When I Was a Temple Fellow – Part 5

Throughout last semester, that is, Fall 2022, the Acting Vice-President for Academic Affairs at my college, Nassau County Community College of the State University of New York (NCC of SUNY), East Garden City, Long Island, New York, kept piling pressure on the Chairperson – I prefer the use of the titular designation of “Chair Lady” in this particular context, at least just this one time – of the English Department to relieve me of all my teaching duties immediately so that she could summarily fire me from the job that I have held and for which I had been peer reviewed over the course of the past quarter century. This happened virtually on a daily basis.

I demanded from my immediate boss what the problem was and she told me that it had to do with students complaining to her, that is, the Vice-President for Academic Affairs and some of the academic-area deans, that I had been threatening to issue these students bad grades and not give a hoot about the same because I was on my way out of teaching at the college. Well, it was perfectly true that I was involuntarily being pushed out of my teaching portfolio at Nassau Community College. But this was not primarily or specifically because of the wanton and inexorable spate of complaints against this writer by his students. Rather, it was because some administrators at the very top of the totem pole, as it were, had decided that as the college had recently been designated as a “Hispanic-Serving Institution,” the services of some of those of us who did not fit the latter description or designation were not needed and we had to be “deported,” pronto, back to wherever in the world we had come from.

Yes, it was primarily because – and it unquestionably well appeared to me – somebody higher up the ladder in the Tower, or the college’s administrative staff, had instructed some of these students to tactically and strategically provoke some of us, instructors, by deliberately disengaging from class activities and participation even while actively attending classes on a regular basis. It was strikingly akin to the deployment of a “Sit-In” or a “Sit-Down” strike against yours truly and some of his colleagues. You see, quite a remarkable number of these very same students who had been very actively engaged in class activities from the beginning of the semester suddenly capriciously started slouching to class, tardily, on a regular basis and claiming that they did not have their learning tools, basically textbooks, with them. Which, of course, meant that these students could not be called upon to participate in the reading of selected portions of literary works for critical analysis in our class discussions.

The end result was that in a class of nearly 30 students, I would have only 5 or 6 students who were actively engaged. I would shortly learn from one of my students that the newly hired Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion Officer had actually been stalking these students in the hallways whenever they got out of class to use the restroom, and telling them to either secretly record my lectures or take careful notes, especially recordings and notes having to do with whatever I had to say about women in general, and then about my own wife in particular. You see, a Twenty-Something-Year-Old Woman from Colombia, South America, in one of my six College Composition and Literature classes had reported me to the Chair Lady of my department, actually her first port of call or complaint, as it were, had been the Office of the Dean of Students, who had then referred the complainant to the Head of the English Department.

There are one or two things that I need to get out of the way in order to make this narrative more logically coherent. The first of these regards the following complaint by Ms. Jay-Ell to the Dean of Students that I had called or labeled her a racist during the course of one of my lectures because she had dared to boldly challenge a pedagogical example that I had given about a character in a literary work – a short story that the class was discussing that she found to be insufferably offensive. This was on or about September 30, 2022. As was to be expected, the Chair Lady of my department called me in and notified me that she had decided to withdraw Jay-Ell from my class and transfer her into another section of a similar course that she was teaching. KB asked me whether her decision was fine with me and I promptly responded that I could not be happier and much better relieved from such a nightmare.

Now, KB, that is, my immediate superior or boss, did something that impressed me considerably and definitely enhanced my already high regard for her as a consummate professional. She had not given me any hint or advance notice that she had, in fact, decided to conduct her own private, quiet and independent investigation into the matter. She would call me in for an urgent discussion several days later, perhaps about a week later, to let me in on what she had done with another one of my “white” colleagues who had, together with KB, quizzed Jay-Ell fairly at length to verify the fact of whether, indeed, yours truly had “sexually harassed” the student as had been officially written up and, I presume, deposited into my official file by the Affirmative Action, Diversity and “Inclusion” Officer.

Now, I refer to BTM as my “white” colleague because in our racially charged, conspiracy theory and suspicion-infected social and cultural environment, BTM is one of the handful of colleagues who appear to have been “certified” by my peers as the one that I seem to have “baptized” and “confirmed” into my confidence as being personally and professionally “transracial.” And, of course, there is an impeccable iota of truth to such “guesstimation.” You see, BTM is easily the one and only colleague, aside from Lori, the Secretary to the Chair Lady of the English Department, that I have absolutely no qualms in calling a friend. He is the Writing and Placement Coordinator of our department and once shared my office suite with me. An incident occurred between a recently retired mutual colleague of ours who also shared our spacious two-room suite with us that effectively and permanently erased any racially inflected doubts that I might have involuntarily harbored about or even against him. He would promptly ask to be transferred from our office and later let me in on his reason for asking the extant Chairperson of our department to ship me out. BTM is one of the couple of colleagues into whose offices I could leisurely saunter into on any given day to share a few jokes and pleasantries without reserve.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr. PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
February 25, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]