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U. Michigan Students Try and Fail to Cancel Art Professor

U. Michigan Students Try and Fail to Cancel Art Professor

“Students expressed their discomfort towards being assigned homework on an artist that is known for drawing racist cartoons”

The students were offended when she introduced them to the work of R. Crumb, who is provocative, but come on.

The College Fix reports:

Meet the ballsy art professor students tried — and failed — to cancel

A tenured University of Michigan associate professor in the school of art and design survived an onslaught of allegations that she engaged in repeated microaggressions against her students, forcing them to copy “racist” and “misogynist” cartoons without providing trigger warnings or context.

Phoebe Gloeckner (pictured), a professor specializing in comics, had faced complaints from students distraught that her curriculum involves provocative cartoons from artists such as R. Crumb, a seminal figure in the underground comics movement.

Some students had filed complaints with the school in fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 that Crumb’s comics are “misogynistic” and “racially insensitive,” and Gloeckner was forcing them to study the images, according to a June 25 investigative article in The Michigan Daily.

Although the investigation is closed and Gloeckner was fully cleared and still teaches, the article reignited debate about her curriculum and teaching methods. She stands by them.

“Comics are, by nature, a provocative art form,” Gloeckner told The College Fix in an emailed statement. “Some comics reflect fantasy worlds that reveal our desires, dreams and nightmares. Other comics offer a grotesque reflection of humanity that we would rather not see.”

Gloeckner gained national fame from her 2002 graphic novel “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” which was made into a movie in 2015. She has taught at U of M since 2004.

“Students expressed their discomfort towards being assigned homework on an artist that is known for drawing racist cartoons,” one complaint read, referring to Crumb. “Students expressed their discomfort towards the depiction of the female body in the illustration, as they felt it was misogynistic and uncomfortable to draw.”

After the students complained, Gloeckner required them to watch a documentary on Crumb, “implying that our discomfort towards misogyny and racism is something to be fixed.”

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Comments

The modern left would be the first people to set the offices of national lampoon on fire, fully not understanding that it was exactly where they came from almost 50 years ago.

number crunch | July 4, 2022 at 4:13 pm

Their parents must be so proud. Can you imagine paying $8K/term ($26.5K out of state) to take a class in comics then having your little angel take offense and try to cancel their professor? I’d march them right over to the local recruiters and sign them up for a 4 year hitch.

    In Austin and Milley’s military? What would they learn there that’s any different than what is taught on college campuses? More CRT, more racist “antiracism,” and more wokeness are the agenda of today’s military. We’ve covered it a lot here at LI.

JackinSilverSpring | July 4, 2022 at 4:24 pm

These so-called college students are emotionally immature. They should spend a year doing menial work before being allowed to enter college so they can get the emotional maturity to handle college work.

    Exactly. After my father graduated from high school, he spent much of the summer roofing. That convinced him to go to college where he learned the craft of accounting (notice he didn’t go for an art degree …)

henrybowman | July 4, 2022 at 9:53 pm

R. Crumb.
The epitome of the ’60s LEFT counterculture against “the Man.”
“Keep on Truckin’.”
Fritz The Cat.
Mr. Natural.
“Remember, kids…”
“Drugs will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no drugs.” Wait, that was Gilbert Shelton. Still…
Yup, he was absolutely not complimentary to black men, black women, Jews, cops, squares, you name it.
And you can’t say he never warned everybody:
I’m not here to be polite!

    henrybowman in reply to henrybowman. | July 4, 2022 at 10:00 pm

    The remaining counterculture icons are such frightened, phony sell-outs.
    Ever read Zippy the Pinhead? A nice, unintelligible family comic for blue newspapers. But I remember early Zippy, who was bullied by ape-looking black men, and ran away crying, and calling them “bastiches” and lots of other words you won’t see in your daily family newspapers.

What a bunch of wimps! We were protesting the fiasco of Viet Nam and today’s wimps can’t handle a cartoon that might challenger their crib creep? No wonder there are so many ancient leaders still staggering around unwilling to hand the positions off to the next generation…what a bunch of crybabies! It appears there needs to be a law that every college freshman must survive a year of military training to include how their former generations fought for freedom of thought. They did that in Korea when I was there. They all need a daily dose of syrup labeled “You are not the center of the intellectual world.”

How will these tender young things ever graduate and work in the real world? I was particularly interested in their complaints about depictions of the female body–in a cartoon, no less–I guess they wouldn’t have been able to draw Jessica Rabbit or any number of characters in comics and animation. I’m just disgusted at this point–why are we wasting valuable resources on people who should just be in padded cells where they can’t harm themselves or others?