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‘The woke are eating themselves’: Professor fired after mistaking two black students

December 11, 2021 | | Print Article

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A white Fordham University professor who made a minor error of mixing up two black students is now out of a job, but reportedly not necessarily because of his mistake.

The school’s student paper, the Fordham Observer, reports that the mix-up occurred during a Composition II class being taught on Sept. 24th by since-fired English Department professor Christopher Trogan.

After class, the two affected students, both black, sent an email to him saying “that they felt disheartened and disrespected, and believed the mistake occurred because they were both black,” according to the Observer.

In response, Trogan sent out a lengthy class-wide email that the two students say went way beyond what they’d been expecting. Some critics now say the email is the true culprit behind his ouster.

“It seemed a little excessive. Like, all you needed to do was say sorry and it would have been fine. We were not actually that upset about him mixing up our names. It was more so the random things he would throw into the response,” one of the two students, Chantel Sims, told the Observer.

The other student seemed a bit less congenial. They “said their experience in Trogan’s class prior to the incident was not great” and “that Trogan repeatedly got their name incorrect over the course of four classes.”

“I felt really disrespected. I did not feel heard because every time he (misnamed me) I would tell him, and it just seemed like he would brush it off or that he did not care,” the paper quotes them as saying.

As for the class-wide email, in it Trogan started by claiming the mix-up had been an “innocent mistake” prompted by his “confused brain,” not by the students’ races.

“The offended student assumed my mistake was because I confused that student with another Black student. I have done my best to validate and reassure the offended student that I made a simple, human, error. It has nothing to do with race,” he reportedly wrote.

But he then proceeded to virtue-signal about his focus on “issues of justice, equality, and inclusion,” tout “everything he has done for minorities” (according to Sims), vow to quit his job if the students desire it and then encourage the students to report him to school officials.

Sims told the Observer that the email made Trogan sound like someone suffering from a “white savior complex.” Put differently, he sounded like a “woke” white liberal.

But to be fair to Trogan, he wasn’t the one who’d injected race into the conversation. Though on the other hand, he was the one who’d decided to involve everybody in the conversation and then virtue-signal about so-called “racial justice.”

Two days after sending the email, he was reportedly suspended by university official Eva Badowska pending an investigation. About a week later, he and a union representative held a teleconference with Badowska. About four weeks later in late October, he was officially terminated, meaning no “salary, health benefits, life insurance and retirement fund.”

He’s understandably not happy with the decision.

“Badowska may have carried things out legally, but definitely not morally and certainly not justly,” he told  the Observer.

However, he also admitted something pertinent. Namely, that the termination letter hadn’t even mentioned the original mix-up.

“According to Trogan, in Badowska’s letter of termination, she did not focus on the original name mix-up. The email he sent to his students on Sept. 24 was the catalyst for termination. He also said Badowska ruled that he had not exhibited ‘proper development’ from the Oct. 5 conversation, which also contributed to the decision,” the Observer notes.

As noted earlier, this has some convinced that his own “woke”  behavior is what cost him his job:

Not everybody agrees.

Others have attributed his termination to the wider trend of “cancel culture” run amok and argued that he shouldn’t have been ousted, period.

Look:

Incidentally, one of his students agrees.

Student Pradanya Subramanyan “said she understands that the mass email may not have been necessary, but she did not think it was worthy of punishment,” according to the Observer.

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Vivek Saxena
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