Friday, March 6, 2009

Inappropriate

Yesterday, I had a CU-WISE poster removed from the lab in which I teach.

It was one of our older First Year Experience posters, which had the face of a young woman in a classroom on it. It had been defaced some time ago with the words "psychology student" -- the implication to me being that a pretty girl couldn't possibly be in CS.

It irked me, but I didn't bother to do anything about it. Frankly, Carleton does do photo shoots where they take whoever volunteers and shoot them pretending to be students of which ever department needed photos; maybe she was a psychology student who someone knew?

But this week, someone had added further defacement to the poster in the form of pornographic stick figures, labelled so you could tell exactly what they thought their very male computer science student should be doing to the female psychology student.

Um, yeah. Not Appropriate. I had the defaced poster removed.

It boggles the mind that I even had to do it.

3 comments:

Gail Carmichael said...

Incidentally, most (or all) of our CS materials come from photo-shoots with actual CS students, which is really cool. I've been in several myself, along with some other attractive CS women.

As you said, it's amazing that you had to take down a poster like that... :(

Terri Oda said...

Yeah, that may be true of computer science, but I know for physics that they actually had outside students come in to be photographed. The physics students were a little miffed when they showed up in the lab and started pretending to do work -- no one even invited the physics students to take part, and they'd have been happy to have someone take pictures.

Gail Carmichael said...

That sucks - I wouldn't be too impressed either. Perhaps the physics photographers should take a lesson from us!