Her areas of expertise
Jessica Krug won’t be teaching her classes this year.
In a statement released on Friday night, the University provost, Brian Blake, and dean, Paul Wahlbeck, wrote: “Dr Krug will not be teaching her classes this semester. We are working on developing a number of options for students in those classes, which will be communicated to affected students as soon as possible.”
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Krug’s biography on the GW website lists imperialism and colonialism and African American history among her areas of expertise. Her writings center heavily on issues of African culture and diaspora.
In itself there’s nothing wrong with that. People should be interested in other cultures and histories. But she faked it, which is another matter.
In Krug’s book Fugitive Modernities, published before the revelations, she paid tribute to her apparently invented past in the acknowledgment section. She wrote: “My ancestors, unknown, unnamed, who bled life into a future they had no reason to believe could or should exist. My brother, the fastest, the smartest, the most charming of us all. Those whose names I cannot say for their own safety, whether in my barrio, in Angola, or in Brazil.”
Back in my day being Jewish was good enough. Kids today want it all.
I jest, but I do find it pretty icky, battening onto other people’s history of oppression. That bit about her ancestors who bled life into a future (meaning, who produced her) is really ugh.
Krug’s public persona comes across in a video testimony to a New York city council hearing on gentrification from June. Referring to herself as Jess La Bombalera, Krug refers to “my Black and brown siblings” in the anti-gentrification movement and criticizes “all these white New Yorkers” who “did not yield their time to Black and brown indigenous New Yorkers”.
An exhibitionist, in short.
An exhibitionist, almost certainly. But does that negate her academic expertise in imperialism and colonialism and African American history? If she’d been a physicist or a geologist her lies about her identity would be irrelevant. Is that different for her areas of expertise?
@#1 Richard
I’d argue that depends (or rather, should depend) largely on whether her claim to the expertise is even partly based on her false claims. If she tried to used her ancestry as a credential in itself or as support for her suitability for her position, yes the discovery that she’d lied does negate part of her claimed expertise.
Not entirely true… if you claim some part of your identity is relevant to your knowledge and understanding of your area of expertise in a professional context, and are later caught in a lie, yes that can have professional ramifications. Generally, physicists and geologists don’t put part of their identity forward as supportive of their authority within their area of expertise.
I beg to differ. If someone is prepared to lie about something as fundamental as who they are, then there is no reason to believe anything else they say; all the research they ever produced would be suspect.
I followed a link to a recent piece of Krug’s. Wokey McWokeface drivel, ‘intersectional’ to the point of erasing any actual meaning. Without a claim to ‘authenticity,’ no one would have given it a moment’s notice.
It isn’t just pretending to be black, its James Frey faking his addiction story, its ‘Helen Demidenko’ pretending to be Ukrainian, its ‘The Education of Little Tree’ and the whole industry of fake Native Americanism.
Does no one else remember the Monty Python sketch about ‘The News…for Wombats?’
It is an interesting question, though, the one Richard raises. The issue of a scholar who is exposed as a liar is one answer, but there are still some interesting issues. You could call it the Identity Issue, or the Oppression Studies issue. Do Oppression Studies belong in universities at all, and if so can they be an academic subject and avoid the pitfalls of personal investment? Is authenticity in tension with impartiality?
I for one have never been a plant, but no one suggests that negates my Botany credentials. Still, I have never claimed to be a plant in order to get a job, but it might be that termination should be an option without questioning credentials. Credentials should be separate from identity (unfortunately, Krug made her identity part of her credibility; whether it had any bearing on the hiring decision, I don’t know).
I do have a problem with the idea that only those who are X can speak about or teach X, especially since it is so inconsistently implemented. If Transwomen, for instance, are the only ones qualified to speak about transwomen, then they should have no qualifications at all to speak about women, because they are not one and do not share the same experiences.
But we don’t assume that Russians are the only ones who can teach Russian history or politics (my Russian political systems teacher was no more Russian than I am). We don’t assume the psychologically impaired are the only ones who can teach psychology. Cell Biology is taught by trained Biologists, not by cells.
I do think we are walking a fine line when we talk about oppressed people, which of course brings up interesting issues when talking about women and our portrayal in both Biology and History. But we do need to have a long discussion about credentials, and what constitutes a ‘right’ or a ‘qualification’ to teach, write, or otherwise engage with a subject.
This is what I’m saying. I’m not saying I assume that Russians are the only ones who can teach Russian history or politics, I’m saying there are issues.
I think there’s a tension between academic principles and inquiry into/study of oppression or exploitation or injustice or whatever you want to call it. I don’t have a firm claim either way; I think it’s difficult.
If someone teaching Russian history who claims to be Russian, and has drawn upon their Russian heritage in generating insight into Russian history, and has parlayed their Russian background to gain access to positions set aside for actual Russians, is in fact not Russian at all, doesn’t that put into question anything and everything they have been teaching and writing about? The problem isn’t so much the person’s non-Russian-ness, so much as the spurious claims to a Russian-ness that never existed. The same knowledge of Russian history can be learned and absorbed by Russians and non-Russians alike, but to knowingly, and falsly, claim a Russian heritage and to use other’s uncritical acceptance of that untrue claim to pretend to knowledge, experience, and authority that a non-Russian could never posess is fraudulent.
These are very good questions. I also wonder to what extent the ethical levers of empathy and guilt are involved in those subjects’ place in the university. Is being focused on one end of an ethical pole in tension with impartiality? (Philosophers, for example, don’t have “Good Studies”. There is Ethics, which encompasses good, evil, and every other possibility.) Is impartiality even possible for subjects that are by their very nature partial?
Also, to what extent does the charade influence the faux-Russian professor’s research, writing, and teaching? If the faux-Russian’s work is used or cited by others, to what extent does that compromise the academic project?
I’m pleased to have started a thoughtful discussion. My own view, briefly, is that the line between activism and scholarship has become hopelessly blurred. Nullius in Verba’s point about ethics rather than “Good Studies” is a good one – traditionally ethicists limited themselves to the study and discussion of the subject, and did not set themselves up as moral examplars. One did not need to be outwardly virtuous to study or even teach ethics. These days academic philosophers sometimes seem to see their university position as a platform for parading and imposing their views.
Ms Krug’s ethnic origins should be as irrelevant as her hat size in assessing her ability to teach in her chosen field. (Her dishonesty is a different matter that clouds the issue.) Her imaginary blackness appeared to add authenticity to her work; it now turns out to have done the exact opposite.
I’d forgotten “News for Wombats” and, having looked it up, am surprised it isn’t better known.
Ophelia, Not Bruce, that is my position precisely. I don’t think academia is in a position to handle it well right now, though. Either way. Academia is under siege from both the left and the right, and routinely caves to one or the other (often depending on department, and administrations are bipolar in this, trying to please everyone except truth). I don’t think academia is in a position to handle much of anything right now, because it has been used as a political football by both sides for too long, and academic freedom has become a buzz phrase that is meaningless. It is often used to justify teaching blatantly false things that serve an ideological purpose, and lead to harm for marginalized groups of people, or to teach wrongheaded things like sex isn’t real, alternative medicine is better than clinical medicine, and lots of New Age gobbledygook.
Richard @ 10 –
Or not so much philosophers as literature people and some social science people.
And academics who do that can be very irritating or worse, and can do vacuous pseudo-scholarship (the lit types more than the social science types)…but at the same time I think it’s understandable to want to nudge the fresh-faced undergraduates to question some of their beliefs or attitudes about other people. It’s not really their job but it should be someone’s job…you know?
Again, this is one I don’t have an answer for, just as I don’t with the Oppression Studies v academic values question.
Sort of depends on the philosophers, though. Environmental Philosophy seems to want to do just that. When I had to take two graduate level philosophy classes in my Ph.D., the students (and profs) were quite scornful of science. All science to them was nuclear bombs and the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment. They wanted to abolish science. They also believed that all eastern thought (especially Hinduism and Islam) is A-OK, natural, organic, and genuine, while all western thought is to be destroyed as toxic, unnatural, and fake.
If I hadn’t already been exposed to philosophy, and read quite a bit of good philosophy, I would have joined the rest of my science classmates and colleagues in dismissing philosophy as irrelevant, ignorant, and unable to parse nuanced thought.