Quiet Mountain Essays

Copyright © 2010

How Thick Does My Skin Need To Be?
by
Michelle Barclay

My lecture came to a close.  Not unlike my students, I was ready to greet the end of the day.  “Have a
good evening.  See you next week,” I announced.  Students shuffled their notes together packing
them away.  They filed out of the classroom, and I started my own routine of packing and erasing the
chalkboard.  With each sweep of my hand, a line of argument addressing Ethical Theory
disappeared.  A few moments passed.  A student returned to the now empty classroom from which I
was ready to depart.  

“Um, I have something to say that I didn’t want to say in class,” he began.  I nodded.  He continued,
“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way…”  

I knew nothing good could possibly follow from such a preface.  Prepared to listen, I stopped what I
was doing and looked him in the eye.  He then proceeded in an excited, angry fashion to tell me that
he found the class “stupid” and “bullshit.”  Indeed, he spoke for 15 minutes without taking a breath.  
A couple of times I did try to interject an idea, but he vehemently shook his head back and forth,
saying, “No.”  I quickly realized that this was not a discussion, so I made no more attempts to
dialogue.  I listened.  

This is not the first time something of this nature has occurred.  My academic subject is Philosophy.  I
teach Introduction courses in a university Philosophy Department and, generally speaking, the
students are freshmen.  The class is usually divided evenly among men and women.  I am also
employed by the Engineering Department to teach Ethical Considerations in Technology.  Those
courses, on the other hand, are comprised mainly of engineering majors in their senior year.  The
population for those courses has a range of 90%-100% male.  For the most part I receive positive
feedback from my students in both departments, but the above recent incident caused me to evaluate
the essence of my critiques.   I have a strong hunch that while some professors do occasionally receive
negative comments from disgruntled students, I am receiving comments that have a different (and
obvious) tone of anger.  What is the source of this anger?  What is really being critiqued?  

An important factor to note, is that the incidents that have given me pause have all come from male
students taking my Engineering Ethics course.  Since this occurs in that particular course and not in
the Introduction to Philosophy class, I think it is fair to consider the setting of the course that makes it
different from others, namely, the high male population.   The major of engineering is not in itself a
factor, because I have a few engineering majors in the Introduction course and for the most part they
are the best students.  In contrast, the class in question seems to foster a group mentality that is not in
my favor.  

A few months prior to the above encounter, one of my colleagues told me about a web page devoted
to grading professors teaching at our university.  Curious, I looked up my name.  I breathed a sigh of
relief when I saw that my Introduction to Philosophy averaged an A.  It would be awhile before my
curiosity led me again to take a look.  But, I did.  My jaw dropped and my blood pressure
skyrocketed when I read the following entries from 2 engineering students:  
      “There is a four letter word for young women such as this.”  
      “I feel sorry for her boyfriend.”  
      “She seems to have a vendetta against people with real majors.”  
      “I’ve seen older women hotter than her.”  

I immediately contacted the manager of the website to insist that these comments be deleted.  They
were.  The manager e-mailed me an apology and informed me that my name was to be flagged so
that future posts would be reviewed more carefully prior to appearing on the web.  Was the problem
solved?  Well, the bleeding was stopped, but the essence of the critiques remains to be understood.   
Close friends advised me to not react, while others were offended on my behalf.  Ho Hum, I thought,
everyone gets criticized.   Was I taking this too personally?  Woe to the recipient of such remarks, for
they stir quite a cloud of thoughts and emotions.  

I am finding myself in a peculiar situation.  For my undergraduate work I focused on Political
Theory; then, for my graduate studies I was drawn to Philosophy of Literature, a shift inspired by
reading the novels of French philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir.  I never abandoned my
love of political theory, which includes concepts of justice and equality, for these ideas were present in
the fiction and non-fiction of de Beauvoir.  As a researcher of her philosophy I explored arguments
regarding women in struggle with transcendence, mauvais foi.  She explained that history deemed
women as the “other,” whereas history considered man the norm.   There were, she argued,
existential and sociological ramifications to this distinction.  (There is, of course, more depth to the
theory but I need not give my thesis here.)  I have studied her ideas for years.  The majority of which I
spent planted at a work table, dressed in my old unflattering sweatshirt and jeans, in front of my dear
laptop with philosophy books stacked to the left, hot coffee to my right.   I could proudly claim to
know the philosophy of de Beauvoir, yet I am only now beginning to understand her concept of the
“other.”  Underscoring the remarks by the male students is a hostility towards me that
unapologetically highlights my gender.  After years of studying cases, statistics, and existential
analyses of women, I have actually found myself to be on the receiving end of the very phenomenon I
studied.  

What brought me to this situation?  The Engineering Department looked forward to expanding their
curriculum to include Ethical Theory, so they solicited a professor from the Philosophy Department.
My colleagues in the Engineering Department welcomed me to work graciously.   I share and discuss
my syllabus with several engineering professors and the conversations have been delightful.  The
course is team-taught: one day of the week the engineer professor teaches case studies, and on the
other day I have the class for Ethics.   Overall, the goal is to establish the significance of the decisions
and values that are part and parcel to design; that is to say, being an engineer presupposes what
constitutes “good” and/or “better” when embarking on designing technology for society.

However, at no point have my colleagues in the Engineering Department, comprised of men 45+
years of age, received any critiques from the students such as mine.  Indeed, the harshness and
personal venom of my attacks are unparalleled.  No student, for example, is reported to have
approached my colleagues with comments alluding to the meaninglessness of their subject or
pointing out the simple fact of their gender as relevant to their teaching.  Their criticisms, on the other
hand, read “Boring” or “Grades too hard.”  

One might object that perhaps I am a poor lecturer.  I am not denying that as a possibility; but the
fact that I have taught other courses that have not generated the same criticisms lead me to believe
otherwise.   There is also the objection that the engineering students resent taking this new mandatory
course, fundamentally based in the Humanities, when they are so close to graduating and are, thus,
focused on technological design material.  That may be the case, but it still does not answer the
problem with the nature of their criticism.

Work environments are governed by laws that prohibit and punish sexist actions.  Much is owed to
John Stuart Mill’s brilliant piece “On The Subjection of Women,” where he argues that legal
inequality is wrong in itself, and hinders human progress.  Without question I feel complete comfort,
freedom, and respect among my colleagues, but the unique position of being a young professor in the
university has made me fully realize that my work environment encompasses an audience of students
as well.  They are an essential part of my work environment.  Yet, I am subject to attacks by the
students that would be unacceptable if angrily stated or blogged by a colleague.  Where is the line for
my students?  

I think that what I have experienced is a reflection of the work that still must be done, culturally
speaking.  Attitude, for instance, cannot be a matter of law.  Mistrust of the material presented by a
young woman professor cannot be a matter of law.   These issues run deeper than my particular
situation.  Are the students projecting a cultural standard of a woman’s place?  I need only to glance
at the categories of magazines in a bookstore to see what a woman’s interests and a man’s interests
“ought” to be.  Armed with coffee, my eyes scan the possibilities.  Under the title “Women” there are
a plethora of gossip, style, cooking, decorating, and wedding magazines; whereas, the selections for
men’s interests are business, news, sports, and porn.  These are the images bombarding our culture,
and especially the youth.  I have, of course, the freedom to direct my attention to any magazine, but
the push in one direction is undeniable.  

Young women in positions of intellectual authority are simply not presented or explored in a manner
of the “norm.”   At least, that’s not what sells.

Laws for equal rights have allowed me to flourish as an academic and to find a place in the work
force, but I continue to be “other,” to borrow from de Beauvoir, in front of my male engineering
students.  I will always do my best as an academic and as a professor; however, when a tone of anger
and sexism reveal themselves in students’ criticisms, I ask: How thick does my skin need to be?

Contributor's Notes...

Michelle Barclay lives in Southern California with her husband Daron.  She teaches Philosophy, and she enjoys
academic and creative writing.  Her work has been published in The Camus Society Journal-UK, SDSU
Graduate Student Journal of Philosophy, The International Conference for the Arts and Humanities
Proceedings (Honolulu), and Short Story Library.  She is an avid reader of fiction with a soft spot for good
mystery novels.   

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