Why Are They Dancing? Who’s Justine? Good God, Where Are We? (UPDATED)
Aw, college. Anybody have any idea what’s going on in these clips?
UPDATE 4:47 p.m.: The videographer emails us to report:
The teacher is Justine Hastings and the class is Econ 115: An Intro to Micro-economics. These videos were taken yesterday, on the last day of class. No one in the class likes Justine as a professor (we refer to her by her first name), and so the Pundits (the all-seniors campus prank group) came in and protested her on her final day of class with a baseball theme. They had all sorts of baseball paraphernalia, from wiffle balls to peanuts and popcorn. The Pundits also had members decked out in face and body paint and carrying signs. This display went on for about five minutes, until the trumpet played pulled off his shorts and streaked out of class.
Justine then proceeded to comment that “I told my male colleagues that if anyone stripped in my class, I would drag them before ExComm [the disciplinary board] for sexual harassments. I didn’t see any distinctive marks, though. Did any of you?”
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December 7th, 2006 at 11:10 am
Well, they’re both in Sterling Strathcoma Sheffield Hall 114 at Yale, I’ll tell you that much…
December 7th, 2006 at 11:16 am
jesus… is it really necessary to identify the building by the full waspy name?? is that supposed to help us care?
December 7th, 2006 at 11:53 am
“Justine” is probably Prof. Justine Hastings, and the class must be Econ 115 (Intro Micro). It is known to be pretty boring, which is why the students must have decided to spice it up a bit.
December 7th, 2006 at 11:54 am
And yes, the full WASPy name is Sterling Sheffield StrathcoNa. Get your heroes right.
Although I agree with d07: why the hell would we care about what’s going on in this video?
December 7th, 2006 at 12:11 pm
I had Justince Hastings at Dartmouth my freshman year and feel like pointing out she was the worst prof I ever had. Ever. Total ditz.
P.S. “Strathcona” is def NOT a WASPy name, haha.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:09 pm
If I wanna watch stupid meaningless YouTube videos, I’ll do it on my own. I don’t need your help.
December 7th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
It’s a pundits prank
December 7th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
i have no idea what this is but wrt clip 1: as if her constant presence wasn’t irritating enough, SL is showing up on my news feed? oh the irony, oh the nausea…
December 7th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
I believe Justine Hastings’ classroom was turned into a ball game, complete with vendors, a trumpeter, hecklers, and a shower of 200 wiffle balls. Oh, did I forget the streaker? I guess students just finally realized that Justine puts the suck in econ.
December 7th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
pundits!
December 7th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
What on earth…
December 7th, 2006 at 6:26 pm
In defense of Professor Hastings–Justine, if you will–I would like to say that she at the very least cares about the class and has a solid organization to her lectures, using Powerpoint so as to be able to post her slides on the internet. This is my 3rd term at Yale, and I found her to be an acceptable if not stellar teacher. Although I do not think all pranks would have been excessive, I do not believe that the cruel comments of this one were acceptable.There are more appropriate forums for complaints about her quality as a teacher.
December 8th, 2006 at 12:53 am
Uh no. I’m sorry. Justine sucks. The university’s ratings system that students must fill out to get their grades online has histograms of things like “Quality of teaching” and hers is the most skewed towards “worst” I have ever encountered. Solid organization of slides? Please…ever heard of death by powerpoint? The only reason I bothered coming to class was cause I would fall asleep faster there than I would in my own bed! What makes things worse, Justine makes problem sets that have absolutely nothing to do with what she taught. Damn right she puts boring in economics. And a tad of hateful as well.
December 8th, 2006 at 1:06 am
Cut Justine some slack… I took her course three years ago. True, she is not the most exciting lecturer ever. But at least all the aspiring economics majors in the course get a great idea of what most of Yale’s offerings in the field are: boring and non-quantitative. After Justine, the naive freshmen will turn into hardened cynics, and they will not blink an eye when the visiting prof in intermediate micro opens his lecture with the words “for those of you who have ever seen a derivative…”
December 8th, 2006 at 9:52 am
those of you who are inclined to cut Justine Hastings some slack…you don’t deserve to be educated. classic Hastings moment included working through a problem on the board only to realize halfway through that she had completed it INCORRECTLY, at which point she’d become flustered, try to work through it correctly, fail, and then move on with a comment like “there are more examples in your book, just look in there after class.”
meanwhile the class would sit in stunned silence, appalled that we were in fact paying to be taught by this woman. DITZ.
December 8th, 2006 at 4:57 pm
As a female junior faculty member at an ivy league school I feel compelled to point out that female faculty are frequently subject to criticism that is harsher than that given their male colleagues for exactly the same behavior. Has Justine Hastings flubbed an example in class? Probably. Have any of your male professors flubbed an example? Certainly. Furthermore, Professor Hastings begins the semester handicapped by students who show disrespect. I, like Prof. Hastings, have routinely been called by my first name by students. A sign of disrepect? Yes. Did I deserve it? This has happened even prior to the start of the semester in classes I have never talk before. In short, it happens well before I can show whether I am more or less competent than my male colleagues. Wake up and start treating people equally. When you do that you just might find that Professor Hasting’s performance in the classroom improves.
December 8th, 2006 at 9:18 pm
FemaleFaculty is right. I’m (a dude) in the class, and the kids who give her a hard time are the date-raping lacrosse-player/greek types (aka, the people who will be running the country soon). Prof. Hastings is just as goofy as any other professor, but she gets a lot of shit from little over-privileged dick-wads whose mothers probably pop the first cork at noon and the first pill before Daddy has even left Connecticut on the way to Manhattan. I hope the kid that streaked does get his ass hauled into the Executive Committee. Prof. Gaddis (another Pundits victim) on the other hand, can eat a dick.
December 9th, 2006 at 1:06 am
Dear femalefaculty,
I don’t know what your personal experiences have been with chauvinism at your school, but having first-hand interaction with other students in the class I can assure you chauvinism has little to nothing to do with the attitude students have towards Prof Hastings. I personally could care less whether my prof teaching freshman micro was male or female. The only biases against Prof Hastings I had were based on having shopped the same exact class taught by her two years beforehand and having had a terrible experience and on the course evaluation histogram I mentioned earlier (and believe me it was accurate given that the class was huge and the law of large numbers had taken effect). I knew what I was getting into, but I still think we deserve a better education from Yale no matter the semester we take the class in.
Further, I suspect any gender-based specificities come from the professor’s behavior more than from students’ preconceptions nowadays. For instance, a male faculty member would have been a lot likelier to shut down the hecklers with a comment like “Why are you messing with my job? It’s not like five years down the line when you’ll be cleaning the bathroom next to my office I’m gonna come in and slam the toilet seat down on your hand.”
December 9th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
Dear x,
If you study psychology while you are at Yale you will learn that people seek and are more responsive to evidence that confirms what they already believe. I have no doubt that Prof. Hastings has had difficult moments in the class. However, when Prof. Hastings acts like a “ditz” this confirms a stereotype and is therefore more readily percieved. When your male professor behaves like a ditz, it is unusual behavior and you are more likey to overlook it. The next moment when he says something smart, confirming your bias, you file it away. Thus, perhaps your experience is indeed different in the two classes, however this difference begins with your personal views regarding what a “smart professor” acts and looks like. I know Justine Hastings research and I have no doubt that the students at Yale have a lot to learn from her, if only they would open their eyes.
December 9th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
She’s just one of many bad teachers (male and female) in ivy league economics departments. You know her research, but I bet you’ve never been in her class (I took it). From my experience, the correlation between good research and the ability to teach is almost zero. It’s why you can learn from famous professors at Yale or Harvard, but you’re not necessarily going to get a better education than at State U.
December 11th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Bingo. Justine Hastings may be an excellent researcher – and, who knows, a lovely person – but she’s not a good teacher. She is, in fact, a terrible teacher. And her terrible teaching, as femalefaculty points out, has absolutely nothing to do with her gender…it has to do with her terrible teaching.
femalefaculty, if we’re to accept your point about a human psychological tendency to see evidence in the world that reinforces our preconceptions, I can think of no clearer example than the fact that you are assuming that the implicit critique of Professor Hastings’ class has to do with her gender and not her inferior teaching ability. Justine Hastings is not, as you point out, worse than a hypoethetical male colleague because she’s a woman; she’s worse because she’s worse. Gender has nothing to do with it.
Gender has never had anything to do with the conception or execution of this prank, I would guess: the Pundits turned it into a crowd at a ball game, for God’s sake, not a gender-themed, chauvanistically-barbed setting designed to put Justine Hastings’ body parts on trial. The Pundits do naked stuff all the time, and the streaker fits in with both that and the ballgame…
If we’re going to discuss what happened, let’s discuss what happened, not our own neuroses.
December 11th, 2006 at 3:14 pm
They were naked with her first name written on their bodies. I have a hard time believing that this is a gender-neutral response.
The question is not whether or not Justine Hastings is a good teacher, it is whether the students’ reactions are different because of her gender.
December 11th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
Female Faculty,
Justine Hastings was a terrible teacher. She was a terrible teacher because had loosely organized lectures, an irritating lecture style, and consistently flubbed very simple examples on the whiteboard.
I don’t want to hear your interpretation of gender-specific behaviors on the pedogogical condition. They are completely irrelevant.
You just totally conflated an argument so that you could make your point about gender issues in teaching.
December 12th, 2006 at 10:56 am
Also, as someone who was in the class that day, one of the people with Hastings’s name painted on was a female, as were several of the hecklers. As for Hefty lefty’s assertion about the “lacrosse playing dickwads” who are disrespectful of Professor Hastings, I can tell you that a lot of quiet, polite middle class kids who resent having someone who doesn’t bother to teach the material later tested on are also disrespectful. I really tried at first to be sympathetic, but feeling like you learned less because you actually went to lecture is a terrible feeling to have at the end of the day.