The dean comes out
Community College Dean, an Inside Higher Ed blogger, is coming out with a book — and with his real name. Matt Reed, vice president for academic affairs at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts has written Confessions of a Community College Administrator, due out in January. When he started the blog, he was was the liberal arts dean at the County College of Morris in Randolph, New Jersey.
Adjunct tells stuttering student not to speak
Philip Garber Jr. isn’t afraid to speak up, despite his stutter. When the 16-year-old was told not to ask or answer questions in his history class at County College of Morris — the adjunct said he was wasting other students’ time — Garber complained to the dean, who switched him to another instructor. The New York Times ran a front-page story, the college is investigating and the adjunct isn’t likely to be rehired.
After the first couple of class sessions, in which he participated actively, the professor, an adjunct named Elizabeth Snyder, sent him an e-mail asking that he pose questions before or after class, “so we do not infringe on other students’ time.”
As for questions she asks in class, Ms. Snyder suggested, “I believe it would be better for everyone if you kept a sheet of paper on your desk and wrote down the answers.”
Later, he said, she told him, “Your speaking is disruptive.”
After 30 years as a middle-school social studies teacher, Snyder began teaching history at the community college 10 years ago.
Garber is taking history and composition at the local community college, while finishing his home-schooling curriculum. He travels into Manhattan once a week to “work on acting and playwriting with Our Time Theater Company, a group for people who stutter,” reports the Times. He hopes to be a photojournalist.
Don’t FEAR Your Stutter, be PROUD, You’re Still Standing! says Garber on his YouTube channel, TheStutteringMan.
Update: Snyder says she told Garber, who wanted to answer every question, that she’d call on him once per class.
