Amy Bishop, Christopher Dorner personality and false accusation

[JackN415]

17. Thanks for your perspective, but

the case is closed and if you review my post #13 above, what happened is really simple:

- The student should have asked for a grade review without a strongly worded, emotionally charged, blustery allegation of racial bias. Grade review happens all the time. Every class, at the end of a semester, unless every one gets A, there will be some coming in asking why they don't get what they expected. Every instructor encounters this all the time. Yes, this is a part of the job.

- But he didn't do what most students do. He first asked her for a review the day before her trip. She replied that she would be back in 12 days and they can meet to do the review. He immediately wrote a direct e-mail to the dept chair with the race aspect. (The guy was simply cunning. He knew that mentioning race would get a faster response, otherwise, the chair would have told him to wait also. It's no big deal to wait a couple weeks. Grade changes can be made several months after a semester.)

- Because of the word "race", the dept chair was chickened and immediately made it into a serious affair with memos calling for formal meetings, etc. making her delaying her trip.

- The result of the special meeting was that the student accepted and was probably even happy about his grade, knowing that he got a much better grade than an F, thanks to a very kind instructor who didn't have the heart to flunk the lowest-score student in the class.

- An ad hoc committee formed after the fact made a recommendation how cases like this can be handled in the future. The recommendation implies that the special meeting called by the chair was premature. What he should have done was:
i) reply to the student that he should see the instructor and obtain a review of his grade to establish facts of the case (which the instructor said they would do after she gets back);
ii) ask the student to cite evidence of bias or unfairness based on facts of the case;
iii) if there was evidence of bias, and only then, a special meeting should be called to consider if the bias is race related.

As mentioned, if this had happened, this thread wouldn't exist. There was no fact to establish that his grade was the result of bias of any kind much less the racial kind.

When the work is demonstrably the worst in the class, what bias can it be? I was the person asked to review his work independently, and I was amazed that he did something no other student could have done: he managed to be wrong on every single answer of an assignment. Even a broken clock manages to be correct twice a day, but this guy managed to be wrong in all questions including trivial gimmes that many instructors often put in an assignment to prevent perfect 0. Yet, this guy did it as if he intended to make a parody. Not only that, his errors were beyond "0". It should have been in the negative territory. It's like asking "how much does it cost to buy 12 oranges, if each orange is 15 cents", and he answered "5 apples."

I will not get into the discussion of the use of expression "mental case" or "bully", it's a personal choice. You should read my earlier post about how he almost exploded on another instructor who was scared of him. More than one instructors call him a walking time bomb.

That's all the facts of the case.

What I tried to accomplish in this thread is this:

- a suggestion of procedure (as described above) how to handle cases like this in the future, which, I am sure now that most other institutions must have it, including the one in this case. It was the dept chair who didn't know the existing guidelines and acted incorrectly, using his power to ask the instructor to delay her trip. In my opinion, he was a politician, knowing that the student was one of the officers of a minority student association.

- to simply share a story about how false racial bias allegation can hurt people and the cause of anti-racism as well. It is one thing to make a charge on good faith and based on facts. It is another thing to manipulate the system and make allegation without facts and evidence.

The student was politically smart (to make up for his deficiency in science/engineering) and probably couldn't stomach the gnawing feeling of having a "bad grade" for 2 weeks waiting for the instructor to return. He did what he could exploit, playing the race story (I avoid the expression "race card&quot to get a faster response. It's like someone yelling fire in a theater so that people run out in order for him to select the best seat.

BTW, No, it is not a part of the job to be yanked around when someone abuses the system I would not be if I were in her case.