The removal of an instructor from her classroom last month is prompting accusations of administrative overreach and questions about academic freedom and the shifting perceptions of humor on a campus that has experienced racist and anti-Semitic incidents.
Catherine West Lowry, a senior lecturer of accounting at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was removed from the introductory accounting lecture course she teaches after university administrators fielded complaints about student-produced extra-credit videos, including one parodying a film about Hitler, that she’d screened in class.
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The removal of an instructor from her classroom last month is prompting accusations of administrative overreach and questions about academic freedom and the shifting perceptions of humor on a campus that has experienced racist and anti-Semitic incidents.
Catherine West Lowry, a senior lecturer of accounting at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, was removed from the introductory accounting lecture course she teaches after university administrators fielded complaints about student-produced extra-credit videos, including one parodying a film about Hitler, that she’d screened in class.
The course is required for all students in the Isenberg School of Management, and Lowry has long offered extra credit at the end of the semester to students who produce a short video about course concepts. The videos, as described in Lowry’s guidelines for the assignment, should “try and help students remember difficult concepts in a fun way.” They are often parodies of film scenes or popular songs, and each semester Lowry’s students vote on their favorites.
The complaints centered on a clip of a widely parodied scene from the German-language film Downfall, to which students had added English subtitles referring to Lowry’s class and accounting concepts. In the students’ parody, the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler threatens an adviser: “Don’t you dare finish that sentence or I’ll send you to a chamber. And it won’t be the chamber of commerce. I can guarantee that.” Also controversial was a video of students parodying the hip-hop song “Bust Down Thotiana,” which Lowry screened at the beginning of the semester.
Downfall, about Hitler’s final days in a Berlin bunker, was released and nominated for an Academy Award in 2005, but resurfaced on the internet several years later as a meme. The four-minute scene in the students’ video, in which Hitler rants to a group of Nazi officials, became the basis for thousands of parodies, including, as The Chronicle noted in 2012, several by professors protesting scientific peer review.
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The students’ take on the Hitler clip was created and uploaded to YouTube in 2009. Lowry told The Chronicle that the video had been a hit the semester it was produced, and that she’s used it as an example several times since. Never before, she said, had anyone complained about it.
A Creative Grade Boost
Lowry has taught the course, Accounting 221, for 13 years; it enrolls approximately 475 students each semester. She began offering the extra-credit assignment as a creative way for struggling students to get a grade boost. She’s since received more than 700 video submissions, many of which are available by searching the class’s name on YouTube.
“The point was to engage students in an otherwise dry and difficult subject material,” Lowry said. “Accounting is really a foreign language for so many of these students.” The videos, she added, have proved “very successful with bonding with students,” and instructors at other colleges across the country have used them in their own classes.
Lowry occasionally shows past videos in class as a way of introducing a concept to students, but she hadn’t planned to do so on November 12. Still, a few students asked her to show a video at the start of class, she said, and the Downfall clip was relevant to the day’s lesson. “So I did it, and they clapped and loved it. And that was that,” Lowry said.
She didn’t think anything of it until she got a call from her department chair. A student had spoken about the video with a rabbi on the campus, who had taken the concern to the dean of the Isenberg School of Management. Before long, Lowry said, she was called into a meeting with the dean, Anne P. Massey, who told her she’d need to step down from the course for the remainder of the semester, which ended on December 11.
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On November 14, Lowry sent an email to her students apologizing for the incident. “I want to apologize to any student who was offended by the Hitler xcredit video on Tuesday. My intent was never to offend or upset anyone. I was unaware of what was going on on campus,” Lowry wrote, according to a copy of the email provided by a student. “While I’ve received hundreds of wonderful, thoughtful, creative videos over the past 11 years, this issue, along with an earlier issue this semester, has caused the end of these extra-credit videos.
“I truly am sorry,” she continued, “and I have never wanted to offend or hurt any of my students. Your success and happiness is most important to me.”
Massey, the dean, briefly spoke to the class the next time it met. She announced that another Isenberg professor would take over teaching for the rest of the semester, according to three students The Chronicle spoke with. Some students shouted, “Bring back Cat,” a reference to Lowry’s first name. Eventually, several dozen students walked out in protest.
An ‘Educational Opportunity’
Lowry said none of her students had reacted negatively when the video was shown. “My class and I are very in tune with each other. I would have noticed that immediately,” Lowry said. “I was shocked when this came out.” Had a student expressed concern, she said, “I would have been mortified. I would have addressed it. I’m not trying to make some statement here.”
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“This was an educational opportunity at a major research university. It’s just unfortunate that the university did not take advantage of this educational opportunity. Instead, they chose to follow a punitive process, which doesn’t really help anybody,” Lowry said. “I could have easily dealt with this, if I had been afforded that opportunity. They made a snap judgment and really trampled the reasonable processes we have in place here.”
Lowry was joined in a phone interview with The Chronicle by Eve S. Weinbaum, president of the Amherst faculty union, the Massachusetts Society of Professors. Weinbaum said Lowry’s punishment was an unfair “overreaction,” given the Amherst administration’s lack of response to other campus incidents, including several swastikas that were drawn in chalk on a campus building in October and racist slurs that appeared in a residence hall last year.
“We’ve had real hate speech on campus,” Weinbaum said, “and the administration has not responded to those things as strongly as it has to these incidents, which were not hate speech, and were not threatening to students in any way, but rather were part of a classroom activity and a teaching experience.”
In a statement, a university spokesman, Edward F. Blaguszewski, wrote that the decision to remove Lowry “was made by the Isenberg School of Management after it concluded that objectively offensive material had been presented to students. The university is conducting a full review of the matter.”
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Weinbaum criticized the characterization of the Downfall and “Bust Down Thotiana” videos as “objectively offensive.”
“We would love to know what the administration’s standards are for ‘objectively offensive materials,’” Weinbaum said. “We were really surprised to hear that the press office is now going to put itself in the place of judging what’s offensive and what’s not.”
An effort to reach Massey was not immediately successful.
A Mixed Reaction
One of Lowry’s students, Ibrahim Akar, a sophomore majoring in business management, remembers that the reaction to the Hitler video in class was “very mixed.”
“There were people laughing,” he said. “There were some people who were kind of indifferent. They didn’t really care. There were some people that, like, you could tell they were a little bit uneasy about it.”
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The “chamber of commerce” line in particular made some students uncomfortable, Akar said. “I understood that it was a joke. I guess some people thought that it was a little too far. I thought it was some type of crude humor, but I didn’t think it was too far, necessarily,” he said. “There’s jokes that you shouldn’t say, and then there’s jokes that, if you were to say them, obviously you get a mixed reaction. And I feel like this joke fell along like the middle line between the two. It was clearly not meant to hurt anyone.”
Greg Fournier, another student in the class, observed a similar reaction. “People sort of realized that that was a little over the top, maybe, for the classroom. But generally, people laughed pretty hard at it [the video]. I certainly did.”
People sort of realized that that was a little over the top, maybe, for the classroom. But generally, people laughed pretty hard.
Humor is in the eye of the beholder, and it can be especially difficult to gauge how a joke will land in a large classroom setting, said Dannagal G. Young, an associate professor of communications at the University of Delaware, who studies the psychology of humor and political satire. She called Lowry’s screening of the Hitler video a “lapse in judgment.”
“Humor is something that is completely created, or not, by the recipient of the joke. It is the audience that decides if something is humor, that makes sense of it in whatever way they’re going to make sense of it,” Young said. “So it’s kind of a very difficult beast to tame, and it sounds like that completely missed the mark.”
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The perception of something as humorous, she said, relies on an audience as both motivated and able to process that thing as humor. In the case of the Hitler video, she said, neither criterion was met. “It’s not just that they’re not willing to, but they’re literally almost not able to engage with that kind of a construct in their mind in a way that would bring humor to it. I think that’s especially true when we’re talking about issues that activate a person’s sense of threat,” like the Holocaust, she said.
It’s a ‘dangerous assumption’ that any use of comedy in the classroom is positive.
While humor can make for effective pedagogy when employed correctly, Young said, it’s a “dangerous assumption” that any use of comedy in the classroom is positive.
While Fournier, the student, wasn’t offended by the video, he said he could understand why some people would be and why the university would take some disciplinary action against Lowry. “I was OK with them banning extra-credit videos, and I think that would have been a much more appropriate response than what they did, which was remove her from her job,” Fournier said.
Fournier, a columnist for The Massachusetts Daily Collegian, the campus’s student newspaper, published a column this month criticizing Massey’s handling of the situation. Lowry, he wrote, had been a “casualty of an overzealous freshman dean who capitalized on her newfound power and caved in to an overly sensitive crowd to enact a perverse version of justice against a beloved figure in the world of the Isenberg School of Management.
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“I’m not sure,” he went on, “which aspect of this is worse: the fact that only a few students out of thousands were able to get UMass authorities to effectively censure one of its best professors, or that the new dean is more focused on the sensitivities of one accounting class rather than the multitude of other responsibilities that come with running a world-class business school.”
A third student, Anthony DeMayo, said he had bristled at Massey’s words to the class. “The way that she had made it seem was that Professor Lowry didn’t care about students’ feelings and that she didn’t value the ideals of inclusiveness and diversity that Isenberg does,” DeMayo said. In fact, he said, Lowry had championed the business school’s Inclusive Leadership Summit this fall.
“The way that she was talking about our professor,” he said, “was just, I felt, of poor taste.”
Megan Zahneis, a senior reporter for The Chronicle, writes about faculty and the academic workplace. Follow her on Twitter @meganzahneis, or email her at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com.