Computer Science and Engineering Grievance (2018)

A faculty member who led a 1000-person-per-quarter computer science intro course had a history of disrupting diversity lunches and listservs and aggressively contradicting people who pushed for greater commitment to underrepresented populations. In 2018 he wrote an article called “Why Women Don’t Code” that argued that discrimination isn’t real as evidenced by the fact that there are some women who succeed, and that everything boils down to individual choice and autonomy so we should be satisfied with 20% representation of women in computer science. A group of graduate students in the department responded by circulating a diversity survey, which the faculty member then passed on to Campus Reform. In an interview with these sites he said “The response was all about how my article made made them feel. It reminds me of this 18th century view of women – they’re so fragile they need the smelling salts ready because they could faint at any moment.

The academic worker union filed Step 2 grievance, authored 2 op-eds, circulated a petition, and won the following remedies:

• Training for academic workers and faculty (that the union designed).

• Established committee to develop ways to measure every faculty’s success at being a mentor.

• Established a curriculum committee to ensure that these viewpoints weren’t coloring the 100-level curriculum for the school, and ensured ongoing academic workers input would be integrated into updates and oversight.

• The faculty member was removed from teaching the Intro class the following quarter.