Amy Bishop, Christopher Dorner personality and false accusation

[JackN415]

13. you might have suffered too much from your experience that prevents you from...

see the fundamental principle of fairness, like John Rawls' Theory of Justice.

But there is such a significant difference between your perspective and mine that it is best to leave the matter as it is because I don't see we are converging on how to deal with this problem, which is NOT racism but the abuse of the system designed to promote racial equality.

You wrote:

Were my feelings hurt, my time used in a way that I didn't foresee? Sure, but that's part of the job.

I simply refuse to accept this as a part of my job.

I will close this thread with the final update of the situation. An adhoc committee assigned to review the case has come up with a recommendation. According to this rec., the dept chair jumped the gun in calling for the meeting. The student's allegation would have been dismissed and this whole thing would have been a non-story.

I will use an analogy. If an employee of a company feels that his/her salary is low because of racial discrimination, how does one prove it? There are plenty of legal precedences, and basically it requires the establishments of two evidences:

1- his/her salary in comparison with those of other employees who perform the same job function with similar seniority/rank, job performance score or rating etc. Let's denote these employees as equivalent employees (EE).
.
2-Evidence that shows his/her salary is lower than those of EE of a different race.

Based on this criterion of 2 evidences, the student would not pass the 1st stage, because the instructor clearly showed how his scores were graded compared with the rest of the class, and why they were so low, consistently at or near the bottom of the class.

The dept chair erred in failing to require the student to acquire the evidence of Step #1, and to present evidence of Step #2 before accepting his allegation of racial bias and initiating action.

There would have been no need for a special meeting, no need for the instructor to cancel her travel plan. Nothing is urgent. They can schedule a meeting after her trip, as grades can be changed months after a semester is over.

Just a simple 30-min meeting between the student and the instructor would be sufficient for the student to have all the information needed to know why his scores are what they are. He would see what other students did (anonymously) and why they had higher scores than he did.

Indeed, the adhoc committee concluded that if the recommended procedure had been followed, there would have been no ground whatsoever for the student to make any credible allegation of bias of any type, be that race, sexual orientation, personality or whatever. Poor work get poor scores, pure and simple. This thread would not exist.

To appreciate this principle, think of an antithetical analogy in which some cops simply arrest a minority person without first obtaining evidence or establishing a probable cause for the arrest. I surmise you would be on the opposite side of the cops in this case and demand for evidence.

About your response

I do not believe that there is such an outbreak of accusations of racial bias by non-white students in universities that this needs to be discussed and warned against at length.

, let's rephrase this way:

I do not believe that there is such an outbreak of

non-black neighborhood crime-watch captains killed black kids carrying marijuana

that

case like Trayvon Martin

needs to be discussed and warned against at length.

Lastly, I will not get into the issue of ingenuousness of your response that you would have the same consideration if the student were of another race such as Asian, given your earlier emotional response based on your earlier conjecture of the student race as being "black."

In order to fight racism, one must have the enlightenment and courage to rise above one own's experience- regardless how painful, to stand for justice when the abuse and wrong is perpetrated in reverse. To justify or even attempting to defend a case like this is to insult the true victims and invalidate the moral high ground of one's own experience.

BTW, I called this kid a mental case, my colleague called him a time bomb and was fearful of him exploding on him once.