Professor Paula Anderson has a curious approach to controversial topics. Some of us encourage students to taken controversial positions to generate passionate class debate. Professor Anderson, according to critics, calls the police. She is accused of calling police on her student John Wahlberg at the Central Connecticut States University after he and two fellow students argued in favor of allowing students and teachers to carry weapons on campus, citing the tragedy at Virginia Tech. Other faculty members have defended her and suggested that there is more to this story.
The students were asked to discuss a “relevant issue in the media,” and the students argued that they death penalty would have been lower had teachers and students been allowed to carry weapons. After his presentation in October, Wahlberg, 23, was pulled into the police station where officers demanded to know where he kept his weapons. They are all lawfully registered and locked in a safe.
Anderson is quoted in claiming that it was a matter of safety that led to her dropping a dime on her own student:
“It is also my responsibility as a teacher to protect the well-being of our students, and the campus community at all times. As such, when deemed necessary because of any perceived risks, I seek guidance and consultation from the Chair of my Department, the Dean and any relevant University officials.”
It is not clear what about this presentation was so threatening beyond the subject. Jerold Duquette, an associate professor of political science at CCSU who sits on the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom, insists that Anderson might have had valid reasons for the call: “[Wahlberg] certainly has a reason to complain, since he didn’t do anything directly threatening. But I wouldn’t say the administration has a reason to sanction or punish the professor or the police…. I don’t know if I would have done anything differently in the situation.” [see update below]
Professor Anderson may have such reasons but she should state them. It is a very serious matter when students or faculty are pulled into a police station for comments made in class. Notably, Wahlberg is no longer discussing the incident. There may be more to this story, but it is important for the other faculty and students to know what the school considered an appropriate basis to call police on a student.
For the full story, click here.
Update: Recently, Professor Duquette wrote me to object to the original language of this post that said that “Jerold Duquette, an associate professor of political science at CCSU who sits on the Faculty Senate Committee on Academic Freedom, insists that Anderson had valid reasons for the call.” It is a valid point. What Professor Duquette suggested is that there might have been a valid reason. My concern was that the burden should be on the professor and the university to explain the call. I remain unclear on why a professor can decline to supply such information to the university. The school is legitimately under scrutiny over this
incident. This professor has a responsibility to state clearly why law enforcement was called into a classroom. This is not a privacy matter like grades. It was an occurrence in an open classroom. If the call was made due to something outside the classroom, the university and the professor have a responsibility to make it clear. I do not see how the university can consider this a “he-said-she-said” incident. Before a professor calls the police on a student, she had better have had an objectively valid reason to do so. There was also a suggestion that she may have consulted with other members of her department. The department should be clear on the facts and the standard for such actions in my view. I do believe that faculty members (particularly those on the academic freedom committee) should go further than stating that either party might be right in this instance and demand information from the department and the university.
Professor Duquette written to me to insist that he was not speaking for the Committee. I am not sure how the committee association made it into this piece, but Professor Duquette might want to seek a correction from the reporter if he never mentioned the committee to the reporter. The most important problem is that I have seen no call for additional information from the university or the classroom professor. Leaving the matter as “either side might be right” will leave the integrity of the institution in doubt as well as its commitment to maintaining an open and safe environment for learning.
Nevertheless, Professor Duquette was trying to remain neutral on the issue and not stating that one party was right. I should framed the line better to reflect that. Below is Professor Duquette’s full email:
Professor Turley:
I’m a fan and respect your work, but your characterization of my comments in the news story about the student at CCSU who was reported to campus police is not correct. You write that I “insist” that the professor had valid reasons for the call. Where? Where did you get this idea? All of my comments centered on the lack of factual information in the case. Nowhere did I say(or was I quoted as saying) anything justifying your conclusion. Because neither the prof or student are willing to talk, I indicated that reasonable judgment was impossible.
As it stands, all we know is that the student thinks he was wronged and the prof thinks she was justified. We have NO information about the actual content of the presentation. Even the student’s description fails to shed enough light.
The fact that neither student of prof is willing to talk is unfortunate. In the absence of full discussion people will be tempted to simply fill in their own facts, undoubtedly the one’s most consistent with their relevant prejudices. Your mischaracterization of my comments provides fodder for this and I want to urge you to correct the record.
How could anyone judge the actions of this professor without knowledge of what actually occurred in the classroom? I cannot. I said and believe that the University administration cannot. And, without this information, I certainly cannot self righteously claim that I would have acted differently.
This incident may or may not be a case of free speech suppression, without the facts we cannot know. One thing we do know though is that cases like this can cause folks to rely on unwarranted assumptions and to arrive at unsupported conclusions. Preventing that is what my job is about.
Jerold Duquette
CCSU Poli Sci
Okay, fourth time is the charm. I didn’t say anything until now because I said I was done with the thread, figuring I’d said all I had to say, but now I have to add this PS. After this, do your worst (or best) and I’ll add nothing unless specifically asked to.
BIL –
way to come unglued
Way to avoid substantive response.
Being accused of ad hominem attacks by someone who said Anderson is “applying for the job” of “brain police,” accused her of “bullshit” and “fear mongering and knee-jerk reactions,” twice called her “incompetent,” suggested she is “merely a rabid anti-gun nut who … decided she was going to ‘teach that dirty gun lover a lesson'” and “abused” her power, referred to “pissy small minded professors” before saying “this smells like adverse politically based vendetta” which happened because she “heard something she didn’t like,” and who falsified my argument by claiming I suggested there was an actual threat, is frankly quite hilarious and unworthy of further response.
Bron –
Can I get you to argue with my 17 year old daughter? You and she have similar tactics and logic.
Then apparently your daughter is more interested in knowing the facts of a matter before leaping to a conclusion than you are. It must be embarrassing to lose so many arguments to a teenager.
The whole point here is that the instructor is being hung out to dry even though by universal admission we don’t know what happened during the presentation. We don’t know if Wahlberg did come off as threatening or if Anderson did overreact. (I ask again: If the topic was the problem, why weren’t the other students questioned?) Still, it seems as though most everyone here has decided that Anderson acted without cause despite having no actual facts to back that up.
What I did was suggest that this could have been an honest misunderstanding and suggested two possible ways that could have arisen. The sneering responses I’ve gotten, which pretty much boil down to “Oh, yeah? Sez you!” hint strongly that I’m not the one arguing like a teenager.
As for your PETA comparison, if the PETA person said “zoos should be banned,” the instructor’s response would have been inappropriate. If that person had said “zoos, such as the one in this town, are an evil that must be destroyed. Animals must be allowed to roam free. We have liberated caged animals before and we are prepared to do it again, very soon,” I don’t think the teacher would have been out of line. Just as in the Anderson-Wahlberg case, it depends on what was actually said. Which is what we don’t know.
Finally,
eat a steak and have a cigar, I am sure its all the tofu and kyaking that have your panties in a bunch
I assume that’s supposed to be some sort of clever slammer, but it’s so lame that I have no idea even what it’s supposed to be saying.
Jill –
Length is required because, as should be obvious, it takes more space to rebut a claim than it does to make it. However, congratulations on dredging up another hoary excuse for refusing to consider a dissenting opinion.
As a footnote, before anyone asks: On other blogs where I comment, it’s considered courteous to use the bold when you are replying to more than one person in the same comment. I’ve gotten into the habit.
When ever someone has as much to say as Larry, it’s usually not worth reading because it’s nothing more than a rambling rant.
LarryE:
personally I stayed away from liberal arts because of the partisanship of the professors, Buddhas claim has much merit.
If it were not for people like him, we would all be brainwashed by our current culture and universities.
So go eat a steak and have a cigar, I am sure its all the tofu and kyaking that have your panties in a bunch.
LarryE:
Can I get you to argue with my 17 year old daughter? You and she have similar tactics and logic.
The teacher was out of line to call the police. How would you feel if a right wing teacher called a cop about some presentation given by a PETA member under the guise of “I thouhgt she was going to the zoo to release the panda and lemar”.
Hey, way to come unglued Larry. Nice talking to you. You might want to consider not going straight to ad hominem next time. It’ll make you look like less of an ass.
BIL –
This will be my last on this topic.
Your argument is no argument at all and relies on exactly the same sort of presumption I criticized in the first place. You simply – without any sound basis for doing so – ignore what Anderson said and ignore what Duquette said while embracing uncritically what Wahlberg said.
if her rationale were valid, she should state it in public/court
Nonsense. First, contrary to both you and Prof. Turley, she did state a rationale: She perceived a threat. What you are demanding is not that she state her rationale but that she defend it in detail.
But if you do that you must also demand of Wahlberg that he recreate his entire presentation because you’d have little chance of judging the validity of Anderson’s defense of her actions without knowing exactly what he said and did during his presentation. And then, of course, you’d have to talk to witnesses to see if his recreation really reflected the original.
All of which means that focusing solely on Anderson is less “we need to understand” than “give us some rope.”
Finally, it appears based on the cited sources that neither party has any interest in pursuing this and both are prepared to let it drop. Anderson is under no obligation to satisfy your curiosity. (And neither is Wahlberg, for that matter.)
picked up by the cops
He wasn’t “picked up,” i.e. arrested. He was asked to go to the station. He did. He was asked about where he kept his guns – not, it’s worthy of mention, about his presentation. He said they were locked up off-campus. Fine, end of the matter.
If some topics were too “sensitive” then she should have banned them
A complete irrelevancy because, again, again, again, hoping that at some point it will penetrate, there is no actual evidence that the topic was the issue! Yet again you are simply presuming guilt with nothing to base it on beyond your own fantasies about her “incompetence” and “abuse of professorial power.” I’m sorry your own experience of higher education was apparently so riddled with such abuse but that is not a rational basis for accusing her.
If it was a “real” threat, as you suggest
Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised at seeing you jumping to conclusions about Anderson since it appears you don’t understand what’s right in front of you. I made no suggestion of a real threat. I suggested two ways in which someone could have rationally perceived a threatening situation even when no threat was intended, noting that in such situations, explanations that make both parties’ positions make sense often are pretty close to the truth. Apparently the suggestion that Anderson might have been driven by something other than “greed, envy, stupidity, vendetta, jealousy, etc.” was too much for you to bear, so you blocked it out.
Did you consider that she might not have felt threatened but was a rabid anti-gun nut…? Left that out of your scenarios, didn’t you?
Yes, I did. I also left out the possibility that he is a rabid pro-gun nut who really was threatening in his presentation and later just lied through his teeth to cover his ass. Left that our of your scenarios, didn’t you?
What I did do, again, was to suggest two ways that behavior not intended as threatening could reasonably be perceived as being so. You want me to agree she was at fault and he was an innocent victim of an attack on free speech? Bring me facts, bring me actual information, not fantasy and presumption drawn from your own bitter memories.
Larry,
None of that changes the fact that if her rationale were valid, she should state it in public/court. If I had completed the assignment as assigned and then gotten picked up by the cops for my effort, she would DEFINITELY get to tell it in court. Her incompetence in issuing the assignment is not an excuse for her reaction. If some topics were too “sensitive” then she should have explicitly banned them as subjects beforehand. If it was a “real” threat, as you suggest, the cops would have arrested the student and the DA would have filed charges. They didn’t so clearly her “perception” was wrong. Did you consider that she might not have felt threatened at all but was merely a rabid anti-gun nut who, unable to quash the paper on technical grounds as non-conforming to the assignment, so she decided she was going to “teach that dirty gun lover a lesson”? Left that out of your scenarios, didn’t you? She is a Professor. In a classroom, that’s a position of power. And if you’ve been through higher education, which it reads like you have, then you know that professorial power can and is abused every day and for the same reasons police and judicial powers get abused – greed, envy, stupidity, vendetta, jealousy, etc. Because what you suggest is dangerously close to allowing her to be the thought police. That’s not her job. She’s supposed to teach kids HOW to think, not WHAT to think. If she had a problem with what he thought over how he expressed it, calling the cops wasn’t the way to handle it. She should have tried to convince him her “what” was right and fairly graded him on his “how”. Quite frankly, I’ve known enough pissy small minded professors in my day who wanted to tell you what to think as opposed to their real job as teachers of showing you how to think that this smells like adverse politically based vendetta at worst and knee-jerk reflexive action brought about by her own incompetence in issuing the assignment in the first place at best. She was in control of the assignment. Her loss of control, i.e. hearing something she didn’t like for whatever reason absent chargeable offense, is quite simply her problem.
The level of presumption in both the post and the comments is quite striking.
“It is not clear what about this presentation was so threatening beyond the subject.”
That is, you don’t know what went on. All we know, based on the various statements, is that Professor Anderson “perceived” a threat, that some students were made to feel “scared and uncomfortable,” and that Wahlberg “didn’t do anything directly threatening.”
Somehow, from that thin gruel you conclude that “Anderson has a curious approach to controversial topics” and prefers calling the police to “generat[ing] passionate class debate.” That is utterly ridiculous.
Since you’ve engaged in sheer speculation about her attitudes, I feel free to engage in some speculation about what happened (which I at least label as such). Recall in what follows that from the accounts, it appears the other students in the presentation were on the same side as Wahlberg but neither was questioned – which in and of itself should deflate the argument that Anderson’s actions were the result of his position on the issue.
Scenario 1: Wahlberg is so passionate about his position that he goes over the top, to the point where he comes off not so much as wanting the ability to carry a gun on campus but as really thrilled by the possibility, that he just can’t wait for the chance to be packing heat around the Quad.
Scenario 2: In defending carrying a handgun, Wahlberg argues doing so makes you safer and adds “I like being safe wherever I go” – meaning that he wants to be able to carry a gun on campus but easily sounding like he’s confessing to doing it already.
Note that in either case, both sides could say they were right: Wahlberg could have appeared threatening – justifying notifying police – without being threatening – justifying his resentment at being questioned.
In my experience, in such “he said/she said” cases, some explanation that makes sense of both positions is often at least in the ballpark of the truth. Be that as it may, one thing I’m sure of is that jumping to conclusions of attacks on free speech based on such thin evidence (if we can call it evidence) is not justified.
What if a teacher initiated a debate on decriminalizing marijuana? One student admits she/he smokes it. Would calling the police be appropriate, after all the student is admitting to illegal behavior? While I don’t agree with the positions of the 3 students they have a right to their opinions and in my view could make a valid, if very weak, case for them. If the Professor can’t handle the interactions caused by her having debate in her class, than perhaps she should stick to a strictly lecture style.
It’s ok to be cautious but since the teacher won’t publicly state what was said by the student that lead her to call the police then I have no other choice to side with the student
as being violated his rights.
Thanks Sally. That’s really funny!!!
Sally:
thank you, finally, it was driving me crazy.
Never underestimate the stupidity of someone who would allude to a torture situs as a nick. Gitmo a bitmo sense-o, troll-o.
Jill…
“Never underestimate the power of an extremely pissed off woman!” 🙂
Hey Sally,
Me four. What does the wording say on your picture?
Why am I not surprised that she got all wound up about the topic?
I’m with you three guys, things really got out of hand in this case.
Who are the brain police?
Apparently Prof. Anderson is applying for the job.
State your “valid reason”. If it’s indeed valid, enjoy your vindication.
If it’s not valid, then it’s just another case of deja moo – I’ve heard all this bullshit before. I recognize wording designed to deflect potential civil suits when I hear it.
Fear mongering and knee-jerk reactions to performing an assignment as assigned are not very becoming behavior in a professor. If the topic scared you Paula, you should have limited the exercise when assigning it. Now all you’ve done is make at least one student think you’re an idiot. Good job. And good luck on that tenure. You’ll need it.
“If you can’t talk about the Second Amendment, what happened to the First Amendment?” asked Sara Adler, president of the Riflery and Marksmanship club on campus”
Amen.
With nothing more than discomfort with the subject the teacher made a police complaint? She needs to be fired.
Bron98:
Ask Chris Hansen on “To Catch A Predator,” he seems to know the answer to criminality of the mind and not the body.
have we now reached the point where we are guilty of a crime before we even commit one?