USC professor put on leave for speaking Chinese
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-professor…
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First major action by USCs new dean, the old Wharton dean. Seems like a great way to get on good terms with the faculty.
If that's the real reason then it'd be absolutely crazy.
Just maybe, the school wanted to get rid of this professor to begin with and this was, albeit a very poor one, just an excuse?
Just playing Devil's advocate here.
Going off recent history, I'm inclined to think it's real and not for your devil's advocate reason... Sometimes I feel like we're all in an alternate universe based off that show Punk'd and just waiting for the camera man to jump out any minute now.
I read the article and there's really not that much information about the situation. I searched for different articles on the event, but the same text is just reused unfortunately.
From the article:
From this, it seems like the Professor was in the wrong. Along with this:
If he was pausing the recording of the Zoom lectures, then that's just weird and kind of suspect.
In any event, it also seems that he didn't communicate the context of the word ahead of time, and maybe could have exercised better judgement given the current atmosphere in the U.S.
I'm sorry, but anyone with Chinese friends or acquaintances (or frankly anyone that lives in an urban area, esp. LA or NYC) would be familiar with the word 那个. It is every bit as ubiquitous as like/uh/um are in English (and obviously particularly noticeable to English speakers). Beyond that, these are supposedly people that have lived abroad in China and have taken Chinese language courses. So they're fully aware of the context and usage of the word, assuming that they spent any time with native speakers.
Ok, beyond that there is this notion of his poor pronunciation. The implication that he mispronounced the phrase in order to sound offensive is belied by the following "this phrase, clearly and precisely before instruction is always identified as a phonetic homonym and a racial derogatory term"–i.e. it is a phonetic homonym even with perfect pronunciation. The context of him speaking mandarin during a lecture on filler words, should be enough to make the desired signification clear. Any other stance is borderline xenophobic.
Hahaha, no need to be sorry. If I could change his fate, maybe I would, but I can't, so I shan't.
I hate cancel culture too.
What made this whole situation in poor taste was that this was not even a Foreign Language class. This was an English communications class, and this Professor chose to use a Chinese word that he pronounced like "naga, rhyming with dega".
He could have chosen any other language and WORD across the world to communicate his idea of pauses in sentences, but he chose a word that was pronounced as "naga rhyming with dega" in a non-Foreign Language class. Also, he paused his classroom recording each of the times he said this word, which showed active ill intent.
He used the #1 most common word used in pauses in sentences, in the #1 most commonly spoken language on Earth?
The only part I will concede is that he seems to have known his idiotic students would take it the wrong way, thus the class pauses. But offending people because they're ignorant shouldn't mean losing your job.
I think the professor made a wise choice using this example. Any other language is not spoken by 1.4bn people on the planet. Not even English.
Similar thing happened to me a decade ago when I first came to the US for my undergraduate education. One night there was a small gathering of the floormates. I spoke in mandarin Chinese to another student very briefly. Of course I said "neigh ga" as a filler word. The conversation was overheard by a black female. She was looking all serious and immediately asked what I was talking about. Shocked initially and it took me a while to realize what the fuzz was all about. The white people nearby were all looking nervous as hell. Eventually we figured it out and all of us had a good laugh together. Lesson learned. We moved on.
Fast forward to 2020. I think we are all hyper-sensitive these days. Just take it easy and have some empathy my friends.
You're full of shit. "nei-ge" is to Chinese speakers what "um" is to English speakers. You go to a foreign country, speak a second language, and try not to let a single "um" slip out. Tell me how that goes.
Sounds pretty lame. If you go to China people do say ‘nigg-a’ sounding words that literally means ‘that’ when they are trying to remember - almost like ‘um’ is used as a filler when trying to search for a word or concept. You hear it everywhere - everyone says it. For the professor to pronounce this form of communication in Chinese, hopefully his intent was not to offend what an English speaker would hear. Also though, it has to be slightly naive of the professor that this Chinese word doesn’t sound derogatory. Maybe he framed the explanation wrong, but it seems like an overreaction by the students.
California is the best place to turn a democrat republican
True but you could say the opposite for the most conservative states like AL/MS/OK.
Nothing wrong with being a Democrat or a Republican.
Issue is that California shows the worst of Democrats. Same way that places like Alabama and Mississippi shows the worst of Republicans.
Which is amusing, given the political history of the state. Used to be a Republican stronghold until hardline positions on immigration turned off moderates and made it into a liberal-voting state.
Orange County in SoCal went blue for the first time since 1936, Katie Porter was the first democrat elected to Congress in her district's history in 2016.
This is absolutely ridiculous. I watched the video. That IS definitely the most common way to pronounce 那个, it can sound like "neigh-ga" or "nah-ga" and other dialects. It's not a "phrase" it's like saying "ummm" or "like" and used dozens of times per day by over a billion people.
Emotional exhaustion? Impact on mental health?
How do these people survive in the real world?
“unable to focus on studies properly”...
Not sure why that would be an issue anyway? Why do they need to focus? They are studying communications.
they don't, that's why they're still in sheltered academia.
They're just further adding to the University of Spoiled Children name
Today I learned you can get in trouble for speaking a foreign language, even with good intentions
I hate cancel culture too, but this wasn't a foreign language class. He could have chosen any filler word from any language to illustrate his point, but he chose a word that had derogatory pronunciation in the English language.
I could understand how a black student would see this as a closeted professor, actively pursuing the ability to say the N word during his lectures, and chalking it up to education. From my perspective, the nail in the coffin here is that this was not a Foreign Language class
Actually, the entire lecture section was on filler words across nations. We only see a small portion of the lecture in the video. Quite possible he used many other languages also. Additionally, Chinese is a very important language to use considering the shift of the global economy. As for him pausing the zoom, there could have been technical difficulties at play (lot of professors facing issues due to the Zoom
format). The context he was using the word in was nor racist.
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/usc-professor-placed-on-leave-after-black-students-complained-his-pronunciation-of-a-chinese-word-affected-their-mental-health/
OMG this is absolute nonsense.You can't make such a big deal of the words of someone else's language happening to mean something in yours. That's coincidence, and unless you can prove some foul intent, it's just better to let it slide. For the recotd, 那个 can be pronounced 'na-ge' or 'nay-ge' with the latter of the two being more common.
This sounds like just a case of misunderstanding. TBH it is so common in daily speech, meaning 'that thing' or 'that one' that I worry when my wife goes to the US that she will use it in the wrong place and the wrong time and someone will thing the wrong thing of her. Relatedly, ask your friends how to pronounce 'pig' in Chinese (猪) . Pig in Chinese is pronounced 'jew', (zhu), and it pleased my Chinese friends to no end to tell me in English, 'you really a zhu,' 'you're such a zhu,' 'oh here comes our company zhu'. OK ok guys, I get it, my ethnicity sounds like 'pig,' but y'all need a new shtick seriously, no originality.
I feel so angry at this because there really IS systematic racism in the US, and bullshit like this makes a mockery of it. You know what's racist? Police killing black people, standing on necks for 9 minutes, sentencing guidelines that are 100x longer for crack vs. powder cocaine, unfair housing and lending practices. Know what's not racist? Some professor speaking Chinese. FFS.
I agree. Myth of systemic racism is not that it doesn't exist but people are claiming that it is. The myth is that people think things that are not racist is racist and things that are racist are not.
Tangential but a quick comment on the crack thing: crack was destroying inner city neighborhoods and the feeling among liberal political leaders at the time was “this would never be allowed in white neighborhoods” so the idea was to come down hard upon crack specifically. There was not some room of evil white men twisting their mustaches hatching plans to punish black people. Look at the conditions of inner city areas during the height of the crack epidemic for context.
Also crack and cocaine are not the same chemical substance. The derivative being the same does not mean they are the same. Morphine and heroin have the same derivative but are obviously different substances. In the case of crack, it’s much cheaper / easier to produce which makes it prone to addiction and thus destruction. I’m not sure if they should be treated identically just as the same way morphine and heroin shouldn’t be.
I think the current outrage is more that when it was a drug epidemic which black folks were abusing, it was viewed as a crime and the people who were doing it were menaces to society who needed to be locked up. And now that it's a drug epidemic for which white folks are the abusers, it's something worthy of compassion and help and state funding. There is more nuance to that, including social mores, how people are getting hooked on and supplied with the respective drugs, and understanding about criminal justice reform, treating drug abusers, etc, but in the context of many other unfair and prejudiced parts of American life, it's hard to get past the obvious difference based on the skin color of the person addicted to whichever drug.
So no, no evil mustache twirling men, but it's not hard to spot the differing standards of sympathy for the "criminals." Especially for those who can remember the stance taken, especially by Law and Order type conservatives (but not limited to them), that the very fact that these people were criminals for doing drugs was what was relevant and not the reasons they might be doing them. Which obviously you rarely hear even the most hardline commentator say about opiate addicts.
There has to be more to it than the pronunciation of a word. To put someone on leave due to this issue does not make any sense.
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There is probably more to it than is being reported.
Welcome to the fucking next-gen liberalism
nypost.com/2020/06/10/ucla-suspends-professor-for-refusing-leniency-for-black-students/amp/
unbelievable. what a joke.
I knew what phrase was being referenced before even clicking on the article. Yao Ming actually had the same problem when he first joined the rockets - his interpreter frequently used the filler phrase when translating to Yao and his teammates thought he was saying an offensive word. Unfortunate that it's still happening even in 2020
What are they going to do next? Ban Chinese classes?
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All speakers of chinese filler words are now racist and must be eliminated from society so we can reduce the hate and judgement
Russell Peters called it over a decade ago.
Funniest comedian eva
in related news, buttermilk in German is pronounced dickmilk, assapanick is a native American word for squirrel, and biche is French for doe, womit is German for whereby, and coque is French for seashell. Carry on.
In Spain, to take a bus you use "coger." In Argentina, the same word means rape.
They're not as easily offended and worst case misunderstanding they find it funny that Spaniards find public transportation so sexually attractive
I don't know how I stumbled upon this song / video... but it seems appropriate to this discussion:
(if you don't have patience to watch the whole thing, just skip ahead to about 1 minute into the video)
Deleted
I'd probably change your username to not be your actual name
Good call
It's actually a word in Korean too
I was just thinking that. I hear it in Kpop all the time. Doesn't it mean "I am" or something?
'Ne-ga(네가)' means 'You'. And 'Ni-ga(니가)' is very informal version with same meaning. 'Nae-ga(내가)', which means 'I', sounds almost the same as 'Ne-ga(You)'.
I'm sorry but this cancel culture has to stop.
Some people need to realize that English is not the only language in the world...
And that Chinese is older than English
Since most people agree that this is ridiculous. Please sign this petition to help this USC professor's be reinstated. It will help save his career and reputation.
https://www.change.org/p/university-of-southern-california-re-instate-usc-marshall-professor-greg-patton?source_location=topic_page
Signed
signed and donated
Wow...and these are students at a top 20-25 MBA program. I guess that's what happens when you accept students based on their skin color rather than merit. Having graduated from a target undergrad with a penchant for diversity admissions, I think this whole thing has gone too far. Most of the diversities were dumber than a box of crayons, nice to see the pattern repeats itself at the MBA level.
Like I've been saying all along,, Affirmative Action hurts everyone, especially URMs.
I automatically assume that they aren't qualified, which is unfair to the ones that are, but it's logical since the standards are way way lower. If I see black/latino kids in my school, or see them get offers, the instinct is to think that they didn't deserve it. Similarly, if I see an asian guy get into my school or get a good offer, I assume he's an absolute rockstar to overcome the discrimination he faces.
If I ever start a company, I'm going to only take white/asian guys from lower target or semi target or state schools with good test scores/grades. It's such a massively underutilized talent pool
He pronounced it as a non-native speaker usually would pronounce it. So it would sound slightly closer to the slur than it would a native speaker saying it, but in no way does it seem he made it intentionally worse.
https://nypost.com/2020/09/06/professor-placed-on-leave-for-using-chine…
Follow up: The Professor has been terminated for at least the rest of the semester and his courses have been reassigned to different professors.
This is beyond stupid. I find the letter by the dean to be particularly angering. The letter makes reference to creating 'an inclusive culture', and creating a 'place of safety'.
What the ever-loving fuck? Hyprocrisy apparently has no bounds!
What part of an inclusive culture forbids speaking a foreign language? What part of inclusive forbids bringing in international examples for fear of pronunciation-police? Try speaking ANY language without the using the word 'that'. And safety of thoughts? Ha! You can devote decades of your life to educating students, but if you dare speak the wrong preposition in a foreign language you're out!
The idea that the professor was intentionally mis-pronouncing the word 'na-ge / nei-ge' is nonsense to anyone who has spent even an hour in China. That's how the word is pronounced by 1.4+ billion people, nearly every minute of every day for a thousand years.
I consider myself very socially liberal, and I find this fake over-sensitivity particularly enraging because it makes a mockery of progressive stances, and cements a snowflake reputation for those of us who would take a stand against racism and social injustice. Real racism in America exists. There's real problems to address. This bullshit response and fake butthurtedness actually cheapens arguments against racism, and sets back the struggle.
USC: You continue to prove through your actions why you'll always be a tier-2 institution, and a University of Spoiled Children.
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