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‘Hate incident’ in LSBE classroom
BY SARAH DOTY
STATESMAN STAFF WRITER
ISSUE: 78/29
An in-class assignment turned hateful last Thursday in a Labovitz School of Business and Economics (LSBE) Organizational Behavior Management class. On Tuesday, the LSBE Dean Kjell R. Knudsen and LSBE Associate Dean Wayne Jesswein visited the class to address the incident. They told students that “hate incidents” would not be tolerated in the LSBE.
On Wednesday, Knudsen sent out an e-mail to the LSBE students calling the situation, “a hate incident consisting of verbally offensive statements and jokes and some intimidation.” According to students in the class, they were working on an assignment about group work and teamwork. “We had to write,” said sophomore Mackenzie Kilwein, who was in class at the time. “We got in groups, one person started a story, and the next person added on. Once we were done, we had to read them out loud to the class.”
The class of 40-50 students came up with all sorts of stories, but one group took it too far, said Kilwein. “One just got out of hand with words and phrases,” she said. Three separate interviews with class members reported that the passage read aloud by the students included the n-word at least four times and a crude sexual reference to Rosie O’Donnell. A phone call to a member of the group in question was not immediately returned.
While the story was being read, the professor of the class, Jennifer Mencl, and the students didn’t do anything about it, Kilwein said. “I sort of scanned the audience when this [reading the story] was going on,” said Kilwein. “The guy reading it off thought it was funny. [In the audience] I heard some laughter, and many people just looked in shock, like ‘oh my gosh, did they really just say that?’ ” However, on Friday morning, the class did receive an e-mail from Mencl saying that she was shocked at what had happened, and she wished that she would have stepped in and stopped it, Kilwein said. Mencl couldn’t be reached on Wednesday for comment.
The students involved have been reported to the UMD Student Conduct Code coordinator, according to the e-mail. “There is an investigation underway,” said Jesswein. While the outcome is yet to be determined, the Student Conduct Code defines disciplinary offenses, sanctions a process to be followed when a complaint is issued, according to the e-mail. Deborah Petersen-Perlman, the director of the UMD Office of Equal Opportunity, declined to comment Wednesday morning on the situation, due to the ongoing investigation. “The behavior reported is not tolerated in the LSBE,” said Knudsen in a phone interview Wednesday. “We [the LSBE and University] are committed to tolerance and diversity.”
Students Promoting Acceptance Through Teaching (SPATT) member Hana Dinku said Wednesday that this has been going on for ages. “The fact that it happened is not a surprise,” said junior Dinku, “but when this is in a classroom, it should have been stopped right away.” More than that, Dinku was concerned that no one tried to stop it, and instead some students laughed at the comments. “I am concerned that the class laughed,” she said. “Previously, there have been incidents like this, and the punishments have been a joke. What we [SPATT] are trying to do is to get this to be taken seriously. We need serious consequences [when things like this occur].”
Dinku believes that the actions of the class members who were laughing were cowardly and sick. The university and LSBE are taking this situation seriously. “This is not a joke,” said Knudsen. “There is nothing funny in any of this … The behavior reported is not tolerated in the LSBE. We addressed [the situation] as a hate incident … and we want to make sure that we deal with this. We have no intentions of sweeping this under the rug.”
