — Snake    Jun 24, 08:05 AM    #

33. Hey everyone,

    How about some compassion for this poor soul? After all, she was absent the day her English 101 instructor talked about giving proper credit to any author whose work is to be mentioned as a quote or in paraphrase form. Not to worry though. Our “victim” here has concluded that that English 101 instructor is also part of this massive “conspiracy” against her. I am sure the committee who is going to hear her case is going to recommend that this former counseling psychology professor to receive years of psychological counseling. Isn’t life funny? One day you’re teaching people to go out and treat others with their psychological problems, and the next day you find yourself to be one of those people having those types of problems. Poor thing :(

    — Jack    Jun 24, 10:15 AM    #

34. Snake-
    Ludo only asks what Gilberto vaguely assumes. It is a credible question that I too am intrigued by. Perhaps you should read Gilberto’s comment before you bash others.

    — Dot    Jun 24, 10:33 AM    #

35. Can we expect an apology from the media, Columbia and Black spokespersons for their false accusations of racism by “Whites”?

    They all should be charged with “reverse hate-crimes!”

    The “victim” is pitiful. If she lied about her writings is she lying about the “noose”? Somehow this story will evaporate and we’ll all have to suffer the phony guilt.

    — Robert    Jun 24, 11:48 AM    #

36. Ludo, snake, et al.,

    Let me make an analogy: the dollar bill in your pocket is just paper and ink, so it has no intrinsic value beyond those material substances. And yet, we vest value in it, so that it gains social cache, and we treat it as more than just paper and ink.

    Well, race works in the same fashion: it is a social construction. There are no necessary bioogical/genetic markers for race, but as a social construction, we can spy race in the functioning of our lives.

    Oh, one more thing: biologists/geneticists do not dispute what sociologists say; in fact, the information flow goes from the hard sciences to the “soft” sciences on this one. This is why biological anthropologists speak of clines, not genes.

    Race as a bioogical category need not exist for racism to exist. There are scores of books out there on this subject, and people in my field — philosophy of race — have sketched this out over the last 20 years. Check out Anthony Appiah, Naomi Zack, Paul Taylor, etc.

    I’m actually surprised that so many academics are behind on this one. Really, most of you are making comments put to rest many years ago.

    — Chris K    Jun 24, 11:48 AM    #

37. Chris K.! Thank you for your diatribe… the rest of us are so unworthy of our opinions. If I prefer my ethnicity and others of my ethnicity, isn’t that a valid choice?

    Anyway, where is all the media regarding this development? When the ‘noose’ was discovered, we heard about it for weeks! Where are they now?

    — Robert    Jun 24, 11:56 AM    #

38. It’s good to see a threshold (finally) established on academe’s tolerance of plagiarism. An occasional “lifting” is apparently OK, but when it becomes “rampant” that crosses the line. And what is rampant? Apparently 12 (count ‘em, 12) documented cases of frank plagiarism will do the trick. We may have soft spines and weak morals in the academy…but we are damned tolerant!

    — dean-emeritus    Jun 24, 12:04 PM    #

39. A FEW FACTS:
    1. There were, I believe, 10 students who made complaints of plagiarism against MC. 8 of those were African American students. Upon receiving complaints from students, MC threatened them with libel lawsuits and so, despite being offered indemnity by TC, 8 of the 10 refused to testify against MC in the hearing for fear of retaliation. 2 students were brave enough to pursue the complaint, and at least one was African American.
    2. There was at least one faculty member who submitted a formal complaint of plagiarism against MC for work that was clearly on the very specialized topic that this faculty member had developed. She also was a minority faculty member. Ultimately, she decided to leave TC because she could not continue to be in the same department with MC because of MC’s behavior and the reluctance of the previous administration to act appropriately.
    3. Suniya Luthar, chair of MC’s department (also a minority faculty member) brought forward the charges made by students and faculty (not herself) to the administration for action.

    The Dean of Academic Affairs at the time, Darlene Bailey (also minority) responded to the complaints by forcing out Luthar as chair of the department despite protests from the department as a whole, and only weeks before Bailey was to leave for Minnesota.
    In addition, MC brought suit against Luthar for Libel for doing her duty in bringing forward the accusations of plagiarism.

    This situation was inherited by the current president and Dean/Provost and was a matter that they had to act on as one of the first issues in their new administration.

    3. The noose incident came up about 4 months before the final decision of the panel looking into the charges of plagiarism. So it was NOT at a time close to the decision of the panel as one comment suggested. The administration could not reveal the details of the plagiarism charge without prejudicing and legally invalidating the case.
    4. There is no evidence whether MC put the noose there herself, so it cannot be more than speculation at this point. However, one could consider the following points:
    a) upon the revelation of the noose in the media, MC suggested to both the police and media that Luthar might be a suspect, which led to Luthar being hounded, and falsely accused of battling MC over a “plum position” and the lead on a non-existence grant. The only dispute was that MC was suing Luthar for doing her job and reporting the charges.
    b) The police had put hidden cameras in the hallway outside MC’s office, presumably in case the perpetrator were to make a return visit. Upon discovering the cameras, MC demanded that they be removed. Her statement at the faculty meeting asked why the police would put a camera outside her door unless they thought she put the noose there herself.

    5. In Feb 2008 the panel looking into charges of plagiarism found in favor of the complainants and President Fuhrman announced formal sanctions against MC, short of termination, but not excluding the possibility of later termination following an appeal to the Faculty Advisory Committee. That committee recently finished its review and did not find in favor of MC. MC was then terminated.
    6. At the end of the last term, the faculty voted in favor of a resolution condemning plagiarism in the strongest terms and recommending that the strongest sanctions be leveled against those found guilty of plagiarism.

    The reader can judge for themselves who acted well and badly in this case, but the claims that TC is racist and that this was a case of baiting a professor because she was a minority cannot be sustained. This has been a shameful time to be at TC, and the faculty have felt embarrassed to advise our students about academic integrity when it was so clearly abused by our own colleague. Almost without exception, including most of the minority faculty members at TC, we are saddened but support the decisive action taken most recently in this case.

    — TC Prof    Jun 24, 12:15 PM    #

40. Ethnicity and race are not the same thing. Ethnicity has to do with where and how you live. Race has to do with what you look like. The idea of race is a false construct because it assumes that race is immutable and that behavior can be predicted and explained by certain “biological” assumptions related to race. Because these earlier beliefs about race are so entrenched and are actually experienced at an emotional level, racists (i.e. people belonging to a dominant group that uses its power to express its prejudice against a group of people perceived to be of another race to its own advantage and to the detriment of that other group) continue to use phenotypical characteristics such as skin color, once thought to be an indicator of race, to decide when and how express their prejudice. This is how the idea of race, a false construct, continues to inform racism.

    — Daisy    Jun 24, 12:53 PM    #

41. Good riddance. Makes you wonder about those lawmakers who are suggesting to add the noose to witch trial style “hate crimes.”

    — Bay Area National Anarchists    Jun 24, 01:01 PM    #

42. I know Dr. Constantine. Even if these charges are true, I know that she also was very dedicated to helping our society progress toward a more healthy end. I am sad to read about how some bad acts may undermine so many good ones by her.

    — sad    Jun 24, 03:35 PM    #

43. Dr. Howard Tierney, your comments are offensive. They are dripping with bitterness and anger. Even if Ms. Constantine committed plagiarism, why must you wage an attack against black vernacular English and the physical characteristics of black women? Your point is quite valid, but you diminish it—and yourself—with your reprehensible approach. You also spelled plagiarism incorrectly.

    — Doranna Tindle    Jun 24, 05:36 PM    #

44. My fellow “intellectuals”:
    (I have put the quotes in because some can’t read sarcasm such as Ludo)

    Re-read my post: I am not in any way suggesting that if she has plagiarized this is excusable becuase of racism.

    Instead, what is so troubling about this discussion is how so many people seem to excuse the noose because she has been charged.

    Recall that the noose was used to hang many, many, innocent black men. . .

    — Gilberto    Jun 24, 06:12 PM    #

45. Is “dawg’s” post intended to be serious?

    — M Dowd    Jun 24, 10:12 PM    #

46. Please Gilberto, please do me the favor of not calling me an intellectual, with or without the use of scarequotes. What will my neighbors say?
    While I am recalling that the noose was once used to hang “many, many innocent black men”, it recently seems to be appearing with ever greater frequency as a means to “hang” an innocent society as “racist”, and thus as a pretext for Black Americans to deflect attention from their extraordinarily bad behavior, such as beating a randomly selected white kid unconscious. It is my impression that most people presume that she put the noose on her own door. Such was the case with a NY fireman, to put a noose on his own locker.

    This is the worst sort of “crying wolf.” Because while being called “n*gger” may hurt, being called a racist is the worst insult a person can endure in the modern world. It impugns your character and intentions at the most fundamental level, with no means of rebuttal or defense. Make no mistake: being called a “racist” is a much more significant and vicious insult than being called by some racial slur. Words have consequences, and that one most of all.

    Sorry for my tonedeafness to sarcasm. But as programmers say: That’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

    — Ludo    Jun 25, 12:16 AM    #

47. Two things. With regard to Charles Nicholls comment, why do you find it surprising that a U Memphis graduate would be a full professor at Columbia? Everyone recognizes that Ivy league schools tend to hire from within, however, your comment “I was surprised” seems to imply that the qualifications of a U Memphis graduate are inherently inferior and unworthy of such a position. Please correct me if I am wrong.
    Second, Ludo, your belief that being called a racist is the worst insult is just that, your belief. However, common sense would suggest that significance of the name calling is determined by each individual “victim” in accordance with their perspective. In short, try not to be so self-absorbed that you state your opinions as fact and actually believe them to be so.

    — umdgrad    Jun 25, 09:31 AM    #

48. I’m curious by the notion that the term “race” has no meaning and is a social construct. Race (or subspecies or clinal variants as biologists refer to them) does in fact exist. It is a collection of phenotypic traits that are indicators of members of a particular population. That is it. Perhaps this is a politically inconvenient fact, but it isn’t any less a biological reality. Obviously the assigned social importance of a particular assemblage of phenotypic traits is arbitrary from a biological standpoint (i.e. racism), but that does not make the set of phenotypic traits that mark the probability of carrying a certain collection of genes designating a population any less real. To continue with the money analogy indicated in an earlier post, yes, the money doesn’t have any intrinsic value, but the social value is imparted not just by paper and ink but by the particular manner in which the ink is applied and the type of paper that it is constructed from. To deny race as a real construct (a collection of phenotypic traits marking a population) would be the same as claiming the type of paper used, ink used, or configuration of patterns on money didn’t matter and has no meaning. Biologists routinely identify populations by the frequencies of phenotypic traits in all sorts of animals. Changing the name to clinal variant or subspecies, doesn’t change anything.

    — Sociobiologist    Jun 25, 09:59 AM    #

49. Sociobiol: given your vague definition of “race”, all blue-eyed people constitute a human race! Not all “collections of phenotypic traits” create a racial category; if so, given the genetic variety of the human population, there would be thousands and thousands of “races” based on different “collections of phenotypes”. Why are certain collections of phenotypes linked to our familiar racial categories? That is a sociohistorical question, not a biological question.

    — Miles    Jun 25, 12:12 PM    #

50. When a particular set of phenotypic traits indicate a gene pool of a particular population descended from a particular geographic location, then it is a race. Diaspora of populations formerly geographically isolated still carry with them traits indicative of their historical population (as a statistical average-not as an individual). Blue eyes alone doesn’t constitute a race in a biological sense, but if you add freckled skin, red hair, genes for cystic fibrosis etc., then you begin to define race in a biologically meaningful sense-in other words individuals that descended from a particular population. The current sociological definition of race is extremely crude from a biological standpoint because it lacks a sufficient number of traits to properly define a population’s origin. This forum is perhaps the wrong one for this debate. My point was that there ARE races in a biological sense. No, these do not match the broad categories one might indicate on a census report, but they do exist. I was simply pointing out that the recurring statement that race has no biological meaning is factually false. The biological meaning of the term race does not mean the same thing as the sociological meaning of race. This is true, but somewhere along the line, these two meaning have become blurred (probably in the name of political correctness) and garbled to read “even biologists say that race doesn’t exist”. What biologists really mean is that the term race has become so loaded and abused (like the word theory by intelligent design theorists) that it has been abandoned and replaced by less incendiary words like clinal variant (note subspecies is even more loaded than race and few biologists would ever use this term-even though it might apply).

    — Sociobiologist    Jun 25, 01:02 PM    #

51. Sociobiologist, Don’t waste your time with “Miles” or his specious (no pun intended) “arguments. I am sure he is busy this Summer sitting by his private pier (feet dangling in the water) while his mowed is being mowed by Brown, illegal Mexican Indians, whose race he doesn’t see either in this all-White gated, university faculty-populated community. But not seeing race, that is any race other than his own, he probably won’t notice either, the lines of Black day laborers waiting on street corners for someone to take them home to clean out their 5 car garages. And his kids? Oh yeah, they just accidentally look White like him and the also “White-looking” wife and they also accidentally also marry other White-looking people, but then of course it’s all just an “accident” that none of them happen to notice after all. I am surrounded on my campus by these fools and I just try to stay out of their way as they race for ski slopes, where they continue to not see race either.

    — Hanover, NH    Jun 25, 02:21 PM    #

52. It is pretty obvious this clown put the noose thing up herself. She should never have been hired in the first place.

    — Bo    Jun 25, 03:14 PM    #

53. It makes you wonder why the recruiting search committee decided to give the position to this woman, a graduate of a regional school, and not someone from a much more nationally- recognized school? Were they trying to make TC much more “diversified” than it already is? Wasn’t there anyone more qualified than this woman, regardless of gender, race, national origin, etc? If she committed all the unethical offenses at TC, chances are that she did likewise at UM and other places, before she got to TC. I think this should be a good lesson to any future recruiting search committees at TC and elsewhere.

    — Jack    Jun 25, 04:21 PM    #

54. M Dowd: Of course I’m serious. I’ll prove it with this statement: If Obama is elected president, he still will be unable to make a racist statement because people of color have no power. Obama is (partially) a person of color. Hence, a President Obama would have no power. Indeed, any comment by a person of color that might be deemed “racist” by straight white christian lookist speciesist homophobic heterosexist males is actually speaking truth TO power.

    — dawg    Jun 25, 04:29 PM    #

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