Standing up

“Get out of this country.”

“Power-tripping graduate student, trying to impose his leftist liberal views on us. Stop being so heinously flamboyant because it distracts my learning.”

These are some of the comments graduate student Gopinaath Kannabiran received on a teacher evaluation for the course I310 — Multimedia Arts and Technology — he taught last spring.

“When I got this feedback, I was like trying to, for a few hours, I was just trying to think, ‘who could have done this?’” Kannabiran said.

Kannabiran was sitting and browsing early in the morning when he first saw the feedback.

“I’m trying to intentionally try and imagine each and every person’s face,” he said. “I knew all of them, I get to know my students very personally, I bake stuff for them and bring it to class and all of that stuff and we joke around, so I treat them pretty much as equals for all purposes, unless they require me to step to another power. Otherwise I don’t do that.”

Kannabiran said he felt a physical shock after reading the racist and homophobic comments on his evaluation. It was something he was not used to seeing at IU.

Kannabiran moved to the United States from India in the fall of 2008 to get his master’s degree from IU. He has many friends in the School of Informatics where he teaches and studies, friends who gave him support when he came out to his parents and friends who gave him support after he received this negative feedback.

“I never felt like I was a gay person or an Indian person or a graduate student,” he said. “I just felt like, ‘No, I’m just another person here. In a way, my world was very shielded, in a way that is not reality.’”

Kannabiran said only when he steps outside the safety net of Bloomington is he very much reminded he is an international person of color who is gay.

“It’s a very physical feeling, it’s not just a mental feeling,” Kannabiran said.

Doug Bauder, coordinator of GLBT Support Services at IU, said he was struck by how visibly shaken Kannabiran was after receiving the evaluation.

“Periodically we get complaints of students harassing each other in the classroom, but it’s usually in the residence hall or a fraternity or on the street,” Bauder said. “The classroom tends to be a little safer. Maybe that’s another reason Gopi felt so violated, because you expect people to be somehow respectful in that setting.”

Kannabiran said after reading the comment, he felt physically unsafe.

“This comment was like a lightning bolt, just hitting that way,” Kannabiran said. “I am used to bullying. I’ve been bullied a lot both here and in India ... For two days, for two whole days, I did not feel safe to step outside of my home. I felt very physically violated.”

Kannabiran said he is open to any critique on his teaching and is willing to learn and become a better teacher, but the comments he received were intentionally directed at him and very personal.

“This is the thing which people don’t understand,” Kannabiran said. “When all is said and done, I am here all by myself. I have wonderful friends who would just, like, drop everything and come to me if I needed them. I don’t know who this person is, and this is very clearly hateful and personal.”

Bauder said this incident was the most severe case’s of discrimination he had seen this past school year.

“The most standard response we get when someone has written something really offensive on someone’s dry erase board in the residence hall, an email or something like that, ‘it was just a joke,’” Bauder said. “They think it’s funny and they just don’t get that what they think is funny isn’t for everyone.”

Feeling safe is something Kannabiran lost for a long time after reading the feedback.

“The issue of safety is not felt the same way by everyone,” Kannabiran said. “Those few moments, I got a glimpse of what it feels like to feel physically unsafe, but there’s nothing around me which is physical which is threatening to me. “It’s literally, physically arresting. I just sat down on the couch for three hours and I couldn’t move. The intensity of that is something you can never explain to someone else. It’s just something you have to experience. It’s just hard. There’s no other way.”

Though Kannabiran was shaken after receiving the feedback, support from his friends at IU and India, as well as a long month of personal reflection brought him peace on the matter.

“Within a week I realized this is a single incident,” Kannabiran said. “Then I slowly started analyzing, what is personal and what is not personal. It took me almost a month to come to that place of what is personal and what is not and how I need to handle this. I felt I was at a stable place. I was not holding any grudge. Basically, I’ve made my peace with it, at least on a personal basis.”

Being a teacher is not for everyone, Kannabiran said. However, it is the career he continues to pursue. He said this incident allowed him to grow in his role as a teacher.

“That is where I think I, as a teacher, have work to do,” Kannabiran said. “Something about me, the way I conducted myself, probably must have made this person feel unwelcome or threatened, that they couldn’t feel like they could come and talk to me about this.”

Kannabiran said that after his class ended, a student took him out to lunch and gave him a card in appreciation of his teaching.

“To me, that’s all that matters,” he said. “I open the drawer and I see that and then I feel like, ‘OK, somebody thinks I’m good at this and I need to keep doing it.’”