Luke Harris
| School: | Vassar College |
| Department: | Political Science |
| Location: | Poughkeepsie, NY |
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I took Luke Harris' Civil Rights course a few years ago and he was a friendly-enough guy so I naïvely overlooked the troubling aspects of the experience. Hoping to correct that here. I don't take courses for grades so I'm not concerned about whether it was 'easy' or 'hard' or whatever... I put 'easy' down on the 'easiness scale' because I didn't see any evidence that one had to do anything but show up, agree with him, and write the requisite quantity. But his lectures were preachy, all of the reading material came from the same perspective, and there was a feeling that the most important thing in the course (and a key for not being arbitrarily downgraded) was simply agreeing with him. He was a no-call no-show for numerous lectures and travelled frequently which made him inaccessible during office hours. The travel was ostensibly to visit Kimberlé Crenshaw (one of the authors we had to read) at UCLA with whom he had some kind of personal or professional involvement. He didn't assign much in the way of graded assignments (I think there were two) and never returned the final, which wasn't graded until weeks after the grades were due to the registrar resulting in a 'pending' grade on my transcript. When final was finally 'graded' it was in the form of a note saying nothing whatsoever about its content and only that it was half a page short of the requested length. No evidence that he so much as read it. All of that falls into the poor professorship category, but there was another incident that fell into a more troubling category. I remember the only black girl in the class deigning to disagree with him in one lecture and he reducing her to tears as a result. She literally left the room. Nobody should be made to feel like that in a classroom. That never happened in any of my other classes and it speaks to the intense pressure that he created to agree with him or to sit in silence. I wouldn't normally even note someone's skin color, but I think it played a role both in how he addressed her and in the other student's silence. I can't say if she was traumatized by that experience, but it was certainly traumatic for me -- to the point where I only just recently allowed myself to revisit it. I should probably have complained to the administration at the time, but I wasn't as strong then and anyway I was distracted by other aspects of college life. |
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