If You Can’t Whip Out a Boob in an Anthropology Class, Where Can You?

I wonder if most students would consider it unprofessional for a teacher to take a bathroom break in class. I suspect they would although it is crazy to think that would ever make the news. I recall a couple of instances of older kids of professors sitting quietly in the back of class and student consensus that it was odd, although again, not remotely newsworthy. Which makes me think it isn’t anything more than breasts which made this sensational.

So, what rule is being proposed? I’m pretty sure most people don’t think anybody can or should do just anything in public, especially if involved in communal behavior (teaching), but I’m not sure what the assertion of right is, exactly.

I don’t know if this applies workplaces in general or just academia, but yeah, I’ve long noticed an exaggerated panic over any intrusion of childraising in the academic workplace. I have to tell students it’s fine if they bring a kid along when they visit for office hours. It begs for a structural explanation, which the OP starts to provide.

@5
Thank you for your response. I find it interesting that the female, feminist posters tend to “swear like a sailor.” I don’t mind, of course, but it is noticeable that they do while, say, Bertram, Quiggan, Holbo and the other frequent male bloggers noticeably abstain from such salty language. You would find the opposite on a South Asian blog, where the women posters would act more correct and the male posters would act more “thug” (on average) in their language. An interesting inversion. The linguist in me senses this means something, but I suppose with such a limited range we cannot reject randomness as the explanation.
I do think it wrong to prevent mothers from breast-feeding when necessary, as it has a disparate impact on their career prospects.

I’m so old I can actually remember when people did their fucking jobs.

I agree with everything in this post. “Fuck that shit” is an idiom, @4. It’s not necessarily worse for having been first written by a man, if it indeed was, and there’s nothing wrong with a woman using it.

@13,
Haha, good explanation. My sister swears more than I do-now I can see it is because she has more to “prove” against a patriarchal baseline. I guess I kinda knew this implicitly in some inchoate sense, but it is striking for me to see articulated (and, yes, I don’t want to over-exaggerate) and played out among educated Westerners on CT.
Anyway, what exactly is the anti-breast feeding crowd in the US? Are they just traditionalists, or is it politicized? That matters, I think-if just traditonalists, it will fade waybut if it gets politicized then like abortion it will take a lot longer to get normalized.

This specific case is so much more complicated than this OP, and many other blog posts, recognize.

Let’s begin with the assumption that breastfeeding is normal and acceptable in most situations. Then, we need to interrogate the professor’s determination that bringing a sick child to a class is the best decision – for the child an students – in a difficult chocie situation. Next, we need to interrogate the professor’s leaving her (sick) child to crawl around on the floor, so that students had to point out that the child (a) had a paperclip in her/his mouth and (b) seemed dangerously interested inan elctrical outlet. After that, we must interrogate the professor’s telling her TA that she was not responsible for babycare, when the TA clearly thought someone ought to be – in light of both disruption to the class and the baby’s safety.

Lastly, we ought to address the professor’s subsequent treatment of student journalists who approached her about the class. This professor named the ‘offending’ students and posted their addresses on a blog site. She asserted that an article that reported that any students in the class were distracted or uncomfortable with any aspect of the case would constitute workplace harrassment of her as a woman – thus attempting to intimidate the students journaliusts into silence.

I am the mother of two (now grown) children and who faced many difficult choices when the best laid plans failed. I sympathize with the predicament of professors whose children are ill or whose normal care plans implode at the last minute. Unlike many other professionals (not al), we canot ‘makeup’ for lost primary work time – classes, in our case. I did have to bring children too ‘sick’ for daycare – which used to mean having a fever – to my college on rare occasions. I breastfed my children. But, like Prof. Pine, I also expressed for when they were in daycare and, so, I never *had to* breastfeed in class; I could have a bottle ready. More to the point, I never left my students (never had TAs) to keep an eye on my children. Nor would I have thought that “rushing through” a class was preferable to having someone cover for me.

This case is not about breastfeeding. And it is not a good case for feminists to mob about.

TO @10 (and OP):

But surely you don’t want to want to give up on self-determination and autonomy entirely? Do you? So, yes, there’s this sort of insane obsession with “personal responsibility”, “personal accountability” etc., which can totally discount social and biological factors, but to argue against the very idea of autonomy as a counter to this seems to me a bit like, well… I was going to mention baby and bathwater bit, but now I’m wondering if that’s going to sound a bit weird given the context. (But maybe I’m misunderstanding?)

And as PNP noted, it is a choice, or at least voluntary, to bring the child or infant to class. A totally justifiable one, I think. But in any case it’s not something involuntary. And the other hand, the “Oh, but the students!” response is a bit stupid precisely because there’s no coercion involved, at least in any vaguely reasonable sense.

I had lecturers turn up drunk, late, ignorant, unprepared, in mismatched knee-high socks, and in one particularly memorable case with white kit gloves and a bamboo cane. Not one of these was newsworthy, or rated so much as a comma in the student newspaper—and I know my experience is not unique. Consequently, this story has nothing to do with alleged “distraction” or “unprofessional conduct”. The only reason this story is “a story” is the potential titillation of the reader because it involved a breast. Personally I consider “Fuck that shit.” a mild response to sexual violation, and most certainly this story represents exactly that.

That the editor has not already resigned in disgrace dishonours AU.

(oh, and @4; amongst other things, swearing is an appropriate and useful rhetorical device to shock the listener out of complacency. That authors writing with the imprimatur of white male privilege writing on similarly privileged issues have less need to avail themselves of such a device should not be surprising. Personally I would consider that this is not immediately apparent to you would be embarrassing so I will not belabour the point).

@23,
with all due respect you are being a bit provincial bc vulgar speach (which, again, I do not object to) as “resistance” is not universally deployed by the disposesed. Just consult, e.g., Dalit-liberation literature. Think globally, and take your Western-centric views and stick ’em where the sun don’t shine! (LOL-swearing is liberating!)

@24,
Interesting. At the exteme risk of generalizing over a country of 1 billion people, I think that Indian mothers do breastfeed in India in public, but “modesty” is easier to preseve bc they are wearing a shawl, duppata, etc. so can drape it over the baby. The upper-class Westernized 5% (which would include me) would not do it though, I think bc we want to be Western.

@31,
Great point, and a hilarious (if at times insidious) distinction betwen Western and “Third World” elites . . . .

You’re missing the most egregious example of “children are a problem in a world that insists on autonomy and self-determination”: the soi-disant men’s rights movement that insists on seeing child support as a kind of criminal liability. “Just because I put my wee-wee in her hoo-ha that one time doesn’t mean I should have to cough up a large share of my income for 20 years, since she can choose to have an abortion.”

The fantasy of control over children, though, seems to me to be based on the very bizarre idea that children have no autonomy or self-determination, something so abundantly untrue that I can’t imagine anyone actually affirming it. Myths of “bad parenting” and “bad teachers” seem to flow more from that than anywhere else.

I fon’t think the kid caused the problem.

It was the boobies.

Duff Clarity, there is an argument you should avoid taking a sick kid into a class (for the kid’s sake, and for everyone else’s). One assumes that the professor did so because she had no alternative (if you read the original article, you would know that). So the options were *don’t do your fucking job* – cancel class – or come up with some, possibly second-best, alternative and do 98% of the job.

Oh, and if you think there’s no anti-breast feeding crowd (that is, anti breast feeding in public) you either aren’t paying attention or you’re a troll (quite possibly both). Try googling, for a start “mp ejected for breast feeding”.

Duff Clarity: *you* are tired of this no alternative thing? Imagine how *she* felt.

Have you ever been a parent? Have you ever met a parent? If so, it might have crossed your mind that sometimes shit happens, and childcare arrangements fall through. Do you really think it is unlikely that what the professor says occurs actually occurred? If so, you really need to get out more.

Okay, this is my last try. I won’t feed this particular troll anymore. She took the baby to class. She made the best of a situation in which her alternatives weren’t do the job or abandon a sick child. For this you criticize her? You, sir (and I use that term advisably) a jerk, an asshole and a fucking idiot. Now fuck off.

Can someone point me to an article about what the US basline is on mothers breastfeeding? I thought it was ok, as long as done “modestly” meaning the mother is draping a cloth over the baby. I now know this is the Indian norm, but I am at a major US university and it seems to be the norm here too. But america is a big place-is the norm different elswhere? I was in boston and it seemed the same . . . .

Okay, I shouldn’t do this. But here goes.

Ever heard of reading? The situation is this: her daycare option wasn’t available. Read, dick, read. Think. Get your head out of your ass.

California gives mothers the right to nurse anywhere, anytime. For reasons beyond my comprehension this offends diners at fine restaurants and, apparently, students, none of whom otherwise object to consuming food in public. For some strange reason certain acts of nourishment are treated in public discourse as though they were flagrant assaults upon decency.

I can even remember when students brought their dogs to class. Once I traded a professor a cigarette for a light. Kids these days have nothing to complain about.

I’m with Chris TS on this. I breastfed my daughter in public (including, on one memorable occasion, on Route 50 in the middle of Middleburg, Virginia), but I would never have dreamed of breastfeeding her during a business meeting, or in court. I agree the kerfuffle here is overblown, but the professor’s conduct was still inappropriate. The child was old enough to crawl, and apparently was accustomed to being in a daycare environment, which suggests that the professor could have fed the child either immediately before or immediately after the 75-minute class. For me, it’s not just a matter of “boobies”; it’s a matter of attention. If the professor had pulled out a bottle and little jars of mashed bananas and rice cereal and started feeding the kid, it still wouldn’t have been the right way to approach teaching a class.

Also, the kid was feverish. For both the child’s sake, and the sake of the other people in the room, the child should have been kept in a more isolated, quieter environment.

I mean, come on, guys. The professor isn’t some downtrodden factory worker. She’s a fucking AU professor. She had resources. She should have used them appropriately.

It’s interesting to me to watch the head-on collision here between the sexual division of labor — with all its historical overtones of the subjugation of women — and Duff Clarity’s (male? false?) working-class dyspepsia.

Yes, if we want women to have access to all the income-earning potential of men, they may wind up being heavy equipment operators, military police pffocers, airline pilots, and what have you. If women doing these jobs also have children, and want to breastfeed, there are issues that they, and more importantly, society as a whole, will be obliged to confront. My own feeling is that we can, and should, be a lot less rigid in our thinking about such issues than we currently are. Certainly there are a lot of DC’s out there, who’d prefer just to assert that never-the-twin-shall-meet, and go on about their business as usual.

That’s why women like Tedra, being professors as well as breast-feeding mothers and feminists, are so ideally situated to call attention to what we’ve been sweeping under the rug. Surely this is a good thing. We really do need to put the corporate sausage grinder’s definition of work, and our definitions of what it means to be human in the same room and let them glower at one another up close and personal. Having been one of those legendary father/bureaucrats who never got to see his kids, and almost forgot why he should want to, I would welcome the confrontation. And, by the way, God bless the women who manage to bring what we aren’t considering carefully enough to our attention, and who refuse to allow us to look away. If, at the moment, they have to be professors to get away with it, I say good on ’em. We’ve gotta start somewhere.

The fantasy of control over children, though, seems to me to be based on the very bizarre idea that children have no autonomy or self-determination, something so abundantly untrue that I can’t imagine anyone actually affirming it. Myths of “bad parenting” and “bad teachers” seem to flow more from that than anywhere else.

Except, that very many people absolutely believe it, including very many people who have children—that children can be “trained up”.

We had a string of fights in Australia over breastfeeding in Parliament. A Victorian MP was ejected for doing so in 2003. But I think that’s all been resolved now. At least the NSW Parliament made it officially OK five years ago.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Breastfeeding-okay-in-NSW-parliament/2007/10/17/1192300836750.html
And, contrary to DC’s bogus working class shtick, that is, as it should be, a legal right for all workers, not some kind of middle class indulgence
http://www.babycenter.com.au/baby/workandchildcare/breastfeeding&working/#10

Tedra, as you say, we’re counting on you to stick it to trolls like DC as hard as possible, so please don’t hold back.

Tim, one difference is that if the student has to miss class, only she suffers. If the professor misses class, a large number of people suffer. That’s not at all to imply that there should be a different rule, just to point out that there could be a justification for treating the cases differently.

I’m finding much of the commentary above pretty medieval (in the ahistorical pejorative sense – obviously public breastfeeding must have been routine in actual medieval times). Is the US (and, given Tim W’s intervention, the UK) really as backward as these comments suggest?

As the OP says, this is part of life – if your work or study requires you to be somewhere public and your baby needs to be fed, there’s no sensible alternative. Obvious examples include university teachers and students.

“Is the US (and, given Tim W’s intervention, the UK) really as backward as these comments suggest?”

I must admit my gut instinct is to be pretty hostile towards Prof Pine, although I don’t know what’s driving that hostility. Etv13 at 55 makes a reasonable argument against though, a far as I can see. (The journalist thing is disgraceful but irrelevant to the point of the post)

Maybe one of the underlying questions here is how much freedom one should have to do a less than “I’m hopped up on ritalin and can only devote my attention to 1 task 100%” job of things.

Obviously, there is the DC position that one’s job is to give “100% attention” (and, presumably, 100% time) to one’s job. Alternatively, one might take the view that a certain degree of what one could call, pejoratively, shirking should be expected and accommodated, in all jobs.

One should be able to get up off the assembly line, or step out of the classroom, in order to take a piss, have a smoke, get a drink of water, eat a snack, or just gather oneself for a minute, as inefficient as all this freedom and autonomy may be. But no, any relaxation of draconian policy is surely an irreversible slip towards sloth, indolence, and inefficiency.

If you let workers cut themselves and each other a break every now and again, the whole world will fall apart and we’ll have nothing but lazy union shirkers taking 2 hour lunches and 3 smoke breaks an hour and socializing at the watercooler for minutes on end.

The shiftless and self-serving will maximize their leisure and the poor honest working man will toil away, covering for the poor work ethic of his lazy (and probably sexually or racially or class-ishly other) coworker, because people are all assholes and the very idea that you could expect them to work together cooperatively and fairly on their own terms is preposterous.

“Doesn’t sound so much as a taboo as just a social norm.”

A taboo is a social norm. (OK, originally it’s a Polynesian religious prohibition, but in common usage outside Polynesia, that’s what it means: X is taboo = there is a social norm that we don’t do X.)

Right, but some of the social norms, including this one, are not nearly as strong as what most people would identify as ‘taboo’. Or maybe it’s just me.

72: of course. And, as the reaction of the students – and a lot of other people elsewhere – demonstrates, we do. Or at least a lot of people do. Enough that, I think, it qualifies as a taboo. Just as, say, topless bathing is. (Not sexual, not scatological, not gross; but still taboo, at least in the US.)

A small kid in class is a no no: it distracts the professor AND the students.

Pine herself admits it:
“The flow of my lecture was interrupted once by “Professor, your son has a paper-clip in his mouth” (I promptly extracted it without correcting my students’ gendered assumptions) and again when she crawled a little too close to an electrical outlet”
and
“I admit those lectures haven’t always gone so well (baby can get fidgety)”.

She even has the nerve of writing
“I guess there are faculty out there who think it’s appropriate to check their BlackBerries while lecturing”.

(All considered, in her post she comes out as a self-entitled asshole).

“Taboo” seems much too strong. Breastfeeding in public certainly isn’t taboo in the US — I did it for a couple of years and never got a negative reaction strong enough that I had to notice it. So any taboo we’re talking about it would be limited to the narrow circumstance of breastfeeding while teaching, or while working.

And the reaction she got doesn’t suggest that she violated a taboo either — a student commented on her breastfeeding negatively online, but there’s no indication that anyone openly objected to what she was doing to her face at the time. If she’d, say, shown up to teach class naked, that would be a real taboo violation, and people would have freaked out about it, left the room, and gone to get help. If behavior is socially acceptable enough that the minimal level of authority a college teacher has over their students is enough to get the students to take it in stride, at least on a surface level, I think it’s misleading to describe it as taboo.

Now, it’s clearly something that plenty of people disapprove of strongly enough that this fuss blew up about it, but not everything that you can find people who disapprove of is taboo.

Why isn’t this spelled out in policy of what is and what is not permitted to avoid these types of situations? It should either be permissible or not to breastfeed in the classroom, for professors and students alike. No need to guess about taboos and social norms.

Breastfeeding in class was an abuse of authority? If I look at it uncharitably, I can follow the argument that teaching with divided attention was unprofessional, and worse than cancelling class. But I can’t see where abuse of authority kicks in.

79: The extent of negative reaction from students in the class (and I may be missing something) was I think a “tweet” or Facebook post made during class. The trouble started when the reporter (I think due to her having seen said “tweet”) approached the prof. about writing a story.

Manta: I’m still not following. The fact that a professor has some minimal authority over her students does not automatically make any action of hers an abuse of that authority.

Lizard: first, the authority is not “minimal” at all.

Second, a few students (the Washington Post story quotes 2) were uncomfortable with it
(or, to quote you again “Now, it’s clearly something that plenty of people disapprove of strongly enough that this fuss blew up about it”).

Thus: she had a captive audience, and put them in an uncomfortable position for reasons that have nothing to to with her job.

BTW, given her treatment of the journalist, I think likely that quite a few students would have felt very intimidated about objecting to her behaviour in public.

Judging by Duff’s blog he’s about as working class as I am (not at all). He does work as an excellent example of ignorant male privilege rearing it’s ugly head – and for that I thank him.

‘ If you’re upset by breast feeding, then you have a problem.’

‘If you don’t agree with me, there’s something wrong with you.’ Very logical.

I am having a hard time knowing what to think here.
1) I support the right of women to breastfeed in public. Babies get hungry.
2) I question an individual’s ability to teach with their sick baby in the room and I could understand why some students may be annoyed that their class time is being taken up in such a way. That said this whole issue would not exist if people had access to reasonable sick day provisions.
3) I find this particular woman’s response odious in the extreme. Naming and shaming the student journalist is completely unacceptable and a way bigger deal than many of the people here seem to realize. She should actually lose her job over that as far as I am concerned.

MPAVictoria’s (3) is where I am on this (minus the being fired stuff). As far as I can tell, there was no outraged student response to her breastfeeding. One ass tweeted about it. The histoires began when she started fighting with the student journalist. I completely understand that the professor didn’t want her actions to be or to merit any sort of story, but her mocking of the journalist’s naivete and enthusiasm is practically a derogation of duty.

“From the stories, it doesn’t sound as if any actual students expressed annoyance at the presence of the baby—obviously not it’s not ideal, but it’s the sort of thing that does happen when you get stuck. The student who complained limited his complaint to the breastfeeding.”

Fair enough. I stand by my statement that it would be near impossible to teach well with your sick baby in the room and that the whole problem could have been avoided by having sensible policies related to sick leave.

for reasons that have nothing to to with her job.

Isn’t the topic of the course “Sex Gender and Culture”? If this course is anything like a similarly titled course I took in college, the kind of person made uncomfortable by witnessing an act of breastfeeding is quite likely to be made uncomfortable on a fairly regular basis throughout the semester.

Sometimes learning things means questioning some of your previously unexamined assumptions and beliefs. We are, for better or worse, members of a species that finds that process uncomfortable more often than not. If there were students in the room who were troubled by the breastfeeding, but then examined their own reaction afresh, trying to understand why they were troubled, this whole incident has pretty obvious pedagogical value, insofar as it helps some students get in the mindset to think critically and openly about gender and culture, and follow their own gut reactions a bit less than blindly than they otherwise might.

@90: “Judging by Duff’s blog he’s about as working class as I am (not at all)”

I’m not working class. I used to be. I worked on a factory floor for the better (well worse, actually) part of a decade. That’s how I know that when Git@69 says, “One should be able to get up off the assembly line, or step out of the classroom, in order to take a piss, have a smoke, get a drink of water, eat a snack, or just gather oneself for a minute”, that that isn’t how things work.

You did get a break on the assembly line, you got three of them on an 8 hour shift – one 30 minute break and two 15 minute ones. You got them when it was convenient for others, and someone had to be there to take your place while you took your break. If you took a break outside of that time, you were written up. If you took too long on break, you were written up. If you were written up three times in a year, you were fired.

As for John Quiggen’s remark @ 61, “And, contrary to DC’s bogus working class shtick, that is, as it should be, a legal right for all workers, not some kind of middle class indulgence”, Mr. Quiggen should read the content to which he linked. It says, in part, “Work out in advance whether there is somewhere suitable for you to express or feed (not the toilet area), a refrigerator where you can store expressed milk, a place for you to store your breastpump and suitable break times”.

In a classroom during class is not a suitable break time. In a classroom during class, a professor should be teaching. That’s part of what the professor was hired to do. If you are intelligent enough to teach at the university level, you should be intelligent enough to figure out your child care situation so that it does not interfere with your teaching.

Was I saying that was how things work? Oh, wait, no, I wasn’t. Obviously taking breaks on an assembly line is hard, and scheduling breaks is best. And yet, it is entirely possible to set up a system for accommodating impromptu breaks, even in assembly line conditions.

On the one hand, I am confused as to why this woman had to feed her baby during class. It is only 75 minutes after all. It is an unusual baby that could not be fed beforehand, but would not tolerate waiting through the 75 min. That seems like a questionable decision to me, even one you might criticize someone for. But I don’t think it’s worth writing a story about or getting worked up about.

On the other hand, I think DC has done us all a service by highlighting very clearly the point that TO makes, which is that this is about the loss of autonomy that child-rearing brings. It is literally impossible to raise a child without the child’s basic needs conflicting, on a few occasions, with the demands of an inflexible job. This can be dealt with as long as one person who can be responsible for the child does not have an inflexible job. That person can be a partner in the relationship, a relative or even a friend. But there are obviously significant problems with imposing this kind of requirement on everyone with children. We should endeavor to build a society where jobs must be made flexible to the point that they can accomodate working mothers with children and no available stay-at-home partner or parents or our society is inherently sexist. The fact that poor working women are often fired as a result of facing this dilemma is a pretty terrible argument for applying the same inflexible standard to professors. Instead, we ought to require that all jobs provide a reasonable level of flexibility for such circumstances to the extent that it is possible to do so. There may be some very rare jobs where this is not possible, but your generic factory job is certainly not such a case.

A few more points:

It sounds like the nursing was a (successful) attempt to calm the baby when she got fussy, not a scheduled feeding that could have been done before or after class. It also sounds like the professor was used to having a tiny baby in class, who sat quietly through the lecture, not a crawling baby whom some students might become alarmed about when they saw her crawling near the edge of the lectern or something. But this could have been prevented somewhat by asking for help–arguing in favor of institutional changes (while reasonable in general) doesn’t seem to me like it could have prevented this from ever happening.

Incidentally, I assume an older male professor (like an older male executive) would have parked his child with the department secretary for however long he needed.

On the other hand, of course, if the university in question has a strict “no breastfeeding in class” policy for students, other questions are raised.

99: Oh, I dunno. Likely nothing. But her response to the student sure makes me doubt her pedagogical instincts. As a feminist and a medical anthropologist it seems like responding to the reporter’s questions (and indeed enthusiasm and support) about taking her baby to class ought to have been squarely within the professor’s wheelhouse. Instead she tried to get the story killed and then mocked the student’s enthusiasm and ignorance of the relevant gender and labor issues. I 100% agree with her that what happened should be unmarked, but as a feminist anthropologist she surely knows that it isn’t. (And I’ve got zero problem with her having brought her baby to class that day and nursing her when she fussed.)

“I’m highlighting the loss of autonomy that having a job brings for the vast majority of people in the world.”

Your highlighting of which wouldn’t be a problem (see many previous Crooked Timber posts on freedom and the workplace), except you seem to regard that loss of autonomy as perfectly acceptable feature of life.

I’m highlighting the loss of autonomy that having a job brings for the vast majority of people in the world.

Which is fine with you, right? Otherwise why would that do your fucking job routine be the first thing out of your mouth? You don’t have to be a Marxist to see that the transformation of human beings into interchangeable parts of the machinery of global capitalism is well past its sell-by date, no matter what we’re being told about the triumphs of Foxconn or Monsanto elsewhere in the world. We need to think about what comes next, and if that includes sneering at single mothers trying to raise the next generation in a world that a) has next to no tolerance for child-rearing, b) treats very screwy ideas about paying the people who raise them as normal, c) advocates even screwier ideas about educating the children who do manage to get raised, and d) since it has no jobs for them anyway, treats teenagers as a form of vermin, then we’re in for a world of hurt. I figure you’ve gotta be either a sadist or a masochist — maybe both — to think that such a world is worth defending.

It’s weird that the discourse is veering so far into the libertarian autonomy side of things. I would figure there would at least be some cult-of-motherhood backlash. Certainly from my perspective, a minor inconvenience to class on occasion is a pretty small loss of value, compared to the importance of caring for a sick child. Especially when you put this in the context of a first day, when the professor’s primary job was probably to bring copies of the syllabus to class and make sure people knew where to buy their textbooks. I would have made exactly the same decision, personally.

I’m surprised Duff Clarity hasn’t told anyone “shut your pie-hole” yet.

Why is everybody, (bar Barry Freed), taking Duff Clarity seriously?

Given that average quality of a university lecture, I struggle to believe that it was affected by the baby.

This is it, really. It’s like people are working with some Platonic ideal of a university lecture (at both ends) and then gasping, “Oh my god, a baby!” Professors e.g. phoning it in and/or students getting distracted isn’t exactly unheard of in the business. And let’s after all not discount the possibility that one of the effects of the baby in class was to keep one or more students awake.

js @121:
since we cannot do a perfect job, there is no problem doing a shitty on?
(I am not necessarily saying that in this occasion Pine did a shitty job: after all, we only have her testimony about that).

Colin @122: what is a “warranted” taboo?
Moreover, pushing a student’s taboo for no good reason is not simply “distracting” him: it’s abusing one’s position.
On the other hand, your take is interesting.

rf @ 124

I’m not altogether sure that engaging DC in this forum isn’t productive, or more to the point, that it precludes the other remedies you propose as more effective. Even if you consider commenting here merely as a bit of practice, or a bargain-basement morale booster, it’s at least marginally useful, and when you consider the post and the comments thread as a whole, it’s hard to deny that it’s a kind of microcosm of the arguments people make elsewhere on this issue. Then, too, you can’t know precisely what the people who read CT make of its debates in the wider world, and thus can’t reliably measure the significance of its influence. From a strictly cost-benefit perspective, it seems to me to be an inexpensive way to advance the cause, whatever you may think the cause is.

@106 I’m not highlighting the loss of autonomy that child-rearing brings. I’m highlighting the loss of autonomy that having a job brings for the vast majority of people in the world.

Actually you’re highlighting how much the workplace sucks in the US. Workers aren’t entitled to toilet breaks either. Breast feeding isn’t the issue here. While noone can stop you celebrating the fact that US workers can be treated like serfs, it is seriously off topic.

since we cannot do a perfect job, there is no problem doing a shitty on?

I will try this in simple language. Given the choice between doing no job, and a less than perfect job due to circumstances beyond one’s control. Less than perfect is better. For most of us this is not a hard concept to grasp – given time you’ll get there.

Moreover, pushing a student’s taboo for no good reason is not simply “distracting” him: it’s abusing one’s position.

Because a hungry or fussy baby is no good reason.

Incidentally, this is why the nakedness taboo is a really bad example.

The room was already filled with college students. Surely one more boob in class wasn’t that disruptive.

“but you have to read between the lines pretty carefully to understand his meaning.”
Well not THAT carefully.

Those childish students! Expecting a professor to behave professionally.

Cian: How many working moms do you know that decided to bring their baby during a lecture and breastfeed him? I know 0 of them: but maybe you have more experience?
Moreover, a professor in academics is one of the most flexible jobs I know of.
In a few word: the “she did not have any other options” line is pure bullshit.

js @121:
since we cannot do a perfect job, there is no problem doing a shitty on?

Cian pretty much already covered this, but no, that is not the point. The point is that there are lots of distractions in the classroom, and lots of ways in which students and/or professors might not be giving it their “100%”, not to mention purely structural problems that can become massively distracting. So the outrage over this particular case (evident e.g. in this thread) suggests that (1) a lot of people don’t have a good sense of what lectures are often like, or (2) there’s something else going on, and “but think of the distraction!” isn’t really the source of the outrage. I suspect it’s a bit of both, though perhaps more the latter.

Hmm, in the above if its not clear. I have met working mothers who had live in au-pairs/nannies who were super-professional.

To anticipate the inevitable Duff Clarity comment – no, none of these women worked on a factory floor.

Or had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night half an hour before they went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work for that matter.

I don’t get the strong feelings here. When you’re a parent of either sex you sometimes say “fuck it” and get the job done regardless of whatever you think decorum might be (and I think the decorum around breastfeeding is stupid). It’s not the end of the world. I have a fuzzy recall of being bananas for about a year after The Lovely Daughter was born and while it’s not nice to think others share my weakness I am willing to cut a lot of slack when someone is outraged that a parent is not performing to their standards.

Substance, what Pine did in class was stupid, but, as you said, not the end of the world.
But it was she that decided to threaten to sue a student and write a post “explaining” her actions.

So: doing something stupid on the heat of the moment? Been there, done that (many times…).
Acting self-righteous about it? A bit less often.
Threatening to sue a student AND having quite a few people defending my stupid action? Well, no (neither of those).

I am quite sure most CT commenters DO know what lectures look like, and quite a few of them from both sides.

Which would seem to make the outrage that much more puzzling…

Most women I am familiar with in the academic setting are uber-professional

So is Pine, obviously. It’s why she didn’t cancel class! Why are people having so much difficulty with this?

I submit that boobs are troubling, and breastfeeding in particular is troubling, not because it is sexual, but because it is intimate, loving, human contact. Americans are fine with sex, we plaster sex everywhere. We have trouble with being intimate with each other; we bound off the acceptable levels of handholding and hugging and kissing to age-matched, slender, heterosexual couples (or children) (or, when you factor in patting on the ass, professional male athletes) because those intimate encounters we can pretend or easily map onto being the sexual encounters we see in the movies, TV, etc. etc.

Americans don’t like to see fat people, gay people, or old people kissing, because we can’t pretend this is a Hollywood movie. When the intimate contact is as prolonged as breastfeeding, it becomes that much harder for us to deal with.

Unrelatedly: What, exactly, did any of the students “have to involuntarily do” (WRT the breastfeeding, not the paperclip/outlet, which I’m separating from the teatching moment)? “Doing” and “being in the same room as” are not the same thing.

So probably universities shouldn’t hire women with children, or likely to have children, unless they have an au pair? That would be the logical conclusion.

Only if you are a white, middle class male. Congratulations, you’ll do fine.

Cian, continuing to accuse everybody that disagree with you of being “white, middle class male” will not win any argument.

Quite a few people (male and female, I think: about their class or color I have no idea) pointed out that working moms are quite able to what their jobs require and do it properly.

Marshall 09.14.12 at 9:36 pm:

‘I think it’s weird that being in the presence of somebody doing something counts as having something done to you.’

It seems to be a very widespread belief or feeling in practically every culture I know about, although of course the specifics vary widely from one to another. Even excluding behaviors which are clearly disruptive, like making loud noises or threatening people with weapons, even in the rarefied atmospheres of bohemia and academe, I would guess that certain acts in public, like excretion or sexual intercourse, would annoy many to the point of causing them to raise an objection. And of course there are many lesser degrees of exhibition, like partial or total nudity, whether functional or decorative, which some people seem to find offensive. What has surprised me in this discussion is the preponderance of apodictic vehemence. I don’t see much that is self-evidently justified about the customs — or a rejection of them. I can’t help wondering how the vehement are so sure theirs is the one correct view.

Anarcissie, it’s neither my call or yours to decide what the students find objectionable: it’s theirs; but Pine decided to blithely dismiss their sensibilities.
(And then to insult and threaten the students who were trying to report on it.)

OK, I know all the answers:

1) She should have cancelled the class, for the same reason that daycare was unavailable – people, including babies, with fevers may well be contagious. She should have called in sick the next day too, when she had the same illness herself. But this is a common mistake, so let’s not judge her too harshly.

2) The fever aside, turning up to work with a baby may be a better choice than not turning up at all. I once attended a high-level (but informal) meeting at an investment bank with my infant son in a baby carrier, because that seemed to me to be the best available option. And my boss, who had called the meeting at short notice, trusted my judgment.

3) Having turned up to work with a baby, there’s nothing wrong with breastfeeding it. It’s bizarre that anyone should want to write a newspaper article about the breastfeeding (I’m British; I don’t think the UK is backward about this).

4) I hope those aren’t real names she’s used for the student journalists. Because if they are, that would be outrageous. They offered not to use her name.

“at some point it is the professor’s right to decide what the students find objectionable.”

Wait, what? No, what the students find objectionable is, from the professor’s point of view, a matter of objective fact.

“There are many, many examples where the professor’s duty is to set the tone and boundaries of what is and is not appropriate in the classroom, and override students’ objections. Students are free to leave if they are uncomfortable.”

Students are also free to talk to student newspaper reporters, who are free to publish articles and bring the weight of social opprobrium crashing down on the professor’s head.

I simply don’t believe that you don’t understand that there is a taboo against public breastfeeding. It’s got nothing to do with what should be, it’s what is.

Pine claims not to have anticipated that this taboo would be operative in her class. If that’s true it’s evidence of extraordinary naivety (perhaps the sort of naivety that would lead one to identify oneself as a militant anthropologist). A professor who transgresses a taboo this strong is going to be hit with extreme pressure to conform.

I think we can all agree that the professor has handled the situation rather disastrously after “the incident.” It’s also true that there still exists a strong taboo against public breastfeeding; however, there’s a huge trend away from that taboo and it’s obviously more operative in some campuses and cities and less operative in others. We don’t know what percentage of students were surprised, we don’t know if this has happened before in other North American classrooms and gone unremarked (though I certainly know that students do it all the time).

That said, none of the students objected strongly enough to actually object at the time, or object to the professor, or to the administration. It’s closer to the truth to say that they were titillated by seeing a professor breastfeed in public, or perhaps scandalized, and gossiped about it, which then led to the interest of a student journalist, which then led to a series of bad decisions by the professor. I agree that granting that interview could have well been a career-ending mistake; but it shouldn’t be.

I’m still stunned by much of this commentary. The worker here was entirely within her rights to feed her child while doing her job – no one has suggested a feasible alternative that would accomplish both goals.

A couple of people suggested she could have waited until the 75 minute class was over to feed the child. I don’t have any idea how long hungry infants can reasonably expected to wait to be fed, but it seems like it might be a feasible alternative.

parse wrote:

A couple of people suggested she could have waited until the 75 minute class was over to feed the child. I don’t have any idea how long hungry infants can reasonably expected to wait to be fed, but it seems like it might be a feasible alternative.

Middle-aged white, academic male here with 2 adult children. Without expressing an opinion one or the other on “the incident”, and w/o wanting to take parse to task, esp. since at least one other person has expressed a similar sentiment on this thread…

This reminds me of something from long ago, about a middle-aged man in Victorian or Edwardian England trying to make small talk to a good friend who had become a parent a couple of months earlier, asking whether the child was speaking yet and what it was saying.

Some cultures, so I understand, are fairly good at training very young children — infants — certain behaviors: bowel & bladder control around the same time as they are walking, sleeping on command, not crying, etc. Perhaps understanding that meals are to be had on an externally determined schedule. If this is indeed the case, good for them. It certainly is not something that our culture stresses, nor are we very good at it.

Anyway, as Prof. Pine wrote in the linked article, When Lee grew restless, I briefly fed her without stopping lecture, and much to my relief, she fell asleep.

The issue was not that the baby was hungry so much as she needed soothing. This is not something that can be done on a schedule. Prof. Pine mentioned taking the advice of a visiting Chilean friend in bringer her daughter to class. A Chilean friend of mine in graduate school once mentioned a folk remedy for soothing restless infants: stroking their genitals. He also insisted that it works pretty well on adults. I suspect that this would have led to considerably more disruption in the class. Nursing the child was probably a better course of action.

oudemia 09.15.12 at 2:17 am:
‘breaching the ordinary norms of privacy and decency’
How on earth is this the case here?

All norms are ordinary, but some norms are more ordinary than other norms. I know I still haven’t gotten an explanation of what standards of conduct in public are desirable, if any, and why.

I’m still trying to get the natalism thing, too. Back in the day, (1960s-70s) the feminist activists I knew were anti-natalists, seeing natalism as yet another tool of patriarchal domination, resulting, of course, in gross overpopulation, tyranny, war, destruction of the planet, and so on. But now…. But maybe that’s another subject.

John Quiggen @ 164 : “The worker here was entirely within her rights to feed her child while doing her job – no one has suggested a feasible alternative that would accomplish both goals”

As your own link showed, the worker would not have been within her rights even if she were in Australia, which she wasn’t. Advising people that they should negotiate doing such things on their break time is not the same as advising workers that they get to do whatever they want wherever they want whenever they want. Sorry!

In the US, contrary to Cian@169, employers are required to give you access to restrooms at work, it’s an OSHA rule. But no, they don’t have to let you bring your kid to work and if they do let you bring your kid to work they don’t have to let you feed it, and if they do let you feed it they don’t have to let you breast feed it.

Here is the best alternative: the woman, a PhD, when she decided to have a child and continue working, should have figured out the daycare situation and known that sometimes kids get sick. Every woman on the line in the factory that you lie and say I never worked at managed to do that. A professor can’t? Bullshit.

Here’s the next alternative, in the article she said she had a friend visiting that told her to take the kid to class. She could have had the friend take care of the kid for one class period.

Here’s the next alternative, the TA ended up rocking the kid in the classroom to keep it quiet. The TA could have done that outside of class.

Here’s the next alternative, this was the first day of class. I’m sure you know how the first day of class goes down. The TA could have handled that. Here’s the syllabus, here’s the books you need, here’s some more information about militant feminist anthropology. Now get out of here.

Here’s the next alternative, this was the first day of class. Who cares? Who goes to the first day of class anyway? All that shit should be online anyway.

For God sakes John you are a professor. You should know better than the second part of your comment at 164.

Coming to this late, I confess to not having read all the comments, but as someone who, some 30 years ago, breastfed in front of students (male as well as female, in my office), held a seminar class in my home with a two-day-old beside me whom I was prepared to breastfeed (she slept on, however), occasionally brought a toddler to class (the most disruptive age! but funny and some crazy fun memories!) and more than occasionally brought slightly older children to classes — let’s hear it for coloring books! — btw, there was little or no daycare available in the days I’m talking about; hell, there were no maternity leaves — I will add a cent or two here.

Whatever this professor did or did not handle well, she is an ASSISTANT professor, deserving of guidance from tenured faculty in her department (among others with more experience), once this became a campus issue: did she receive that guidance? Professional obligations extend beyond the teacher-student relationship. Unless I missed something, a curious silence on this aspect of the story.

It seems pretty obvious to me that, while having a sick baby in class or, under any circumstances, having to attend to a baby or young child while also teaching, would not be ideal as a regular practice, stuff happens (news flash). I have taught through fevers of my own, as has nearly every teacher. BFD. In fact, you can create a special rapport with students when you conduct a class while you’re obviously suffering from illness — or while you’re tending a child (baby, toddler, older child with coloring book in front row). It can enhance and enrich the entire course. Obviously, continual disruptions would become a problem (whether caused by children or something else), but that’s not what was up here. This was one class and apparently more an organizational first meeting than anything else. (Would it have been preferable to cancel the class meeting altogether? Unlikely.) Anyway, who cares? Does any of us expect every single one of our class meetings to be subject to this kind of scrutiny?

Tessa’s post is more basic, about our (individually, as social groups) complicated relationship to boundary, continence, control, mutual dependence and need for independence — and our (every?) society’s extreme sensitivity to women’s bodies. I think Tessa’s on to something important. The notion that women can’t control their bodies because female bodies simply cannot be controlled (menstrual flows, water breaking, labor, lactation) is so widespread, and so fundamental to the oppression of people with female bodies (hey, folks — there are lots of scholarly books on this subject), that we can have trouble recognizing that notion operating in our own thinking and responses.

(Years ago, when I was talking about ancient Greek notions of female incontinence — Pandora as a leaky vessel (these were the early days of this kind of analysis) — a male student interrupted: what about wet dreams? and then others joined in: embarrassing erections? testosterone-fuelled eruptions of anger? Just a reminder that male and female are both prone to incontinence — and bravo to the young men who spoke up all those years ago. Has there been so little progress since?)

Against Pine for breast feeding during lecture? That’s silly. It happened once, not as a regular distraction.

The treatment of the student reporter is where I’m not clear. I sympathize with Prof Pine to the degree that any time someone is threatening another’s livelihood there must be a better reason than “it will entertain others”. On the one hand, public breast feeding is more than just an entertaining topic. But then it shouldn’t at all concern Prof. Pine. If she chose to regularly breast feed in public, well then ok. But she didn’t.

She’s not the story: people’s squeamishness is and the journalists could protect her and still do the story. I think centering the topic on Prof Pine is merely adding entertainment value to the story. And what is it when you potentially harm another, private person for entertainment? Thug. And journalistic thuggery is still thuggery. I want to say that these conclusions are too strong (perhaps because they’re not well represented on this thread), but there it is.

Ok, your a journalist kid. You wanna fuck w people’s lives to make copy? It should be for a greater cause than entertainment or self promotion.

I’d like to know more about the circumstances in which Prof Pine publicized the student-journalists name and private info. Perhaps that went too far, but so far in this thread no one has sufficiently taken the measure of the journalists’ actions. (& here I mean the editors more than the reporter).

[aeiou] @ Mr Quiggen 176 : “And, obviously, you’re cool with that. Presumably same goes for the fact that employer can fire you because they don’t like you, can easily suppress unions etc. You’ve shown yourself to be an anti-worker thug, so I’m not surprised.”

I don’t need a union at this point in my career. My employer can fire me for whatever reason and I can have another better paying job the same day if I want one.

Back in the day, in the working class jobs that you claim I never had, things were different.

I’m very pro-union, you’ll get a better deal if you all ask together than you will if you ask by yourself.

But you, you piece of shit. You call me an anti-worker thug? Really? I worked all those shit jobs that you never worked, and now you’re gonna lie and say I don’t know what it is to be working class?

Fuck you. Just fuck you.

[aeiou] That’s how its gonna be I guess. If you mess with Mr Quiggen you get disemvowelled.

Mr Quiggen, don’t ever fucking whine about unions here again.

It would be sort of a joke

DC: I disemvowelled you, not John or Tedra. We have a comments policy, there’s a link at the top of the page. You were plainly in violation – “comments which are personally defamatory or insulting or which seek to derail a thread through provocation of one kind or another” – now go away.

@Chris Bertram: Could we have a post/thread sometime soon about the comments policy and, specifically, the practice of disemvowelling? Please?

The reason this is a news story has nothing to do with an objection to breastfeeding per se, or to lazy teaching, neither of which is newsworthy. Rather, breastfeeding while in the middle of a lecture: making no ethical judgments, it’s clearly unheard of, and that’s why the tweet was sent out, and why the newspaper wanted to find out what happened. I’ve never heard, read or seen, first or third-hand, of it happening, and aside from one commenter, no one in this thread has either. I’ve also never heard of a lawyer or prosecutor or judge in court breastfeeding, or a speaker giving an address, or a congresswomen, or really anyone else on a public stage. These facts are arbitrarily close to defining a taboo.

You may question whether it *should* be taboo to breastfeed when on such a stage, but it clearly *is* taboo. I find it strange, as other commenters have, that an anthropologist of all people can’t understand this. And I’m fairly unconvinced by pleas of “what else could she have done?” given that there are millions of mothers in similar situations, the overwhelming majority of which have not broken the taboo. For one, a polite request to an office secretary or friendly grad student to watch the child seems totally appropriate when the professor is in such a bind, and given that the child attends daycare already, we know that many hours away from Mom, let alone 75 minutes, does not lead to the end of the world.

As for the treatment of the student reporter: I’m with others here. The professor will be lucky indeed to not be sanctioned for her treatment of that young woman.

Coming late to this discussion, and having read the comments (191 to date), as well as the Counterpunch piece by Prof. Pine herself, the post and thread on Alas! a blog, and the post and thread on Ethics Alarms by Jack Marshall, I feel like it’s all been said, and yet, somehow, it hasn’t.

The first day of classes of the fall semester (i.e. the start-up of the academic year) is pretty unique – you just really don’t want to stand up your class if at all possible. The class in question was sizable, and scheduling a make-up is often difficult if not impossible (for reasons related both to students’ schedules, and to that of the university).

What was she to do? This was quite literally a last-minute emergency, and she had no back-up plan in case her baby couldn’t go to day care.

I think that under the circumstances, I would have gone to class as she did, with some modifications: I would have availed myself of Laura’s gracious offer to look after Lee, explained the situation to the class at the outset, relieved Laura about midway through the class (or whenever Lee became fussy), taken Lee elsewhere and nursed her (Laura could have distributed the syllabus and answered procedural questions concerning the course during this period), and cut the 75-minute class period short by 15 minutes, to be made up in five-minute increments later in the semester.

Two additional points that haven’t been discussed in much depth on the threads (or I’ve missed them, if they have): AU apparently makes no provision for such emergencies (mentioned but not sufficiently stressed IMHO), and secondly, Dr. Pine’s decision not to “impose on” Laura indicates that she felt obliged to “go it alone”. Mothering an infant is simply not a one-person job; every anthropologist knows the mantra that “it takes a village to raise a child”. The TA seems to have been a decent person, and her humane offer to help could have been repaid by a gift, either material or “in kind” (Pine could have undertaken to mark one set of papers, assume responsibility for a couple of discussion sessions throughout the term, etc.).

Speaking from personal experience, I wasn’t able to have my children with me in class (I wasn’t a multi-tasker by nature). Thus, I took unpaid leave for their first year, and then had full-time, in-house care for years. The financial costs were high indeed and obviously, to judge from the cost of a single day of such care, Prof. Pine could not opt for such a solution in DC. Isn’t this also an issue here – that working women cannot afford (regular/reliable) back-up to support them in childcare emergencies?

“Is the US (and, given Tim W’s intervention, the UK) really as backward as these comments suggest?”

What’s backwards about asking whether professor and student are being treated equally?

As to the breast feeding in public thing we’ve all got over that long ago. Although I will admit to having been a touch discomfited when the nappy got changed on the pub table as others around were eating their lunches.

It’s not that the student needs ‘protection’, just that Prof Pine’s behaviour doesn’t speak well of here. The student never sought protection only Prof Pine did, who circled the wagons, brought on board her well connected friends, wrote an article in Counterpunch and generally made a big deal about this when no one else cared. So it’s difficult to sympathise with her.

JQ @ 196: It is far from obvious that “babies” — in this case, pretty close to a toddler, given her mom’s emphasis on the fact that she’d been breastfeeding her all over the place for “a full year” — “need to be fed.” Apparently the kid in question at the moment in question needed to be calmed down, not necessarily fed at all. In any case, we are not talking about abandoning the child to its own resources for a whole day, or anything like it — just a 75-minute class. You seem to be thinking, “Oh my god, poor starving infant — of course its mommy ought to feed it.” I’m thinking, “Oh my god, poor kid, its mom is an idiot who can’t plan even a couple of hours ahead and feed it before the start of class.” Let’s think about all the other days in this kid’s life, when she didn’t have a fever and was admitted to day care. What happened then? Presumably, Prof. Pine sent along a few bottles of expressed breast milk, or formula, and the day care people fed the baby using those. Why did she have to breastfeed in the middle of class on this particular day? By her own account, she didn’t have any choice but to breastfeed the child, but also by her own account, she doesn’t think breastfeeding is any big deal, understands that other women can’t breastfeed their children and use formula instead, and ended up “forced to breastfeed” for — well, for reasons that completely escape me. Last I checked, the grocery stores carried a pretty good supply of Enfamil.

Have you read Pine’s Counterpunch post? Because I think , based on what I read there, that she would have a quarrel with you and your “babies need to be fed (by their mothers, from the breast)” argument. But maybe not, because by the evidence in the article, consistency and rationality are not exactly her strong suits.

Re the student newspaper, again, have you read the Counterpunch article? What it indicates to me is that Prof. Pine went off half-cocked, based on a plethora of unsupported assumptions about the journalist, the editors, and the story they would write. Having lacked the sense to tell the journalist who turned up after class, “Look, I can’t talk now, I’m feeling sick,” she jumped to conclusions (again, without any real basis, and in contradiction to what she acknowledged was the pro-breastfeeding attitude of the student journalist herself) about what the story would say, and attempted to quash the story by claiming that it would cause a “hostile work environment” for her. I’m a lawyer and she’s a layperson, so it’s not really fair for me to say, “What a dolt, she doesn’t understand the term ‘hostile work environment’ at all,” but in fact, she doesn’t understand that term, and she seems to be throwing it around as a threat to try to get the journalists to back off. Based on her own account, I don’t see that the student journalists did anything wrong or inappropriate — having heard rumors about a professor doing something in class that excited/titillated/upset some of her students, they followed up with an attempted interview asking, among other things, what her political opinions were about the District of Columbia government’s attitude toward public breastfeeding, and what her experience generally had been. By Prof. Pine’s own account, the student journalist was “sophomoric,” but enthusiastically pro-breastfeeding. Yet Prof. Pine assumed the article would harm her (maybe she realized, on some instinctive level, that when you’re thinking patronizing and insulting things like “sophomoric” and “third-rate” about a bunch of students, you can’t in all fairness expect them to be kind to you). To allay her fears, the student editor offered to give her anonymity, yet Pine chose to go public with the Counterpunch article. To say that she didn’t do herself any favors is kind of an understatement.

The media? It was a college newspaper. This is what small town newspapers do, they write about nonsense, generally hang around the local court and annoy people. This is small town news that would have stayed local if Prof Pine hadn’t taken to the pages of Counterpunch. And good on them for not pulling the story, which might well have been favourable

Manta: your comments about appropriate behaviour here make interesting reading when compared to your contributions to earlier threads.

From the Eagle, apparently Prof Pine published the journalist and editors phone numbers.

http://www.theeagleonline.com/news/story/breast-feeding-news-judgement-under-scrutiny-after-national-attention/

“The essay also published both Mongilio and Cohen’s cellphone numbers, which were removed upon the University’s request a day later.”

It also appears the story was specifically about the rights and wrongs of breastfeeding in public. I’m at a loss to see how people are defending this, and arguing students shouldn’t be treated with kiddy gloves while professors should.

“The Eagle initially started looking into this story when we thought an unknown professor was under administrative review for breast-feeding in class. We then found a number of students who confirmed Pine had breast-fed her baby during a “Sex, Gender and Culture” lecture.
Heather Mongilio, who has worked at The Eagle as a news reporter for a year, interviewed Pine to confirm the information we had obtained. I subsequently offered Pine anonymity by withholding her name, the class and the school she teaches in.”

The relevant articles from the Eagle can be found quite easily online. I’ve a comment in moderation that charts the timeline as; newspaper hears University Professor is under investigation for breastfeeding, wants to publish story (apparently on arguments for and against public breastfeeding), asks around, finds the relevant Professor, grants her complete anonymity, Professor goes on Counterpunch and publishes journalist and editors phone numbers; story blows up due to Counterpunch article.
The moral being, we should respect peoples privacy and not treat students with kiddy gloves?

Here in NYC women can walk around topless if they wish. It’s an equal rights issue: If men can take their shirts off and flash their boobies, there’s no reason women shouldn’t be able to as well. I agree 100%, particularly when there’s a pressing need to do so, such as quieting a screeching baby. The students are just being entitled twats. (The intimidation of a student journalist is another issue, of course.)

With Tedra Ostell’s pieces, though, I always agree with the issue at hand (in this case, breastfeeding), but her broader points make me go “huh?” The problem isn’t that we hate being “forced” to do things — who doesn’t? — or that we value control over our lives and self-determination. Those are good progressive goals and values, and the idea that feminism is in opposition to them is bizarre.

The problem is we assume others are in perfect control of their lives when they aren’t, and we hold them responsible when we shouldn’t. We assume a single mother can find a sitter whenever she wants one; that women can avoid being harassed or raped (so women that are harassed or raped are irresponsible sluts); that Good Parents can prevent their kids from misbehaving (so if they misbehave they’re Bad Parents); that Good Teachers can improve test scores (so if their students’ get bad scores they’re Bad Teachers) and so forth. It’s a lack of empathy, not a desire for freedom, that’s the problem here.

@211 Ah. A problem with hearing these things second-hand. Well let me qualify by saying, “If they were making a big stink about breast-feeding they were entitled so-and-sos.” (I like the word “twat,” but if it bothers you replace it with something else.)

And re the power issues: Sure, she said to the TA “this is not within your job description.” If I’m in that position, I’m thinking, “Does she really mean this, or does she expect me to go above and beyond?” Finding an outside student or department employee, and even allowing money to change hands, seems less an inherent abuse of power than suggesting the TA is responsible for helping to keep order in the class but pretending some subpart of that task is not expected of her.

Manta at 209: Sorry, when I said “no one else on this blog” I meant none of the bloggers. Some of the commenters can be rude. It’s boring.
When I started commenting several years ago, I was often personally abusive. I try to behave better now. I may still be a jackass, but I try not to be a flaming asshole.

@212 I don’t like “twat” because it’s a gendered insult used against the oppressed half of the patriarchy. Not that you asked, but it may be something you haven’t thought of.

Re “request to an office secretary or friendly grad student,” what Chris said at 194. I’m stunned by the presumption in “request to an office secretary,” and while there’s a long tradition of exploiting powerless grad students we really don’t need to reinforce it.

It might help to distinguish between (a) bringing the kid to class and (b) breast-feeding said kid once it’s there. As I said upthread I agree that (a) is not something you want to do under normal circumstances, but I want to resist the idea that it’s so outlandish or extreme that you only do it after exhausting every other conceivable option, like imposing on office staff.

(Pulling back from the immediate controversy, one of the more interesting questions you can ask about *any* social/cultural milieu is what happens when a kid gets sick. *Somebody* is going to have to adjust their routine. Who? How is the adjustment spread? This is one of those moments when power becomes visible.)

Re (b), breast-feeding should not be a taboo. It should not even be a big deal. Tedra and others are making a *normative* argument that the taboo is wrong because it limits people’s freedom and ability to adjust. Repeating that the taboo exists is not a counter-argument.

Colin: can you point out some taboo that does not limits people’s freedom?

can you point out some taboo that does not limits people’s freedom?

I can’t think of any, myself. This is why I see taboos that serve no discernable rational purpose and have inegalitarian and discriminatory consequences as legitimate targets.

can you point out some taboo that does not limits people’s freedom?

The taboo on involuntary confinement?

One of Tedra’s major points is that when a changed environment makes preserving a taboo more trouble than it’s worth, something must be done. The more entrenched such a taboo is, being based in what everybody knows, etc., the more energy must be expended in combatting it. In the process, not only egos will get bruised. So what?

At this point, the sociological literature is full to the brim with the disconnect between earning a living and other human needs in post-industrial societies, particularly in a country like the United States, which appears to be ground zero for the idea that everybody is on his or her own, and God screw the child who ain’t got his own.

Just to name a few of these disconnects, we’re told that kids have no idea what their parents and other adults do every day, so they live in a fairy-tale when they’re young, and in subcultures devised partly by themselves and partly by consumer advertising when they reach adolescence. There are no rites of passage to speak of, so not surprisingly, many of our young arrive at the doorstep of adulthood like refugees from some distant Balkan war. (If they don’t wind up as victims of the War on Drugs in the meatime, that is.)

We don’t want to see that women are the ones who most often get stuck with resolving the contradictions between the demands of the factory floor or the office and those of their families, including the cost of child care that’s often nearly impossible to find, or to trust, an often underfunded and occasionally dangerous public education system, and what often looks like a war on the very idea of being a woman. None of our overseers of public morality seems to give a damn about this garbage heap of previous follies, or about women themselves, the people who are actually having to shovel through it.

If Professor Pine seems inclined to overreact, and to be suffering from an overnourished ego, consider the provocation. I think Tedra is absolutely right to be pissed. What surprises me is that she has so few allies here.

William, I see your point: she behaved like an asshole, but we should consider the provocations.

However, if prof. Pine was a work supervisor who unloaded her frustration on her subordinates I think you would be less sympathetic.

Child rearing as a single parent and working at the same time is hard.
Most likely, the university did not do enough to help its employees with kids.

But prof Pine did NOT complain to her superiors: as a two-bit bully, she attacked a person that was both inculpable of her situation and in a position of being easily hurt by her, i.e. a journalist students (with the support of her superiors, if I understood correctly).

@60 I think a lot of the specific “in class” issues really center around attention/attentiveness. I wouldn’t have a problem with a student nursing a baby in class — I’d have more problem with a student bringing a squrimy or crying child to class — not because there’s anything “wrong” with a squirmy or crying child, but because it will tend to distract from the overall purpose of the class.

I find it an axiomatic error to argue that something has never been done before to set a norm that forbids it. Where would we be without avantgardes since the start of humanity?

I neither used the term “teachable moment” nor does my argument logically entail that idea.

Salient brings the goods at 231. What an excellent comment, thanks.

Okay, while I was writing my comment, Salient’s came out of moderation. So this another prominent exception that may rapidly make this part of mine obsolete (Barry Freed’s too).

In other words: you are claiming that the student becomes a journalist an somehow loses his student status in her relationship with Pine; this is not true, as long as Pine can (and did try to) use her status as professor at the student university to squash the story.

Manta @ 238: the “story” doesn’t exist prior to the editors/reporters decision to threaten the reputation of a professor for sport. No, the desire to practice a profession without unwanted publicity is not subservient to the public’s desire for titillation.

Thank you, Salient. I had some vague sympathy for the position that her conduct vis a vis the student journalist raised some questions, but your comment (and manta’s utterly anemic response) is quite persuasive that my sympathy was misplaced.

I like you reasoning, Salient.

No you don’t.

A beautiful example of justification for horrid behaviour

I could see “justification for misbehaviour” or “for unprofessional behavior” or even “for irresponsible behavior” as coherent, but if any of this actually strikes you as horrid, we’re just going to have to keep living on our own separate planets, sorry. Horrid is, like, stabbing someone. Or getting stabbed! And ok, probably stuff like armed robbery is horrid. I think horrid stuff is stuff like stuff you’d probably feel PTSD about if you witnessed it; nothing here on anybody’s part tripped my ‘oh god that’s horrid’ trigger. Okay, so, I think the term “pearl clutching” is as stupid and awful and sexist as “the vapors” or “hysterics” … and a comment like yours makes me wish there was a more acceptable widely-recognized alternative word to mean ‘one who feigns shock rhetorical effect” so I could just call you it instead of writing out this whole sentence. (Not that I haven’t done that kind of thing myself. I won’t hold it against you; it’s probably usually an unconscious thing, in the heat of the moment.)

Pine rounded her colleagues for solidarity and help

Sheesh, only two misrepresentations in eight words? Surely you can do better than that!

[1.] The description “rounded up” does not apply. The professor notified her department chair (in effect, her boss) that an article about her might get published in the newspaper, with a quick description of what had happened so far, and a brief clarification of why she felt concerned about this. That is completely responsible and sensible behavior. If you learn a reporter is going to write a potentially hostile article about your conduct while at work, notifying your boss about it in advance is good professional conduct, and verges on professionally imperative. The decision to inform the staff and the dean was the chair’s discretion, undertaken with the professor’s permission (and, I’d say, was not a bad choice on the chair’s part).

[2.] The professor’s colleagues were not notified for solidarity or for help. See:

At that point, I spoke with my departmental chair, who … notified my colleagues and Dean that we were all possibly about to be drawn into a pointless story centered around my breasts. [Again, wordier non-ellipsesized passage is in the counterpunch article.]

I would say the purpose of writing the staff was to inform them that because of “a pointless story” in a local paper, they might find themselves in a weird position receiving reporters’ or students’ questions “centered around my breasts.” It’s useful to know when this kind of public discussion might take place, because getting ambushed with unexpected questions about a colleague while acting in your professional capacity is uncomfortable and might leave you sputtering nonsense.

Personally, as someone who has been quoted as saying “no conduct” in a newspaper, with the surrounding passage constructed to sound like I had endorsed a very disagreeable condemnation, I would definitely want to have a generic comment other than ‘no comment’ prepared. If someone questions you and you stammer and unthinkingly say “I have no idea,” they can publish some of the professor’s colleagues, such as Dr. Soandso, say they have “no idea” if this could mean the end of Dr. Pine’s career at this university. (Seriously, a variant of this happened to me.)

you are claiming that the student becomes a journalist an somehow loses his student status in her relationship with Pine

Misrepresentation [3.] The reporter was not one of the professor’s students. The reporter had no relationship to Pine, prior to the reporter’s decision to write a story about the professor. A reporter “becomes” a reporter when they act in their capacity as a reporter. There is nothing Pine did that would have been or should have been any different, even if the reporter had worked for the Washington City Paper or the Guardian or whatever.

@Manta What is this about using her position as a professor to stop the story?

The student newspaper at a university isn’t like a high school paper – professors have no capacity to censor it. As far as I can tell Pine did what anyone dealing with an obnoxious journalist/editor has the right to do (usually, ineffectually) namely write and ask that the piece not be published.

And, absolutely, the fact that a reporter happens to be a student (but not a student of the professor in question) makes no more difference in this case than if she were, for example, the professor’s landlord and was threatening eviction.

anonymous: the initial conditions are: no AU story, no Counterpunch article, no publicity. Then it’s: AU story a comin’, Counterpunch article, etc…

manta @ 238:

Since the beginning, for me, “the story” is about the practice of journalism w r t private citizens. Again, Pine only writes about it once the publicity is inevitable.

How would a piece in a school newspaper reporting the incident harm this woman

That’s a really straightforward hypothetical to answer by example:

AU PROFESSOR BARES BREASTS TO CLASS

Prof. Typeoftree angrily brushes off conduct as a “non-issue” in exclusive interview with our reporter

Student concerns ignite campus-wide controversy over appropriate bounds on professor privileges in the classroom

(Name changed so it doesn’t google up and make things worse for the professor.)

Wouldn’t even matter what the article said after that… and the fact that the paper considered this newsworthy in the first place, is pretty solid evidence they’d be pushing the “booooobs” angle. At least in the counterpunch thing the professor could make a statement in her own words, that hasn’t been clipped or filtered through whatever awful lens the reporter introduces — can’t exactly trust ’em to fairly and competently attend to genuine “balance” if they’re as titillation-focused as they seem.

#256- Philip Roth has already written it.

@128
“Breastfeeding while teaching a class is unprofessional. I have never heard of it happening”
When I was in grad school one of my professors would breast feed while interviewing prospective students in her office. She may well be a grandmother by now and is definitely a Dean. If Mayhew got out more and met a few female scientists, he might see some other breast feeding professors.

Nice post, nick.

But, if it comes to “whose sides are you on” question, how comes you are on the stronger side (Pine)? Maybe because you are an academic too, and thus find it easier to sympathize with her?

Here is my answer to your question about why (some) commenters here deny the theatrical aspect of what she did.
If you do something theatrical, it’s quite normal a newspaper would write about it.
And thus she was doubly unjustified in attacking the student reporter for writing about her exploit, and quite disingenuous in her description of what happened.

Really, what the fucking fuck? Since it’s a colleague, people feel the necessity to circle the wagons around her? All the happy talk about “empathy” and “blind spots” is only so much bullshit, and when it’s time to apply it to oneself it’s forgotten?

BTW, that’s the reason why I liked Salient reasoning (I was sincere in my praise): so much sweet talk to justify class solidarity. At least dsquared was honest in his answer: the student is in the weaker position, and should eat shit. (Well, it turns out that it was not really the end of swearing).

After reading the comments on this thread and then reading Professor Pine’s account at Counterpunch. I have to wonder what brought on all the angst by the super critical commentors on this site. Salient, thankfully, finally put the whole thing to a close by offering a realistic perspective to the the controversy.

It was all reminiscent of a situation I had 25 years ago while working on a controversial piece of transportation at a state legislature. An emotionally upset environmentalist, misunderstanding an issue, telephoned my office and told me that if the bill passed, both the senator sponsoring the legislation and I were “dead meat.” The office secretary, who also was the phone, immediately called the State Police to report the threat.

I told the state police officer responding that I did not believe the threat was credible
(I believed that I recognized the voice as someone who always made idle threats),
but he insisted that both the senator and myself should be placed under protection and that the threat should not be discussed with anyone else.

A reporter for a small, local community newpaper somehow found out about the threat
and cornered me in the state capital building demanding information on the threat and I told him that I could not talk about it and that he should talk to the state police, but they would probably deny any knowledge of any threat.

The reporter’s headline in the paper the next day: “Legislative Director Alleges Threat to Life of Senator; State Police Deny Any Knowlege of Threat”

#267- Please what? I wrote something that annoyed you and you responded with an open display of contempt. That’s a common rhetorical move among feminists, and not common among non-feminist academics (who are ikely to utilize arch sarcasm and clever ridicule). And it’s an example of different attitudes: feminists are bold, confrontational, even reckless. Academics are conformist, cautious, even timid. Feminists are egalitarian. Academics are hierarchical. Feminists are activists who act in solidarity with women. Academics are careerists who may sympathize with others but act only for themselves.

I’m not bothered that you called me a jackass. I’m pointing out that the feminist rhetorical strategy you adopted when you did so doesn’t work very well for academics. Pine – we are talking about Pine? – finds herself in a conflicted position. She claims to be a militant assistant professor, which is a contradiction in terms. And the internal contradictions, so to speak, have emerged to create the situation she’s in.

manta @ 263

Theatrical? Isn’t that when you do something simply for the sake of attention? Prof was a) doing her job and b) being a mother. Unless she put her nipple on the document camera or something, there’s no theatricality. Simple means to an end every step of the way.

Yes, to do this as a matter of course would be theatrical, unprofessional, burn-her-she’s-a-witch, etc… But it happened one time. For understandable reasons. I only see circular logic: I don’t like what she did because it’s wrong because I don’t like what she did because it’s wrong. On the one hand we have a mom caring for a sick child and introducing a college course: two things she’s doing that are nearly the antithesis of self-indulgence. On the other we have someone so caught up in their private feelings that they manifest as an objective reality (“I feel uncomfortable” becomes “she did something wrong”) that all must respect and observe: baby and course or both be damned.

To the contrary, any theatricality lies merely in the indulgence you give to your precious sensibilities, which neither sooth the flesh, alight the intellect, or inspire the spirit. Your feelings alone aren’t necessary your choice, but it most certainly is a choice to lobby for their public importance. Make the case. Why should your negative reaction to Pine’s breastfeeding concern anything beyond your own nervous system?

Only after you’ve convinced us that we should all like mustard but not ketchup and breasts in Renoir but not in reality can we then move on. Given that her breastfeeding to sooth a sick infant one time in class is established as objectively wrong, then Prof. Pine becomes the Other and has squashed a legitimate news story about her own Wrongness and thwarted the public good. But the entire crusade rests on that first act of judgment: thou shall not breast feed before a captive audience under any circumstances.

If, on the other hand, the fault lies merely in our nervous systems, and they will have recovered 5 minutes after the boob and baby are all in their proper place with no lasting trauma, the issue then becomes the Professor’s right to protect her reputation. Should the school paper be allowed to turn a one-time distraction into a Cause, an Incedent, a Threatrical Act of Deviant Professionalism? Why should anyone allow that the fleeting perceptions of a few students become the basis to harm someone’s career?

b9n10nt: I think you are mixing 2 separate questions:
1) was what she did in class wrong
and 2) was she doing something obviously noteworthy (and newsworthy)
You give some arguments to answer “no” to the first question, but you don’t say anything about 2).

Even granting 1) (which, anyhow, I consider only a small mistake on her part, so I can easily grant), 2) does not follow.
On the contrary, have strong evidence that what she did WAS newsworthy: I submit Tedra’s OP as evidence number I, and 274 comments to it as evidence number II.

There is point 3): did she realize at the time that she was doing something controversial?
Well, she is a professor, and anthropologist, and a militant feminist, but we should believe the answer is “no”?

Personally I find nothing wrong with Prof. Pine breastfeeding in class. But this thread has been instructive as to how tribalism works among academics, and it is not pretty.

“I could see “justification for misbehaviour” or “for unprofessional behavior” or even “for irresponsible behavior” as coherent, but if any of this actually strikes you as horrid, we’re just going to have to keep living on our own separate planets, sorry.”

It is very hard to think of any reason of Pine to publish the phone numbers of the student reporters except as an invitation for people to sympathize with her to anonymously harass them. If you think this is acceptable behavior we really are living on different planets.

Then there is the assumption that the student reporters are writing a “gossip piece”, with no evidence beyond a tortured deconstruction of a partially quoted email. If breast feeding is an important issue, shouldn’t the school news paper publish stories about it? It may not have been appropriate for them to write the story directly about Pine, though I see no evidence that it was going to hurt her career. However, none of the students actions are any where near as bad as Pine publishing there numbers in the middle of a highly inflammatory article.

I am less impressed by Salient’s comment than others seem to be. For starters, Salient did not quote the initial e-mail in full, omitting (among other things) the following sentence that came right before Salient’s block quote: “I do not want to make you feel uncomfortable.” That strikes me as a pretty important omission, when you’re claiming that this was a threatening email.

And let’s not forget that Pine’s Counterpunch piece was not triggered by this initial e-mail. Indeed, here is Pine’s own description of her response to this e-mail which Salient claims justifies everything Pine did afterwards: “I was shocked and annoyed that this would be considered newsworthy, and at the antiwoman implications inherent in the email’s tone. ‘Delicate’? ‘Uncomfortable’? What did the Eagle . . . think I was? A rice paper painting? A hymen?” By her own account, Pine didn’t feel threatened by this e-mail; rather, she was indignant about the suggestion that breastfeeding was a delicate subject, or that talking about it might make her feel uncomfortable. She fired off an email to Heather claiming that it was no big deal; the baby was hungry, she fed it, “end of story.”

Quoting again from Pine’s Counterpunch piece: “Following class I was accosted by budding reporter Heather, who clearly had not understood what I meant in my email by ‘end of story.'” Okay, so having responded to Heather’s email with a dismissive email of her own, Pine now follows up with a dismissive and condescending response to Heather in person (“budding reporter Heather” who is apparently incapable of understanding what Pine thinks is obvious). Then we get a snide comment about how Heather apparently thinks some professors check their Blackberries during class — Blackberries, sheesh! Where has Pine been? I last had a Blackberry about eight years ago — which, again, is nothing but Pine ragging on “budding reporter Heather,” followed by an attack on the Eagle based on Pine’s preconceptions that it is a third-rate sexist rag. I’m not sure I agree with Pine’s reading of the Eagle editorial about date rape, but whether her reading is correct or not, the salient point (no pun intended) about the Eagle’s being a student newspaper is that its staff turns over every three or four years. It’s really not fair to blame “budding reporter Heather” for things that happened before she even got to campus. But as far as Pine is concerned, it’s just peachy to judge Heather for things some unnamed editorialist wrote in the paper two or three years ago.

Anybody who sees these questions as intruding into Pine’s private life — well, I just don’t get you, that’s all. The whole point of the incident, episode, what-have-you, is that Pine didn’t breastfeed her kid in private. She didn’t feed young Lee in the National Portrait Gallery, or at a bus stop on Massachusetts Avenue. She didn’t breastfeed her in her office during office hours. She didn’t breastfeed her in a seminar with students she knew well. She breastfed her (or as Tedra put it, “whipped out a boob”) in a classroom at American University while giving a lecture to forty students on the first day of class. It sounds like no one had done that before, and obviously some of Pine’s students must have talked about it after class. Pine thought — or purports to have thought — it was no big deal, but apparently they thought differently. Can you really blame them for that? It’s an immature attitude, but they are immature. Whether they’re there to get an education or just credentials, we can’t expect them to act like people who already have an education. The attitude is there, and we should be prepared to deal with it. Maybe even — shocking thought — by publishing an article in the student newspaper examining the issues facing nursing faculty mothers.

‘Cause here’s the thing: Salient’s surmises about what Pine might have thought about the article that was going to be written aren’t borne out by what Pine herself says about what she thought was going to be in the article, or about why it troubled her. Here is what Pine said in the Counterpunch piece: “I was loathe to become the victim of the ‘scoop’ of a sexist third-rate univeristy newspaper.” But here is what she said in an email to a sympathetic colleague (also quoted in the Counterpunch piece): “I really don’t care what the slant of the article is. It’s just the fact of the article itself that I find offensive.”

How arrogant is this? Again, she did something in a classroom full of students at American University. Some of her own students apparently found what she did worthy of comment, and the staff of the university newspaper found it newsworthy. But their opinions don’t matter. She doesn’t want to be typed as a woman, or a mother. She’s offended when somebody addresses her as “Ms. Pine”, omitting her “professional titles”. (God forbid anybody should forget to call me “counselor.” I mean, really, what the fuck? “Ms. Pine” is offensive? Shit, “Ms.” is my professional title. Obviously I should have gone to grad school and not to law school. Or maybe women lawyers should insist on taking the “D.” in “J.D.” seriously and make everybody call us “Doctor” too.) And “it’s just the fact of the article itself that I find offensive.” Because really, everything she does should be immune to criticism or even comment.

Going back to Salient’s comment, we have another edited email, this time the one from the student editor, a junior at AU. Salient’s comment suggests that his promise of anonymity was equivocal. I beg to differ. The editor didn’t just say, as Salient would have it, “Providing anonymity is an option,” as if it were an option the Eagle was likely to reject. He said, after stating that the Eagle was going to run the story, “However, providing anonymity for you is an option. I understand your concerns and we can alternative [sic] ways of identifying you in the story.” I read this as a genuine offer to protect Pine’s identity — and so, apparently, did Pine, who emailed back that she wanted the Eagle to conceal her name.

I don’t see that the student journalists did anything wrong. They were proposing to write an article about Pine’s public, not private, conduct. The story was obviously newsworthy, given the attention it has received since. They gave Pine an opportunity to comment, and offered to give her anonymity (to the extent they could, given that rumors were already circulating, through no fault of theirs, around campus). It was Pine herself who decided to go public, in a piece that does her intelligence, judgment, and sense of charity absolutely no credit.

b9n10nt:
it may be well true that in the heat of the moment she did not think through about the consequences of her action (e.g.: baby starts to cry, she is concentrating on the lecture, and unthinkingly does the normal thing she does in such situation, and breastfeeds him; or whatever other scenario you may prefer).

However, what happened later was not in the heat of the moment, but deliberate.
When she was “…shocked and annoyed that this would be considered newsworthy, and at the anti-woman implications inherent in the email’s tone” it was already the day after.
When she wrote the Counterpunch article was 1 week after; while writing it, she had all the time to think about its consequences.

And about what happened being her private life, and hence should be protected from public scrutiny, I can only answer that we have different opinions about what is private life and what is not. In my opinion, anything you do in front of your class is public, and as such fair game for public discussion: this independently from whether your actions are normal, or commendable, or stupid.
A professor in class is a performer in front of a public: privacy expectations from a professor during a lecture are as out of place as privacy expectations from an actor while on the stage.

“But we’ve just been demonstrating how easy it is for us to have our feelings hurt and then lash out and treat others cruel (she’s publicizing the journalist’s home info., you’re judging her “mistakes”, I’m treating you like you’re seven, etc…”

I don’t have any special obligations towards Pine (nor you towards me), besides common humanity; while she, as a professor towards a student in her university, did have special obligations towards Heather Mongillo, and in those she was amiss.
You don’t have special power to harm me, I have not special power to harm Pine; she does have such power over Heather.

About the last point (which was contested by e.g. JQ), I think some disagreements my stem from different expectations about university life in different countries (and universities), so it may well be that I am mistaken about it (if someone with more experience about the environment, expectations, and rules in US universities in general and AU in particular could give his say…).
However, I would expect that her position as university professor would give her quite a bit of power over a student at her university: power to impede her career as a student; power deriving from their positions as professor and students at the same university, that she would be lacking over a journalist from the Guardian (to quote from one of the previous examples), or from the local TV; and therefore power that she should NOT use to to her advantage against a student.

A small evidence that this is the case is the way they address each other in letters: “Professor Pine”, “Professor”, “Ms Pine” (whoops: how dare she address her without her professional title!) on one side, while “Heather” and “Zach” on the other side (not “Ms Mongillo” or “Mr Cohen”, as she would address journalists from the local news).

Manta and etv13:

Okay, so we all agree that Prof’s breast feeding in public wasn’t wrong in itself. And we all agree that Prof’s publishing of the journalists home info. was wrong. The disagreement lies in whether Prof Pine had a special responibility towards the journalsit as student (you do equivocate here, though. Go with that.) and and whether we make a distinction between the classroom and the newspaper as public places.

I myself am a high school teacher. Put yourself in my shoes: I go to a bar with some friends. Do I allow myself to be webcast live while there? Why shouldn’t I? I’m already in public. So we obviously allow that “in public” is not a monolithic social space. And the public of a newspaper is worse: you’ve been edited. Now imagine being in public but a strange device has the power to edit your actions and speech so that you can only say or do only a dynamic and unpredictable subset of your chosen behaviors. Why might you have any qualms about wearing such a device?

As an aside: my ideas about publicity are pretty conservative, bourgeois, no? The idea that agreeing to publicity is some kind of citizens’ duty seems repressive in a Culural Revolution sort-of-way.

by the way, a lot of people in this thread appear to have been confused about which side to take. I have often found in the past that in situations of difficult choice, the side that uses the word “inappropriate” the most is almost always in the wrong, and usually a bunch of prissy assholes too.

It’s a horrible word. It means something like “not illegal, not immoral, not in breach of any actual professional standard, but in some way it makes me feel icky and I don’t like it, but I have just enough self-awareness to realise I can’t say that out loud so I’m going to say ‘inappropriate’ in order to make it sound like it might be an actual misdemeanour”. I think it first got off the ground during the Clinton administration, for obvious reasons.

dsquared, 285

Then let me be the first to say, Pine’s publishing the students’ cell ‘phone numbers was inappropriate.

Rethinking about b9n10nt post about public space and the lecture hall.

When giving a university lecture (I make no claims about classrooms in high school), you agree (and even encourage) people to take notes, to (discretely) register it for their own use (any objection I’ve heard to the latter is about the fact that it discourages students from paying attention in class). Students are then free to use their notes/registrations as they see fit. It is not a private event, but a very public one
In its context, giving up privacy and being at the centre of attention is not some unfortunate side effect, but the whole point.

I think that Pine herself did not make any claim to privacy: only that what happened was not newsworthy, and that an article on the subject might damage her career.

Tedra Osell 09.15.12 at 10:48 pm:
‘Anarcissie @222: “We must all subordinate ourselves to the breeding and rearing of children wherever and whenever, for the sake of the community, without which we will be lost”

Um, no. We must accept that children are part of the community, and behave accordingly. Which includes accepting the fact that they cannot be held to the same standards one would apply to adults.’

There I was giving one end of the libertarian-communitarian spectrum within the natalist ideology. I also gave the libertarian end. Naturally there are moderate or mixed views in between.

Maggie 09.16.12 at 3:34 am:
‘I’m disturbed by comments above about “natalism.” How is it “natalism” to assert one’s right to care properly for your child once it’s already born? Or is it in daring to be a mother at all that one becomes guilty of “natalism”? …’

Well, the anti-natalist view would be that breeding more humans is reprehensible, and that interrupting one’s own and others’ work to care for them publicly compounds the offense. Perhaps the justification for this view would be that there are already too many humans for the earth to bear, or that humans are aesthetically repugnant, or something else — there are a variety of them, some of them fairly rational. Given my own experiences as a caregiver, I would definitely agree that American cultural practices are often objectively anti-natalist, but anti-natalist ideology has not been overtly expressed in this discussion, whereas natalist views have been given by several people (see above), and that’s what I was noticing — the ideology, not the practices. It is hardly unusual to observe a popular ideology sometimes failing to inspire practice: think of patriotism or Christian charity. This does not mean it is not believed.

I brought up natalism because it seemed to be the ideological framework which permitted or even enjoined the rage which was exhibited, but I have been assured this is not the case now, and would not be pursuing the subject if it hadn’t been questioned.

Manta, 288

“Inappropriate”‘s been used here, prior to dsquared‘s comment, once to describe Pine’s breastfeeding in that specific situation, once in a query (presumably against Pine), once, thus: The students and TA were forced into the inappropriate role of caretakers, once, thus, : I don’t see that the student journalists did anything wrong or inappropriate, once as a protest against people who dislike public breastfeeding.

So it is true that posters who do not endorse Pine’s actions in toto used the word more than posters who regard her as, in this instance, “faultless”; uninteresting, but true.

A feminist note. The student Pine most diminished is a woman.

“Horrid is, like, stabbing someone. Or getting stabbed! And ok, probably stuff like armed robbery is horrid.. I think horrid stuff is stuff like stuff you’d probably feel PTSD about if you witnessed it.”

Not in the English the rest of us speak. E.g., H.W. Longfellow:

There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead,
And when she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

@. 295

Longfellow was being playfully hyperbolic? That or the kid goes all bioterrorist in the next stanza.

Hey, if Prof had done that she could’ve avoided the irrational cruelty of publishing the journalist’s info. We adults can wonder at how clearer are heads can become after a lil tantrum when the Black Mood comes upon us.

For starters, Salient did not quote the initial e-mail in full, omitting (among other things) the following sentence that came right before Salient’s block quote: “I do not want to make you feel uncomfortable.”

I don’t have any special insight to offer on the broader discussion, but etv13@279 has not represented Salient@236 accurately–the above is only the most obvious discrepancy.

A prissy point:

etv13 wrote:

dsquared: … I’ve done it (public breastfeeding) myself, which is more than you can claim.

Nonsense! If Romney can claim credit for the autobailout (on 1st Mondays, when the moon is full), dsquared can claim, if he so desired, to have (I want to be precise here) performed public breastfeeding. Not with any credibility, perhaps, but he could certainly make the claim.

This would have been better, more prissily, more precisely worded as: I’ve done it myself, which is more than I suspect you can credibly claim to have done..

Seriously, fuck that shit.

The adolescent cattiness displayed above – ye gods, what to even say about it. Especially next to Berubé simultaneously pronouncing this the best blog ever! It’s sad if university academics still conduct themselves according to the kind of open emotional cruelty (disguised as wit) people are supposed to start growing out of in their mid-teens. The intersection with the policing of correct ideological opinion is almost a trivial detail in how this plays out – though kicking the loser/dork/outsider/adjunct/undergrad/commenter etc must be even sweeter when you can pretend you’re only defending the cause of justice by doing so.

That’s the way the game is played, and Pine has no real option not to play it. Petty meanness: it’s just what academics do, and it’s hard to fault a naive egghead “militant” for turning to the standard arsenal when faced with an unexpected challenge of diplomacy. Granted her uncharitable presumptions about the Eagle’s intentions make her seem defensive and paranoid; arguably she’s bought her own militant BS and got spooked about persecution. But the way she expressed it – particularly, the tactic of sneering at someone for not *already* knowing (or in the political case, believing) things instead of simply informing them; treating Heather as an idiot and presumptive enemy for her implicit ideological errors; taking her own point of view as too obviously correct to even bother spelling out – is also just what academics do. Pine’s doubtless been on the receiving end of it a thousand times. But to openly treat an undergraduate that way is really something. Considering that students by definition are supposed to be progressing from ignorance to knowledge, for a professor to mock a young student’s ignorance rather than clearly correcting it, and to elevate her own arcane theoretical commitments to the level of basics too trivial to enunciate in good company, is a self-indulgent dereliction of duty. But it’s nothing male profs don’t do every day – they just never make the news for it.

Marcel, yeah I thought that about dsquared, but couldn’t be bothered to double-check (mobile browser less than agile), and part of the problem here is that just who is mad at whom and why is getting obscured unless one wants to follow it much more carefully than it deserves, so I’m not even sure d^2 is the only one at fault (especially with an ancient phone that – thankfully – forbids deep perusal). I do think of this blog as a kind of pseudo-academic space. In any case it’s still true that academics pull that crap all the time. It’s a big part of why I don’t mourn the career that might have been too bitterly. It’s the reason Pine reacted the way she did: saber-tongued put-downs (“budding reporter Heather”) are an absolutely standard and essential item in the academic career-climbing toolkit – and Pine may well be getting held to a misogynistic double standard for availing herself of it. I don’t know if it’s a significant coincidence if dsquared, being in finance, also feels free to act this way (at least on a blog); I haven’t really known many bankers, but in the non-academic settings where I *have* worked or been able to observe closely – including the administrative side of a college – the kind of venom many academics (at least in humanities/social science) go flinging about at competitors, students and underlings all day would be career suicide in a lot of other professional fields.

I’m surprised that Prof. Pine’s “militant feminist” credentials are allowed to stand here. As soon as she thought her job was at any risk she resorted to all the standard tricks of patriarchal authority, including publishing a young woman’s cellphone number. Are we to pretend she didn’t know that the most immediate consequence of that would be sexual harrassment of the woman?

She isn’t standing up for anyone’s rights but her own, she’ll happily trample those of the younger women she thinks might be threatening her. Contrary to the tone of the original comment, she’s not striking any blows against individualism: she is a classic example of the selfish individualist in the modern workplace. But somehow here she gets a free pass for behaving like a patriarchal bully just because she calls herself a militant feminist and pops some tit in an unusual setting?

Consumatopia @ 301: You’re right, I got confused reading my own notes, which I guess is what comes of writing champagne-fueled comments at three in the morning. The sentence from the e-mail I mean to say Salient had omitted was “I hope you had an enjoyable first week of class.” My apologies.

Does anyone know whether the phone numbers briefly posted to Counterpunch were their home or cell numbers, or their work numbers at The Eagle? Posting personal numbers is a pretty awful mistake to make, but posting work numbers at seems alright.

@Bloix — thanks for that, made my day, will keep it in mind. (Though plenty of parents have seen temper tantrums so severe they’d probably welcome bioterrorism or getting stabbed, just to be done with it.)

@etv13 — You’re right, I got confused reading my own notes, which I guess is what comes of writing champagne-fueled comments at three in the morning.

Holy shit, you took notes? Uh, ok, I’ll try to reciprocate some attentiveness. I can’t respond to more than a couple things…

For starters, Salient did not quote the initial e-mail in full

…fair complaint. Right before I posted I did consider going back and doing so, and maybe bold the parts I wanted to quote/emphasize. In retrospect that’d been better. But at the time I was in a Panera with a lunch crowd flowing in, and retrieving the link at that point would’ve meant scrolling up to the top of the page again, and up there in 32-point font is If You Can’t Whip Out a Boob in an Anthropology Class, Where Can You? which is possibly the Crooked Timber post title most likely to get you kicked out of a Panera or scolded by a grandparent or something. (I am way more sheepish than any lactivist could afford to be…)

omitting (among other things) the following sentence that came right before Salient’s block quote: “I do not want to make you feel uncomfortable.”

Telling someone “I do not want to make you feel uncomfortable” will, very reliably, make someone feel uncomfortable. But yeah, I omitted that. I also left out the It was brought to our attention thing, which was bureaucratically creepy in the passive voice, sorta like The Eagle has secret agents or underlings or something. Or really, it was creepy because it’s the kind of thing a manager would say to an employee that got caught stealing on camera. But I’m sure it wasn’t intended like that, so I just dotdotdotted it and moved on.

Anyway, never mind which sentence was where. In your argument that I omitted contextually important information, you omitted possibly the most important unit of context in the sentence:

I understand the delicacy of the matter and I do not want to make you feel uncomfortable, but for the story to have the most balanced angle it would be best to have your thoughts

That word reminds me of people saying, “I don’t mean to be racist, but…” That entire sentence is weird creepy shit (dare I say horrid?), and I only didn’t bang on about it because I figured, chalk it up to understandable accidents due to youthful incompetence or something.

That strikes me as a pretty important omission, when you’re claiming that this was a threatening email.

I said hostile, not threatening. And I tried to be sooo super careful to avoid asserting that the reporter conceptualized herself as hostile, because I don’t believe that to be the case. My sentence I am identifying myself as a party hostile to your interests was meant to say, “here I have made an unintentionally revealing statement, and this is what it reveals: I am a party hostile to your interests.” (Why were those bullet points in a weird quasi-first-person form, I dunno.)

Salient’s comment suggests that his promise of anonymity was equivocal. I beg to differ. The editor didn’t just say, as Salient would have it, “Providing anonymity is an option,” as if it were an option the Eagle was likely to reject.

I never said or implied that I felt the offer was insincere. I do believe the editor was offering something he was not capable of providing.

He said, after stating that the Eagle was going to run the story, “However, providing anonymity for you is an option. I understand your concerns and we can alternative [sic] ways of identifying you in the story.”

I’m ok with assuming he’s sincere. So what’s wrong with what he said? Well, elsewhere he claimed that the paper needed to run the story because there were already so many rumors about Professor Typeoftree circulating around campus. If there’s already well-known widely spread rumors that Professor Typeoftree bared a boob in her class, you can’t claim any ability to keep that professor anonymous when writing about a professor who bared a boob in her class. It has nothing to do with the intentions of the editor, or whether or not the editor is attempting to make a genuine offer to hide Pine’s identity. If Professor Typeoftree shows up naked to class, and everyone the next day is talking about didja hear Professor Typeoftree showed up naked to class, you can’t write about “A Professor Who We Shall Not Name showed up naked to class” anticipating that nobody will see through the ruse.

So. Either the rumors are not widespread, which shoots the editor in the foot because the rumors are his proffered justification for needing to run the story, or the rumors are indeed widespread, which shoots the editor in the foot because he offered a promise of anonymity that he literally just does not have the power to fulfill.

Anyway, here’s the thing. We’ve both read the same account and timeline. Here’s your takeaway:

I don’t see that the student journalists did anything wrong. They were proposing to write an article about Pine’s public, not private, conduct.

Everyone already knows this. I am assuming you took pains to emphasize this because you feel that the second sentence implies the first. Well, let’s go ahead and make this difference of opinion explicit: restricting an article to someone’s public conduct does not automatically make that article acceptable journalism. We’d agree there are plenty of hypothetical articles on other topics that would be unacceptable specifically because they report somebody’s private conduct. That doesn’t mean that an article is acceptable as long as it only reports public conduct.

Note: feel free to substitute ‘moral’ or ‘the right thing to do’ or whatever for ‘acceptable’ in the paragraph above. However, if you’re still interested in a substitution for ‘incident’ that I’d consider fine and dandy, try nonevent.

Salient, 316

As they were mobile (cell) numbers, I assumed they were personal. Pine has now apologised (by email) for publishing them and for the tone of her comments.

what etv said @317.
For Salient, about the supposed lack of value of the offer of anonymity.
I will give an example: let stipulate an incident X happened involving prof. T, and people are gossipping about it: what does it mean? It means that there are 5 groups of people
A) people that know that X happened and T was involved,
B) people that know X happened but don’t know that T was involved,
C) people that have no idea that X happened,
D) people that “know” that Y happened and T was involved, and
E) people that “know” that X happened and prof S was involved.

Now assume that the local paper “the Duck” publishes a story, where they describe X, but leave the name of T out, and that everybody reads it.
What happens is that group C enters in B, D in A, and E remains unchanged.

Repeat the calculation for the case when “the duck” publishes the story with the name of T in, and you will see a difference: this difference is the value of the offer of anonymity.

Those readers of the Duck that are gossip mongers will investigate about the identity of the professor involved in X: but how many of them will not know already about the story (being them gossip mongers)?

Addendum to my own bottom line: Pine’s dealings with her department made good sense. It’s her piece in Counterpunch that I think was her part of things going to hell. I’ve been wondering if, when she woke up, got over being sick, and thought about it soberly, she didn’t feel like I’ve felt several times when I’ve got into a fit of temper out loud on the internet and regretted it the morning after. It’s not a good feeling even in meaningless spats on internet comment threads.

@dsquared — for my comments, I’ll own “acceptable” = “it would be reasonable for their employer to let this adversely affect their professional status” and “unacceptable” = “it would be reasonable for their employer to let this adversely affect their professional status.” The adverse effect could be as mild as a supervisor telling them their actions were out of line, which is about all that’s appropriate here. It’s not quite the same as ‘professional’ because the professor wasn’t acting in her capacity as professor, but the reporters/editors were acting in their professional capacity.

@JanieM — yeah, I agree “no one in the story acted with much good sense, groundedness, or maturity.”

I guess where I’m coming from is thinking, that’s often true in contentious situations when speaking truth to power, calling out abuse of authority. Fighting against an unyielding authority seems to always get dirty, ungrounded, and immature at some point. The clean, grounded, mature avenues can all be dead ends, and I think in this case they were.

…forgive me going on a wild tangent prompted by this Dr. Phil episode I’m currently watching. Maybe it would be reasonable to say Trayvon Martin didn’t act with much good sense, groundedness, or maturity when confronted by George Zimmerman. Trayvon could have been the bigger person and not panicked and calmly complied with every request that Zimmerman made while putting Trayvon in citizen’s arrest or kidnapping him or just yelling at him or whatever. But we tend to fault Zimmerman for what happened, because he’s the one who put Trayvon Martin in a frightening scenario with no good options. k, no more tangents from me.

In this The Eagle situation it’s going to be especially mudslingingly murky, because the folks abusing their positions of authority at The Eagle happen to be students at a university where the injured party happens to be a professor–ironically this diminishes the effectiveness of her protests, because anything she does to protect herself from the newspaper authorities, would be obviously inappropriate for a professor to do to her students. But. If a professor is pulled over and mistreated by a police officer, they’re not in the position of authority. It doesn’t even matter if the officer was a campus officer taking classes at the same university. The professor wouldn’t have any more authority than, say, a doctor at the university hospital. Or hell, no more authority than a professor at a different university nearby. So, when we’re discussing who abused their authority throughout this timeline, the professor doesn’t really have any professor/student authority to abuse.

Ultimately I guess the main thing I’m hoping to say is that the reporters and editors of The Eagle should be identified as the authority figures who insisted on creating this bad, nonsensical, ungrounded, immature situation in the first place. And they did so for shitty reasons that we should hold against them. That’s all I care about.

@Manta, I’m not going to get into some weird in-depth argument about the hypothetical size of each group A through E or whatever. What you’re saying is the same thing the editor was saying, so you’re responding to criticism with recapitulation. To translate the criticism: Either C is relatively small, and the anonymity hardly matters because most people know anyway [the ‘rumors’ side], or C is relatively large, and the article will encourage those folks to ask around to obtain more details, in which case the anonymity’s shot because those folks will be highly motivated to learn more about what happened and will ask around, easily finding out who it was [the ‘meaningless promise of anonymity’ side].

The only meaningful thing anonymity could do, was protect the professor from having the article come up on google searches. So, sure, she took what little concession they offered. But now we have an addendum — the newspaper demonstrated they don’t even have an interest in that, because even after the professor explicitly made her request for them to hide her name, they went ahead and used her name in their articles. So much for credible promises.

@faustusnotes — Salient, I don’t think it matters whether the numbers were personal or work – publishing them was irrelevant to the thrust of the argument and clearly intended as intimidation.

I’d maintain it does matter (and because it was the nonwork cell numbers of the students, it matters in a way that reflects badly on the professor). Those numbers are not publicly available (come to think of it, I’m unclear on how the hell she got the cell numbers). But in the hypothetical case where it was publicly available work numbers at The Eagle, consider some similar examples of this type of act. Is this how you feel whenever a political action committee type thing publicly announces the work phone numbers of a politician, encouraging you to call and express your upset at them?

(I wouldn’t call it intimidation, by the way, I’d prefer to call it public shaming. It’s a similar category and the difference is mostly irrelevant here. So maybe I should just say, intimidation is one of the few ways a person without authority can protect themselves from the authorities.)

It should be seen the same way as the denialist websites that bust the anonymity of commenters and publish their work details.

The author of the article would have their real name in the byline, and the editor would have their real name published in the masthead. There’s no anonymity here to bust.

It’s a threat, and it’s beneath a “militant feminist” to use such intimidation.

Well shit, I’ve probably done more acts of intimidation acting in the capacity of “militant feminist” than all other protester roles combined, except maybe “militant pacifist.”

Tells you all you need to know about how much this supposedly well educated person has adopted the concept of the personal as political – only as much as is necessary to bully people she doesn’t like.

Bullying authorities who are mistreating you is, technically, bullying people you probably don’t like. I’d say it’s more accurate to say “shaming authorities who are mistreating you” or even “intimidating authorities who are mistreating you” in this case, just because bully implies the bully has a [Cartman-esque] position of authority, and my only real stake in this discussion is marking out who had what authority, and who abused their authority.

@etv13 — I’m fond of you too and have appreciated your responses, but I gotta admit “being able to disagree without being disagreeable” is giving me much too much credit. :) Erratically agreeable, maybe.

Just received confirmation that the phone numbers in question were and still are official work phone numbers, and are easy to find publicly available information. So, for those of us for whom it matters, the numbers were taken directly from the The Eagle website, and the numbers are still there.

I guess we can’t verify this was the professor’s source, but to anyone who claims otherwise, for goodness’ sake, the phone numbers posted by the professor are identical to the publicly available work numbers that are posted on The Eagle website, and that’s the first place anyone would go to get work contact information.

agh, “just received confirmation” was supposed to be “just confirmed” and in the post before that the first ‘reasonable’ should be ‘unreasonable’ — typing too fast and mangling the sentences

Given that Prof. Typeoftree identified herself first, it’s not clear to me that the Eagle violated any promise in naming her in its own pieces. If you think that this is a sign of bad faith on the paper’s part, please explicate.

The editor offered to withhold Prof. Typeoftree’s name, and Prof. Typeoftree requested that the editor do so. The editor then did not do so.

Keep in mind my reasoning for why she accepted is, she doesn’t have any real control over how informative or misleading the Eagle article is, so she doesn’t want those articles coming up on google searches for her name. It’s not a question of being outed, it’s a question of what shows up in searches. Her counterpunch article is something she wrote, and presumably she feels it is a fair representation of herself.

She has no reason to believe The Eagle will be similarly fair (and I should note, their leading line is ample evidence they’re aiming to stir up and empower titillating controversy over a nonevent.) So, she has no reason to want The Eagle articles coming up in searches of her name, and good reason to not want that.

I will note that her reply to the editor made this clear. She did not say, “Please keep me anonymous.” She said, “Please hide my name.”

The professional thing for the editor to do would be write her back and ask, “Since you’ve publicly identified yourself, can we please forgo keeping you anonymous in the articles we publish? Or do you still want us to hide your name?”

I think this information from the Eagle’s editor is important in evaluating the newspaper’s decision: “The Eagle initially started looking into this story when we thought an unknown professor was under administrative review for breast-feeding in class.”

If the administration were reviewing a professor’s behavior (for breast-feeding in class or anything else) it seems like an appropriate story for the campus paper to cover, and investigating to find out it there really was such a review in process was exactly the right thing for the paper to review. If you believe the editor (and I don’t see any reason not to) when the reporter discovered there was no administrative review in process, the story might have been abandoned: “Had Pine never posted her now well-known essay on CounterPunch, we may have never run a story in the first place.”

If the administration were reviewing a professor’s behavior (for breast-feeding in class or anything else) it seems like an appropriate story for the campus paper to cover

Cover? As in, write an article about? Holy shit no, not until you receive confirmation from an administrative source.^1^ Publishing “so and so is allegedly under administrative review for misconduct, according to, uh, student rumors” is a lawsuit-worthy offense for a reporter to commit. If the paper actually wanted to follow up on this, some further investigation is necessary before you write the article! At the very least they’d be talking to administrative officials to see if there was, in fact, an administrative investigation taking place (and to see if administration was even aware of the breastfeeding happening, or if they knew about the rumors, etc).

Student rumors are completely inappropriate source of information (though they could prompt an investigation seeking appropriate sources of information). Cripes, I had student rumors one semester that I was going to be fired because I didn’t cancel an exam during a storm (fwiw, I wasn’t even authorized to cancel it). A newspaper reporting and publishing that would be extremely inappropriate. It would be weird, but acceptable, if they sent a reporter to ask the administration whether or not I was under investigation. But if they chose to pursue the ‘story’ by peppering me with questions after class one day, or if they let me know they were writing an article insinuating I’d committed professional midconduct and solicited my defense of my own conduct, that’s completely out of line.

Chasing after the professor with interview questions after class is the technique of a gossip rag, yellow journalism. These reporters behaved like they worked for The National Enquirer, not for a paper worthy of respect.

^1^like with most news investigations, keeping an anonymous source on background could be ok, but they’ve never claimed to have any administrative source whatsoever at any stage of the process–they’re chasing rumors and gossip without bothering to fact check

Salient, cut my sentence in half. If you read this part “and investigating to find out it there really was such a review in process was exactly the right thing for the paper to review,” you have saved yourself two paragraphs of comment. (I meant to write for the paper to do, but I think you and I agree how the paper should respond to rumours that a professor were being reviewed for breastfeeding.

I am not sure why you think the editor’s claim that there might not have been a story without the Counterpoint piece is complete bullshit on their part. Zane told Pine they probably would but also said a final decision wouldn’t be made until the story was written. I don’t have any problems in you a skeptical about all that, but where’s the certainty coming from?

The motive you are imputing to him for lying about it–he’s trying to claim Pine forced his hand in publishing a story he did not want to–seems to be in tension with his own defense of the story: We stand by our reporting because this is the essence of journalism: we received a news tip and followed up with the proper sources to confirm the truth. The story, in our eyes, became newsworthy when we found specific policies that afforded her protection, opinions from the University on her actions and widespread campus debate on a very legitimate question on the social acceptance of public breast-feeding.

In other words, your reading of the Eagle’s behavior doesn’t seem to be a neutral one, and I wonder where your presumption of bad faith comes from?

Did we ever find out where you can whip out boobs? I don’t want to dig through 300+ comments. Thanks

Back when I used to go to mass I remember one of the ladies in the congregation (old enough to have a daughter who was a student at Princeton) would regularly breast feed during the service. I’m surprised at the fuss, although I haven’t read all the comments.

I also recall years ago when I was teaching Juvenal that there seemed to be a direct relation between the tendency of students, of either sex, to publicly boast about their sexual achievements and their feigned embarrassment at anything vaguely sexual in the text before us.

Does changing a diaper in class count for anything? That I’ve done, but I’m obviously incapable of nursing.

Hi,

Without exception, we have all instinctively depended for our very survival on attraction to these wonderful boob organs, or else we would have starved to death in our infancy (and probably well deserved it). It’s a complete mystery to me why anyone now pretends otherwise.

Have a nice day!
Antti

Hm. Salient posts at lunchtime, at a Panera. While etv314 posts at 3 in the morning, after multiple glasses of champagne. On the substance here, I am totally with Salient. But I do have to acknowledge a kindred spirit.

Also, while the conversation has obviously moved on, I do feel obliged to mention that when I was on the bargaining committee for the UMass graduate employees union back in 2001, one of our demands was that instructors have the right to breast-feed while teaching. We did not, unfortunately, succeed in getting that into our contract, but it was a useful opening gambit for getting the administration to agree to other accommodations for employees with young children. In retrospect I wish we’d pushed it harder.

Captain Pullings, a glass of wine with you, sir.
Mr Martin, the bottle stands by you!

Outside of the dysfunctional alcoholics, it’s hard to think of a fictional character who drinks more than Aubrey. Maigret drinks more often, but for pure volume Aubrey must be near the top.

I am low-class at this time.
I have been most of my life.
Being middle class is something I’d like to be one day.

I keep hearing “middle-class” in news stories, articles, blogs.

So if I am low-class, do you think I am worthless?

I am going to school now.
I have never made more than 7,000. a year, and have been unemployed for awhile now.

because what happened appears to have been this: an older, avowedly feminist woman used her position of authority and social contacts to bully and then shame (in a national forum!) a much younger, much weaker woman.

Well, I’ve got to disagree with this. Professor Pine appears to me to have been defending herself. The student journalist emailed her, Pine responded that she had no interest in participating, the journalist then turned up outside one of her lectures.

Using her position to then – gasp! – publish an article criticising the journalist and the paper doesn’t seem to me to be bullying, it seems like fair criticism. They were going to attack her in print, and she got there first. That’s not bullying.

The fact that the student journalist was a woman is not in fact a reason why Pine should have rolled over and taken this shit, surely? Women are required to take sh*t from other women for the sisterhood – is that the argument? Just as applicable then to the student journalist who was about to grossly breach a woman’s privacy by writing a piece about her breastfeeding and turning up outside her workplace when she had already clearly stated that she wanted nothing to do with it.

No salient, she’s a student. Student journalists are not journalists; they are students.

“Far from that philosophical view. I described one of my many experiences in dealing with young, eager and foolish reporters on “third rate” newspapers….Get a life!”

Yeah, apologies for being an ass Tom….I get a little carried away at times!

Katherine, I don’t see much evidence from the questions asked that the article could have been inferred to be an attack on Pine.

I doubt very much that it was intended to be an attack on Pine, but surely you can see how, sympathetically written or not, it could have had the effect of significantly and negatively impacting her professional life. Parenting issues — specifically, looking as though your parenting is invading your professional life and interfering with it — still damage women’s careers. Ideally, in a decent workplace, there’s a certain amount of grace granted for the demands of people’s personal lives: if you need to take a day to care for a ailing parent, or partner, or child, you can; if you need to split your attention to handle a family emergency, you can; and you can expect that if such intrusions are kept to a reasonable minimum, no one’s going to make a fuss about them or regard you as unprofessional for breaking perfect concentration. In a lot of real world workplaces, though, women particularly get professionally punished if people become aware that personal demands on them have made any intrusion into their professional life.

Professor Pine had a childcare problem, and handled it in a way that she thought would come within the scope of the reasonable grace any employee should be granted to manage personal problems while still getting her work done: it wasn’t an ideal workday, but she thought she could get through it without professional repercussions. Once there’s an article in the student paper, sympathetic or not, her choices with how to deal with her childcare problem become the subject of a public referendum on whether she’s managing her personal life adequately: rather than having coped with childcare in an acceptably inconspicuous manner, she turns into the public face of “Women’s job performance suffers (sympathetic story or not, some of her students were put off by the breastfeeding) because they have intrusive personal lives.”

You may think that she deserved (or, wasn’t entitled to object to) any negative effects on her from the proposed story: if she didn’t want to be the subject of journalism for how she conducted herself in public, she shouldn’t have breastfed her kid in public. But you have to be able to see that the negative effects of the proposed story are real whether or not it’s written from an angle sympathetic to her or not.

Also I think this just says it all:

“…they also dimly perceive that professors are regularly not in their offices when they say they’ll be, whereas their presence in classes and between them can be calculated with some assurance” (CarlD @345)

A position where, not only are you only expected to attend the office at your own say-so, but can habitually lie/disappoint with impunity. At the direct expense of paying clients, no less. Nice work if you can get it, and difficult to imagine as powerless, particularly relative to the clients whom you are free to screw over. Many very accomplished, well-paid, senior people in other fields would be in a lot of trouble if they were so heedless of other people’s time and convenience, let alone clients’. Indeed, they in most cases wouldn’t even dream of such an arrangement.

Sigh. I will quote from **Victoria:

“Let’s think about all the other days in this kid’s life, when she didn’t have a fever and was admitted to day care. What happened then? Presumably, Prof. Pine sent along a few bottles of expressed breast milk, or formula, and the day care people fed the baby using those. Why did she have to breastfeed in the middle of class on this particular day? By her own account, she didn’t have any choice but to breastfeed the child, but also by her own account, she doesn’t think breastfeeding is any big deal, understands that other women can’t breastfeed their children and use formula instead, and ended up “forced to breastfeed” for — well, for reasons that completely escape me.”

John Quiggins and others have argued she had no other choice (exclamation points). But, she did, and it was a choice – or, rather, an option she used on a daily basis: to express milk and have a bottle ready if the baby was hungry/fussy/whatever.

Further, she could bring a folding crib/playpen to keep the infant from crawling around on the floor (pretty repulsive picture to me, given even our newest carpeting at the college).

I do take serious issue with those (like Duffy) who do not understand that teaching is not like other jobs; as I said in my first comment, we really cannot make up lost time. I also take issue with those who think parents (not just mothers) simply ought to somehow magiacally have Plan Zs when their children are ill and *are not allowed* in daycare or school. We had daycare, neighbors, and private sitters. Guess what? Sometimes they were ALL sick or otherwise unavailable. And reaaly is life/i>.

Finally, I am deeply offedned by the shaming device of suggesting that my not being willing to defend every mother for every choice is in some way unfeeling, blind, or closed-minded of me. Nice trick to silence others.