Penn State Professor Faces Backlash for Sharing and Mocking Student's English Assignment
Social media users argued that most of the professor's corrections were "politically" biased.
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A professor from Pennsylvania State University has outraged social media users after posting an output of an undergraduate student on X (formerly Twitter).
The professor, Thomas Joudrey, who teaches Rhetoric and Composition at Penn State, posted a picture of the assignment he had checked.
News 9 Live showed that the paper was filled with several corrections in red ink, with the caption "Undergrad writing has gotten so bad. Look what one of my students turned in."
Netizens quickly expressed their disapproval, arguing that the professor was inappropriately mocking the student on a public platform. Many pointed out that educators should not humiliate their students, especially in such a public manner. One user questioned if the professor had received permission from the students to share their work.
Some found his edits a bit too harsh, considering even some of the comments by the professor in a class about political correctness, where the professor wrote next to "mankind": "sexist." Others reacted by calling for the administration to dismiss him for implementing corrections biased toward his political standpoints.
Interestingly, some alert users pointed out that the English paper of the student was found to be almost a direct lift from Karl Popper's work 'The Open Society and Its Enemies,' leading to some to believe that the student was just philosophizing and the professor had got the context of the assignment wrong.
The incident, however, left very many questions in the minds of the participants regarding the role of instructors as agents of change, ethics behind publishing work published by students, and a thin line between constructive criticism and humiliation.
Penn State has not responded to the backlash as of yet.
