I got whacked in the face with Morgan State bullshit earlier today. I'm tutoring an elementary level German student and we use an unused classroom for our sessions. We've met in the same classroom at the same time for weeks now for these tutoring sessions.
Today, midway through the tutoring session, about the time that classes change over, one a man walks in while I'm tutoring my student. He's young and was casually dressed, so we paused (my student, I found out later, knew who the man was, a professor of Arabic, because he had taken an Arabic course) and asked him if he needed help. He said no, he had a class to teach. I asked him how long this course had been taking place, and he responded the whole semester, which is total bullshit because, at least for the last few weeks, I've been tutoring my student in this classroom and my student told me that he had had lunch in the classroom at the same time time of day since the semester began.
I was infuriated. My student and I walked around the building to find another classroom, while I stewed about the situation--there's always at least one empty classroom so it wasn't really a big problem, but I was pissed that this so-called professional blatantly lied and, in the process, interrupted actual education (his student he was tutoring never showed up). If he had just said that he were a professor and he was tutoring a student, I wouldn't have cared, but he didn't. Talk about a total lack of courtesy and respect.
To make matters worse, I found out from my student that the professor is shady. Apparently, this professor had allowed native Arabic speakers to take his elementary Arabic courses and not only passed out academically dishonest grades, but alienated non-native speakers in both the classroom and direction of the course. My student, along with others, took this to the administration, and they followed by noting the obvious: that native speakers of a foreign language cannot get credit for taking elementary courses in their native language. And he has non-native speaking students visit costly third-party tutors (which now apparently includes himself, god forbid) if they need extra instruction, and he directs the whole process. What a fucking joke.
I've been appalled by some of the shit I've seen so called professors get away with since I enrolled at Morgan. I think this event has set me off. I was scared to voice concerns last year because I'm the white guy at a black college and don't want my concerns to be written off as such, but I graduate in the Spring, so I don't care about any stigma that can be stuck to me for speaking out. This event was petty and ridiculous, and it highlights issues going on at HBCUs across the country: there are problems and nobody is willing to speak-up about them. HBCUs suffer from terrible academic records, and I've been (successfully) helping a student to pass a course that exists only because of the music department, and my efforts got thrown off by an excuse for a professor. I don't plan to walk into the dean's office the next day I'm on campus, but if this guy interrupts us during my next tutoring session, then I'll have had enough.
