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Images of an email exchange widely shared on social media last week depict a mathematics instructor at York University, in Canada, rudely dismissing a request from a student from Myanmar for a deferral for a midterm test due to a communications blackout in the country, which is undergoing a military coup.
In the depicted exchange, the instructor not only rejects the student's request for a deferral, and says the student will have difficulty passing the course, he also mocks the student's request. “Even the internet came down with COVID-19?” the instructor asks.
The instructor also casts doubt on the student’s statement about the shootings of anticoup protestors. “By the way, your remarks (both related to this course and to your home country) made me wonder how you understand reality,” the instructor writes in the pictured exchange. “People don’t get shot for just protesting, but for a lot deeper reasons.”
The instructor whose name is on the pictured emails, Emanoil Theodorescu, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
York said in a statement it issued in response to the exchange that it “is taking steps to address the matter under the relevant collective agreement, and further, effective immediately, alternate arrangements for the teaching of the course have been made.”
“York University is committed to upholding and promoting the values of respect, equity, diversity, and inclusion across our campuses and in our communication. There was a recent communication between a Department of Mathematics & Statistics instructor and a student that does not reflect those values,” says the statement from Barbara Joy, a spokeswoman.
“We would like to assure all concerned that senior staff from the Faculty were able to directly make contact with the student the night of the exchange with the instructor, and clearly expressed support for their difficult circumstance and well-being, and further, assured them that necessary accommodations would be granted.”
