A white male graduate student at Iowa State was expelled from his journalism class this semester for allegedly making racist comments. The professor, a black woman, banned him last February after he challenged her for teaching with an "anti-white" bias. She called him a white supremacist; he says he was simply insisting on balance: "If you're going to make claims that white America is intentionally suppressing, holding down, oppressing African-Americans . . . you have to let some students give their opinions on it, and that wasn't happening." The university backed the professor; the student is still fighting the decision two weeks after the term has ended.

Though the professor claimed the student harassed her and made the class impossible to teach, it seems clear enough that he did not do anything more inflammatory than to question what he perceived as his professor' biased approach. That is his own take on his behavior, and other students in the class attest to this. One said his questions were a welcome change from the silence of the majority of incurious, passive students. The worst anyone had to say was that he spoke so often that it was disruptive. Maybe so--but that doesnt make him a racist. It makes him a stickler.

Experienced teachers know this type well and have strategies for dealing with them. They often are white men (ooh: racial profiling!), and they are often extremely intelligent, articulate, and exacting men. It can be intimidating to run into sticklers when you are new to teaching, especially because they can and do tap into deeply embedded anxieties many of us who are not white male sticklers have about power, authority, and respect. It can be very easy to attribute the stickler's behavior to racism or to misogyny or both, to project onto him your belief that he believes he is superior to you and needs to dominate you, the professor, publicly. It's especially easy to do this when the student in question isn't a boy of 19 but a man of 38, as in the case at Iowa State.

Such neurotic pedagogy may be lame, but it is also pretty commonplace in our ever-so-sensitive academy. I know women who allow their work as teachers to be dominated by their fear that male students might try to dominate them. Some even try not-so-subtly to dissuade men from enrolling in their courses--by focussing exclusively on gender issues in a course on the rise of the novel, for instance. But nine times out of ten, the putative gendered and/or racial disrespect these teachers think they detect just isn't there. A white male student, articulate and quick and hungry for clarity and even for debate is not a threat. He is a blessing in the way that any student eager to learn and ready to take risks is a blessing. It is the teacher's job to overcome any insecurity she might have about her ability to stand up to this student and meet his challenge--to teach him, to convince him, to press him to think harder and better--and to do so with imagination, patience, and respect.

The Iowa State fiasco is not a case of a racist graduate student but of a professor who does not know what she is doing and a university so afraid of being called racist--now that she has played that card--that it cannot call to task either her partisan teaching methods or her penchant for attacking skeptical students. This professor should be questioning her competence. But instead, she is calling upon Iowa State to help her cover for herself by persecuting the student who exposed her.

The wider context for this imbroglio is the thick racial tension at Iowa State's journalism school, where three out of six assistant professors have resigned their posts because of what they see as the senior faculty's racial insensitivity.

Stay tuned--I'll blog about the Iowa State exodus within a day or two.