That tells me she’s just trying to show off vs a new mom / actual emergency sorta thing.
Breast feeding is like masturbating. Perfectly natural and pretty much every one has done it. But many folks prefer not to see others do it.
Though if I ever win the Nobel I am gonna wank it so hard on stage that Pee Wee Herman will go “dayum dude”.
Given that the kid would have been in daycare if she hadn’t been with her mother, I don’t think the bottle would have been terribly inconvenient for her. She was obviously would have either pumped or given formula that day anyway. Would she have pumped in front of her class, though? I doubt it.
I think that bringing a baby to class is unprofessional, and she shouldn’t have done so, unless it was absolutely necessary. Once the kid is there, though, she was obligated to lessen the distraction as much as possible. Breastfeeding is about the least good way to do that, and for that reason alone she should never have done it.
I don’t have a problem with nursing in public, I did it all the time. I sure wouldn’t have done it while giving a presentation at work, though, any more than I would have changed a diaper. It’s just not an appropriate situation.
I choose the take the professor at her actions that’s she’s a complete nutter and genuine asshole. If students are talking about something, it is defacto newsworthy for a school newspaper. It’s not The #@! Economist. Far more banal things are reported in such papers every week. Asking for her side of the story does not display “antiwoman” feeling as she alleges.
Yes, I can see how it’s totally unfair to let the TA handle the rigorous program of handing out syllabi and dealing with drop/add that constitutes the first day of class in the average American university, but it’s not toally unfair to let the TA hold and soothe the baby. Cause you know, the TA just demanded to do it. After the baby put itself in danger more than once, raising the concern of students for its safety.
What kind of germaphobe is afraid of catching something from a baby with whom they are not touching or interacting? There were probably sicker students attending the lecture and I’d be more worried about some sick kid not wanting to miss the first day of class contaminating the desks and door handles before I’d be worried about some random baby. Sheesh.
How can she be a new mother if the baby is a year old? Babies get sick a lot, I really can’t believe that this is the first time that the baby has ever been unable to go to daycare or the first time mom has ever thought about what to do if the baby couldn’t go to daycare.
Look, I have taught university courses, and occasionally I would get students who expected all kinds of slack to be cut for them because they had kids (or because they had two jobs or whatever). But I had to tell them that I couldn’t change the rules for them. I know it is difficult trying to balance kids and school or work and school, but that’s a problem for the person who has decided to take on that balancing act. It sucks and it’s unfair, but that’s life. I definitely wouldn’t have allowed a student to bring their kid to class, especially if that kid was both sick and fully mobile. It’s not reasonable to ask other students, who have paid good money and are ready to be fully focused on the class, to put up with that. I can’t imagine that this woman would be happy with 3 or 4 of her students bringing babies to class either, but what kind of precedent has she set?
Wow, that’s incredibly inappropriate. I’m willing to bet those professionals are still talking about that nut bar lady who whipped out her boob during a presentation. This is not about fear of women or fear of tits - breast feeding her baby during, say, a conference luncheon or dinner would be fine. But during a presentation is way out of line. Just like the class, it’s wildly inappropriate to even bring a baby to an academic conference, let alone to maximize the distraction level by breast feeding during the one short period of the day when everyone is forced to watch.
I don’t buy it for a minute that the professor wasn’t trying to make some sort of political statement. Hell, she makes several political statements completely unrelated to breastfeeding in her blog response to an article that hadn’t even been published yet. As well as, of course, making political statements about breastfeeding in the “response” to an article no one had read yet.
The professor is playing the martyr while simultaneously doing her best to draw as much attention as possible to an issue she claims she doesn’t want attention drawn to. She essentially pulled an Opalcat.
Completely wrong. I breastfed my own daughter, and I’m comfortable around breastfeeding moms. Breastfeeding is very natural. So are a lot of other behaviors which are not appropriate for a classroom. I think that our society should encourage breastfeeding. The professor didn’t breastfeed because the child was hungry, but because the baby was being fussy…in which case a pacifier works just about as well, in my experience.
I don’t think that bringing a baby, sick OR well, into a classroom is professional or appropriate, unless the class is about childcare and a subject is needed. I would also think that it’s inappropriate for someone to bring any child which needed to be cared for into a college classroom, which means that a child who could be counted on to quietly read or otherwise amuse him/herself in the classroom might be OK. I don’t care if the child is the professor’s, or a student’s, the child shouldn’t be in the classroom if it’s a distraction.
Maybe the baby wasn’t contagious (ear infection). Maybe she was. But she was crawling around, putting stuff in her mouth, and getting too close to dangerous items. We don’t know if any of the students had compromised immune systems, or were close to someone with such a system.
If the professor had really wanted to have this be a lesson, she could have either skipped the class for the day, or found another caretaker, and presented her dilemma to the students at the first opportunity as an example, without actually bringing the baby to class, and asked the students for solutions to her problem. In my opinion, she wanted to make a statement, and she wanted to stir up controversy.
Remember, I’m a feminist and a breastfeeding advocate.
Yeah, I urge anyone that’s leaning toward the ass’t professor’s defense to read that. Here’s a sample excerpt showing the reporter’s (completely reasonable and polite) original email and Pine’s reaction:
Yeah, Teach. You’re a delicate rice-paper painting of an uncomfortable hymen. What a piece of work.
I sure hope you are being obtuse, because that was just a stupid thing to say
Think its stupid? Explain why then.
Being naked is also natural as hell. People genrally also don’t wanna see people neked either when teaching class or give presentations.
Natural but not generally preferred to be “seen” by others in public:
Urinating.
Crapping.
Douching.
Farting.
Belching.
Vomiting.
Masterbating (again).
Copulating.
and voting.
And drinking water is also natural and that’s okay to do during a presentation. Having the baby there at all was inappropriate but there’s no reason to compare breastfeeding to masturbation, or give examples other “natural” things that are inappropriate to do in public.
That would be my take. A baby is unprofessional in the classroom, whether breastfeeding or bottlefeeding - a baby you are pretty darn sure is going to sleep through the whole thing (say a three month old) - I can see taking that risk, and if it gets distracting, releasing the class early. But it sounds like this baby is old enough that it was distracting - and not just the breastfeeding.
So wait, it’d be totally cool for the prof to not go to class, and miss 100% of the student interaction. But it’s completely unacceptable for her to go with her baby and make probably 90% of the student interaction? How does that make any sense?
This is undergrad, not real estate classes at the Learning Annex. The prof made the students think and did something that pushed enough boundaries to make nation news. That is exactly the sort of critical thinking that those students are paying all that money to be a part of, and it has opened up interested discussion on gender, child-rearing, professionalism, etc. A classroom is a community of learners, not a Broadway musical. It’s okay to venture off script now and then. You are all all a bunch of people, human beings with real lives, coming together to think and to learn. Heck, we had a few babies in our classes with students now and then. Life happens, and it’s not ideal but I’d rather my classmates get their education than spend the evening staring at the walls because the baby coughed.
I went to grad school at AU, and I can say two things. The classrooms are pretty bare and low on baby-hazards and every student takes the metro- which is infested with the germs of every human being in Washington with the exception of Barak Obama- nearly daily. A baby with te sniffles is a non-issue.
Snarkers are going to have a field day, but one of the things I really liked about Cameroon was that it was perfectly okay to strap your baby to your back and go to work. Why do I really care if the store clerk or cubicle drone or receptionist has a baby with him or her? On the off chance that I might be subjected to hearing the baby coo or fuss, so what? I’d more than be willing to deal with that if I can keep my freaking job when I choose to have baby.
In any case, I firmly believe that we, as a society, are going to see some major changes in child rearing in the years to come. Women largely do not want to return to the days when they could not have jobs, nor are women largely willing to give up having families. So we’ll have to rethink the whole darn system to make it possible to have a family and work as well…which isn’t impossible, but will take some changes.
It seems to me here that we’re conflating a number of issues:
(1) Is it OK to breastfeed in public?
Sure, I say.
(2) Was it appropriate to breastfeed in that particular situation?
No, because the woman was lecturing to a class, and breastfeeding distracted from the lecture.
(3) If it wasn’t appropriate to breastfeed in that situation, how inappropriate was it?
I think it was about on par with eating while lecturing (as per Enderw24), taking a non-emergency cell phone call in the middle of a lecture, changing the baby’s diaper, or coming to class with your fly unzipped.
In light of that, I feel like a lot of the anger on both sides is overblown, and mostly reflects people picking fights over issues they already had strong feelings about.
Same reason as it’s okay to miss 100% of a work day if you have the flu, but it’s not okay to show up with a wastebasket and sit in the back of a meeting vomiting into it while you take 90% of the notes you would have taken. It’s not all about her - she’s distracted, the students are distracted, and frankly she’s sending a message to them that she doesn’t take the class very seriously and doesn’t have much respect for the students.
This is getting a little off-topic, but I don’t understand this. We’re always being told that motherhood is so incredibly difficult and all-consuming, but now suddenly it’s such a minor inconvenience that you could meet all your baby’s needs while simultaneously performing all the tasks of your regular job? That doesn’t seem likely to me. What does seem likely is that the mom-with-baby would work 50% of her regular job while everyone else got to pick up her slack. That might sound good to you as a mother-to-be, but it doesn’t sit too well with me as someone who doesn’t want kids and would just have to put up with it.
Everyone knows that having children involves sacrifice and will change your lifestyle dramatically. Now, I can get behind the idea of changing maternity leave rules and providing reasonable daycare and whatnot to help women. I’m not some kind of crazy baby-hater. But it seems silly to me to say that moms should just be able to bring the kid around wherever and damn the inconvenience for anyone else. Nobody else gets to drag their problems into the workplace without consequences. If she hasn’t planned for normal baby-related ‘emergencies’ and she doesn’t want to make any sacrifices at all in her life, that shouldn’t suddenly make the baby everyone elses problem.
A baby is a problem? Here I was, thinking they were human beings and a normal part of life and all that.
Everyone knows that having children involves sacrifice and will change women’s lives dramatically. There isn’t a lot of talk about men who dare to “think they can have it all” and how deluded they are and how much sacrifice they will have to make.
I’m not ready to say that toting babies into the workplace is the answer. But we will see a shift in career timing to where the most absolutely critical point doesn’t happen to fall right at the most critical point of women’s fertility. We will (and have already) see more openness to flexible schedules and working form home. We will see changes in the school schedule to make them sync with work schedules.
A country’s productivity suffers when we expect nearly half the population to miss out on good chunks of their career. And women have, for the most part, already made their decisions. The structural legacy still makes things unnecessarily hard on women, but it’s not going to stay that way forever. The market has spoken, and people still want babies.
I went to grad school at AU as well, and I know Professor Pine, although Anthropology was not my field. I actually ran into her, and met her new baby, off-campus early in the summer. Somehow, I was not surprised to see her name and picture attached to this story.
There was recently a panel discussion at AU recently on this sort of topic. I could not attend, but a friend did, and apparently the event covered the same ground as the previous few comments. Changing the paradigm is crucial, and it has to accommodate parents and non-parents alike.
This discussion has been going on for a long time, come to think of it.
Coincidentally, inasmuch as I was going to Professor Pine’s place to talk about anarchism, I wonder how these concerns are addressed in worker-managed (or better yet, worker-owned) institutions? I really should know this.
In Stockholm, would anyone even take notice of another guy in a tuxedo masturbating?
(actually I think that’s what is depicted on the back of the 100 Krona note)
Given that it was a student who noticed the kid had a paper clip in her mouth, how was she perfectly capable of doing both? The classroom wasn’t child proof, and her students shouldn’t be the ones looking after the kid.
I’m also reminded of this Onion video.
Yes, that would have been the more professional thing to do.
Actually, the professional thing to do would have been to call on her network of friends and associates and said “the baby is sick, I have a two hour class, can you babysit!” Professors know grad students and other professors, who usually have pretty flexible schedules when they aren’t scheduled to teach (or aren’t in class themselves).
As a woman who has held a full time job for fourteen years with two children - you can work and have a family. It isn’t like the 1970s happened and women stopped having kids if they worked. This is not an either or. And hasn’t been for an entire generation, nearly two now - no reinvention of the system needed.
Is it difficult to juggle a job and sick kids? - yep. And yet millions of American women have been doing it. We call in sick ourselves. We call our mother and see if she can watch the kids. We drop them off with a stay at home neighbor.
(Childcare could be more affordable and more subsidies available for low income - even median income - workers).