Ed. The story of racism at the University of Wisconsin rings all too true. A few years ago there was a murder suicide at the University of Washington. A Taiwanese resident shot and killed Roger Haggitt, a Professor of Pathology,. The resident then committed suicide. A horrible story for anyone of any culture.
I became involved because of the aftermath of the murder suicide. Another recent Chinese immigrant, a student , was upset that the media were focusing on the ethnicity of the Taiwanese resident. The student expressed his concerns openly. A UW employee filed charges, claiming the student had threatened her. Both the UW and I investigated. In my investigation I was able to prove (via witnesses) that the threat had not actually happened. What did emerge was that this employee , had bizarre prejudices against Chinese people. She had greatly over-reacted to the student’s concerns.
The rest of the story is frighteningly like this recent story from the University of Wisconsin. Our administration refused to listen to me, to the Chinese student, or to another colleague of mine who became the student’s PhD mentor. Rather than addressing this very real problem of a bigoted employee, the UW went after the student in a very aggressive way including the use of police and banning the student from campus. During the confrontation I tried to get help for the student from colleagues in the UW office of minority affairs. I discovered that the UW’s “minority affairs” apparently does not include Chinese people, even thought these folks then, as now, are the largest non-Caucasian minority on campus.
My story came out well. Working with other faculty and some people from the Seattle media, we were able to get the UW to back off and the student went on to earn a well deserved PhD. On the other hand, despite repeated requests, we were never able to get the UW to provide ethnic counseling that might have averted the event in the first place. To my knowledge, the UW STILL does not regard the Chinese part of our community as a distinct minority in need of recognition.
from Inside Higher Ed. (excerpted) May 5, 2011
Charles Shi, a UW-Whitewater computer science professor, was hired into a tenure-track position by UW-Whitewater in 2008, after finishing his Ph.D. at Clemson University, and quickly began publishing peer-reviewed papers. Beginning in 2009, he clashed with other faculty members; when they inquired about his religion, for example, he replied that he respected “every culture’s right to their own mythologies,” Schauer said. Shi is not a native speaker of English and might not have realized that the word “mythologies” would be insulting, but other department members thought it was, he said.
Richard Schauer, who represents professors throughout the University of Wisconsin system through the American Federation of Teachers’ Academic Freedom and Tenure committee and a former chairman of Shi’s department, argues that Shi’s colleagues in the department were unnerved by the young professor’s productivity, and felt threatened by his potential to rise to a leadership position. “When you bring a person into a department who is different from the average racially, or possesses talents beyond the average of the members of that particular division or department, they will sometimes regard the individual as a virus and conceive of themselves as antibodies,” Schauer said. “It’s a well-known phenomenon in academia.”
Shi felt alone and persecuted, and the climate was bad enough that he approached Schauer before problems with the university arose about representing him should he file a grievance, Schauer said. “He believed he was being unfairly treated and isolated…. He trusted very few people.”
In a conversation with another colleague, Shi made a remark about Virginia Tech, saying he hoped he would not be treated like Seung Hui-Cho, the shooter, Schauer said. (The UW-Whitewater student newspaper, The Royal Purple, quoted a more ominous variation based on court documents: “If I continue to get pushed too hard, this will turn out like Virginia Tech.”)
After the remark, whatever it actually was, Shi was confronted by a campus police officer and agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security, Schauer said. They searched his home, office, car and computer, eventually concluding that Shi posed no threat. But, citing that incident as well as problems with students and teaching, the university did not reappoint him during a periodic review, and forbade him to come to campus, Schauer said.
Shi filed a petition for judicial review of the decision not to reappoint him and has since filed a complaint with the Equal Rights Division of the state labor department, which Schauer said he and Shi believe is the forum in which the complaint should be addressed.