Op-Ed: My Professor Said There Were No Dumb Questions, But Got Mad When I Asked If Women Are People Too

Just yesterday, my professor encouraged us to ask questions and not to feel embarrassed if we didn’t understand something. Yet when I asked later in lecture whether women are, in fact, people, she totally flew off the handle!

I was dumbfounded. She completely flipped out, and it was RIGHT after she said there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Talk about HYPOCRISY!

Suddenly I had this woman yelling at me in front of my peers; I thought this was supposed to be a SAFE SPACE! All I was doing was following her lead and asking questions, merely trying to learn more about whether these strange inferior creatures/primates with more makeup could be classified as people.

Such a DISGRACE to Ezra Cornell’s any person, any study. In this institution of higher learning, I demand the right to have an environment where I can be the inquisitive scholar I was BORN to be.

Professor Encourages Students to Ask Questions He Already Knows How to Answer

ROCKEFELLER HALL—During his Intermediate Quantum Mechanics lecture, Professor Zhao urged his students not to hold back and to ask questions about anything they’re unsure about, unless, of course, he can’t answer the question himself.

“Come on, guys,” Zhao said, finishing an illegible problem on the board, “You can ask me any question you can think of that pertains to my research, but if it’s anything else then you should check the syllabus or Google it.”

Remarking on the poor grades on the latest exam, Zhao begged students to speak up, but if their confusion was in going from step three to step four in the quantum entanglement proof then they should “ask the graduate TAs who understand those complicated formulas.”

After having his say on class participation, Zhao told the class he’d have to answer their questions next week since they were already behind.