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Tuesday, November 09, 2004
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Teaching Today: A University Diaries Series
REFERENCING KERRI DUNN No doubt about it, the name “Kerri Dunn” is becoming shorthand for whacked out pedagogy. Dunn, UD’s readers may recall [see UD posts of 3/18/04, 3/21/04, and 8/21/04], wrote disgusting hate speech on her own car and then claimed she’d been victimized. She was lionized every which way at Pomona College, where she was a professor of psychology, until two witnesses came forward and described what really happened. Dunn’s history of other crimes did not help her case. She’s in jail. A few days ago, a couple of students at Pomona ran around campus writing - with an erasable marker - nasty things (“I heart pollution”) on SUVs. UD has immense sympathy with this gesture, being a rabid SUV-hater herself, but it is illegal. The students explained to college officials that their professor in "Political Activism in Film and Media" [a German literature scholar whose work includes a 1999 paper titled “The Modern Woman and Her Sanitary Napkin: The Social Construction of Women through Feminine Technologies”] had given the following assignment to the class: go out there and exercise your political voice, with allusions to the recent election. “I thought it was kind of unwise,” says one of the vandalized student SUV-owners, “because it seemed to reference Kerri Dunn.” Although the circumstances are very different, UD knows what she means. Professors who make things like voting, promise-to-be-nice pledges, and the public articulation of social grievance a class requirement display a Dunnish fanaticism. |