Don't tell me we are living in a "post-racial" society when incidents like this still happen.
I came across an article recently about a Latina college student who was accused of plagiarism by her professor for using a certain word in a paper.
The word in question? "Hence," which was circled; next to the word, the professor wrote "This is not your word." The student was justifiably outraged (as I was when I read about the incident), and she recalls feeling "terrified" and "publicly humiliated" about being called out in front of her class.
Now, I don't know this girl personally, but I give her the benefit of the doubt in this situation and believe she chose to use this word out of her own vocabulary. "Hence" is one of those words students will often use to spice up otherwise stale vocabulary in papers (trust me, I've done this more times than I would like to admit), so for this student's professor to shame her for using a pretty commonplace word reveals underlying biases that are more apparent than we might think.
What bothers me about this incident, aside from the obvious bias, is the fact that the professor didn't bother to even perform a surface-level check to see if there was anything copied and pasted, using one of the many online resources available to check for this sort of thing. If she had any doubts that her student had plagiarized any part of her paper, she could have used one of these to gain some peace of mind before taking the liberty of scrawling half-baked criticisms on a paper most likely agonized over by a sleep-deprived, caffeine-riddled college student desperate to put anything down on the page mere hours before the deadline.
What this professor failed to realize is that perhaps her student chose to use the word she ended up using because it was the most appropriate word in order to transition to her next point. Clearly, this professor has never heard of a thesaurus; otherwise, she would know that "hence" is one of the most common synonyms for "therefore," which tends to be overused in papers.
Whether her comments were racially motivated (let's face it, this sort of thing still frequently occurs) or speaking to the student's work ethic, this professor was unjustly harsh in her treatment of the final grade of this paper. Believe me, I've written plenty of papers in college and have had to face my fair share of tough professors (and I am also half Latina), but never have I received a criticism so extreme. To think that this professor would go out of her way to draw attention to something so insignificant brings me to think there are larger forces at play.
But whatever the case may be, I will never know. There are two different sides to this story, and I will never be able to fully understand why the parties involved were responsible for what happened. However, this incident brings to light the many everyday injustices that continue to occur on college campuses and elsewhere. Hence, our society still has a lot more work to do if we want to see any sort of change in the way we treat those who fall outside of the stereotypical notion of what it means to be scholarly.
