Conservative Mexican Student Falsely Labeled Child Molestor by White Leftwing Professor

A professor at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) filed a police report against one of her students, accusing him of making veiled sexual threats against her and her three-year-old daughter, according to the Associated Press. The charges arose from a poem which the student submitted in a creative writing class. In her police report, the professor requested that the student be compelled to undergo psychiatric evaluation.

Disturbing racial and political undertones color the incident. The accused student, Edward Bolles, is Mexican, with a light brown complexion bespeaking mestizo or mixed Spanish-Indian ancestry. The professor, Kelly Ritter, is white. Bolles is conservative. Ritter is a leftist. The two have had "political disagreements" in class, according to the Associated Press.

Bolles admits that his political conflicts with Professor Ritter inspired the offending poem. However, the poem contains no hint of sexual violence, much less child molestation.


"Professor White"

Bolles is 36 years old, married and the father of two. He says he did not even know that Professor Ritter had a three-year-old daughter. Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press describes Bolles' poem thus:

"In it, a [conservative] Mexican student named Juan has a sexual encounter with the daughter of his [leftist] white professor. … Bolles' poetic character… pledges to `turn the tables' on his professor and has a tryst with her college-age daughter. … Bolles said the poem's interracial affair symbolizes white America's feeling that Mexicans are corrupting their culture. The encounter is not violent, and the professor's daughter brings Juan home to meet her disapproving mother. … The poem ends with the professor trying to get Juan kicked out of school by calling one of his poems racist. "

According to Bolles, he meant to satirize globalization. Whatever his intent, Bolles' poem — titled "Professor White" — became a self-fulfilling prophecy when Professor Ritter reported Bolles to campus police on April 8. SCSU barred Bolles from his poetry class for two weeks while it investigated the incident. AP correspondent Matt Apuzzo writes:

"Bolles began publicly protesting the university's decision Monday, wearing a `Save Professor White' shirt and handing out fliers on campus. After that protest began and university officials received calls from The Associated Press Monday, Bolles received a hand-delivered, one-sentence letter from the administration:

"`As a result of the investigation, I wish to inform you that no formal disciplinary charges will be filed on behalf of the university and you are permitted to return to your English 202, Section 1, course, Introduction to Poetry [Writing],' Christopher Piscitelli, director of judicial affairs, wrote."

Bolles will resume his poetry studies Wednesday. He expressed some concern to the Associated Press as to what sort of grade Professor Ritter will award him.


Double Standard

Some might argue that Señor Bolles was "cruisin' for a bruisin.'" He plainly sought to arouse controversy with his poem — though probably not quite the sort of controversy he got. In the political poker game he played with Professor Ritter, her charge of pedophilia trumped his charge of racial hypocrisy by several orders of magnitude — even though Bolles' charge had arguable merit, while Ritter's was groundless, hysterical and perhaps deliberately malicious.

All these considerations notwithstanding, we would do well to keep in mind the double standard applied to Mr. Bolles' poem by a professor who had surely read and admired, in the course of her literary training, one of the most highly praised and widely anthologized works of African-American poet Amiri Baraka, "Black Dada Nihilismus." It reads, in part:

Come up, black Dada

nihilismus. Rape the white girls. Rape
their fathers. Cut the mothers' throats.
Black Dada nihilismus, choke my friends

in their bedrooms with their drinks spilling
and restless for tilting hips or dark liver
lips sucking splinters from the master's
thigh.

One would think that a professor of English literature steeped in an academic tradition which celebrates such feral effusions as Baraka's would have thought twice before reporting a student to the police for so mild a manifestation of "Mexican Dada Nihilismus" as Bolles' poem invokes.

But then Baraka is a leftist, and Bolles conservative. That seems to make all the difference in today's academy.