"Dealing with Discrimination" - Laughably Bad Advice from a Student Guide from UCLA

[jedifreac]

Earlier this month, Dr. Christian Head at UCLA's Medical School decided to sue the university for racial discrimination.  Dr. Head, the only tenured African American professor in his department, reported that he was repeatedly mocked as an "affirmative action hire" and was depicted in a slideshow at a student roast as a gorilla being sodomized by a

Comments

[matt_doyle]

Good grief.

[essentialsaltes]

So in a sense, the school is criticizing the way he chose to respond as a victim of racism. Cool.

I don't know if it's cool or not, but they gave him good advice to make use of the formal procedures for this very problem and he chose to ignore it. That'll be question #1 at the lawsuit. Meanwhile, UCLA lawyers are probably telling everyone, as a matter of legal advice, not to investigate the incident(s) -- that's their job and his lawyer's job now.

The Resource Guide does leave a lot to be desired; it reads like a first draft written by some GSA flunky who got stuck with the job.

Well, I'm glad we got that out of the way. In case underrepresented students didn't think this would happen to them after coming out of four years of being an underrepresented undergrad.Many grad students will be coming from undergrad schools (say, in foreign countries) where they weren't underrepresented. Or heck, some may be coming from schools in the US that aren't as understanding as (even?) UCLA. It was only in 2000 that Bob Jones University

[jedifreac]

Ah, I didn't think of students from foreign countries who were the majority in their home country. That makes a bit more sense. Although telling them to practice simulating racism is probably not all that helpful.

For Dr. Head, it sounds like he waited for quite some time before filing the suit and did try to speak to people about it before doing so. The Academic Senate process sounds a lot like arbitration clauses trap options. At an environment like UCLA (remember the school's initiate reaction to his complaint was that the gorilla photoshop wasn't "illegal" or breaking any laws) I can see why he might opt for a jury trial lawsuit instead.