I was appalled by Rachel Shasha’s claim that female
professors are superior to male professors at UCLA (“Female
professors vastly superior to males,” Viewpoint Nov. 18). It
doesn’t matter what gender the professors are! All that
matters is their ability to communicate the goals outlined in the
course syllabus.
The room decorations wouldn’t help either. Unless of
course you are learning the alphabet, then the funny animals
associated with the letters do not support the subject matter. But
that is kindergarten; this is UCLA. If the professor can’t
cut it, then reading selection, class decorations, and funny jokes
will never be an adequate substitute for a good lecture.
If the professor can engage you in a subject, then that
person’s gender, and for that matter the person’s race
and age, should be the last thing on a student’s mind.
Racism and sexism are the same forms of discrimination. If you
were to change the nature of the article, replacing every
“she” and “he” and every
“female” and “male” with
“black” and “white” the article would never
be published. Why? Because it would smell of racism, however
humorous the packaging.
Perhaps if the article were written in reverse order, stressing
the finer point of personality first, my response would be less
bellicose.
The purpose of the university is to move beyond such superficial
analysis and concentrate on the underlying ideas and the mechanisms
that make up the world we are preparing for. By sticking to
superficial comparisons of gender, class, race and age, we have
only demonstrated that we have learned nothing beyond those funny
animals tacked up on the kindergarten classroom wall.
Magdaleno is a fourth-year political science student.