The Tiffany Martínez case: her post is long on emotional appeal and short on details
The trending case of a Suffolk University student accused of cheating in front of her class raises more questions than her manipulative story answers…
Tiffany Martínez, Suffolk University
On Thursday, a Suffolk University student named Tiffany Martínez posted a blog in which she described how her professor had attacked her in front of a class for using language that was “not her own.”
This morning, my professor handed me back a paper (a literature review) in front of my entire class and exclaimed “this is not your language.” On the top of the page they wrote in blue ink: “Please go back and indicate where you cut and paste.” The period was included. They assumed that the work I turned in was not my own. My professor did not ask me if it was my language, instead they immediately blamed me in front of peers. On the second page the professor circled the word “hence” and wrote in between the typed lines “This is not your word.” The word “not” was underlined. Twice. My professor assumed someone like me would never use language like that. As I stood in the front of the class while a professor challenged my intelligence I could just imagine them reading my paper in their home thinking could someone like her write something like this?
Martínez is right to be sensitive to the issues of bias she points out. America is far from attaining post-racial equality (if you don’t know this, you clearly haven’t been watching the last year or so of election coverage) and while the academy is supposed to be a bastion of progressive ideals, those of us who have spent time in higher ed, as students or professors, can tell you that the university world isn’t as far along as it sometimes thinks it is.
My colleague, Dr. Denny, has been teaching at the university level for 25 years or so, and has a pretty informed take on these kinds of situations. He noted, in an email to the S&R staff list:
Tiffany’s prof went way over the line. If her version of events is accurate, then 1) he has violated FERPA with his veiled accusation of plagiarism and 2) he has slandered her.
A good lawyer would love a case like Tiffany’s.
He’s dead right … to a point. The key lies in this bit: “If her version of events is accurate…”
There’s a lot of if in here, and now the mainstream media is arriving, which is guaranteed to help nothing. For example, a predictably and insufferably lazy piece by Elyse Wanshel (Associate Editor of Good News) at HuffPo this morning swallows the hook: she not only offers no critical analysis of the post, there’s really nothing in her article suggesting that she’s ever heard of critical thinking.
There are basically two issues we should look at.
First: it’s frustrating that we don’t actually know as much about what really happened as we might think we do if we take the post at face value. That’s by design. I find myself wishing Martínez had devoted more energy to presenting us with facts we can consider and less time indulging in emotional indignation.
The post doesn’t lead with facts or narrative or statements from others in the class. It leads with a graf establishing her credentials (which I think is a very smart move in this case, and she does a nice job explaining why she does it), then a graf on the bias students like her face (absolutely relevant, but it’s establishing an emotional/political/social context in an attempt to shade our reception of the narrative). This is a deft rhetorical tactic, but it’s also something that ought to alert the critical reader that he or she is being positioned. And we should always resist being positioned. When writers try to manipulate us, it signals that we’re not being trusted to reach the desired conclusion based on the facts. Never trust a writer who doesn’t trust you.
Then we get to the graf where she relates the what happened. They don’t begin with “X happened.” They begin with “I was disrespected and offended.” Frankly, that isn’t a story.
The sum total of the descriptive narrative of the events of the day – which ought to be the centerpiece of a story such as this one – is limited to roughly 160 words sentences out of nine paragraphs. I don’t even know what the paper was about. It sounds like it was a lit review for a Sociology class, but that’s about it. All I really know is one word: “hence.”
So, I have this emotional essay designed to manipulate me into outrage at the grader. If the events are as she depicts them, make no mistake, I am outraged. There is zero place in a classroom for an instructor who humiliates and slanders a student in front of her peers, especially in the absence of solid evidence that the student is guilty of cheating.
However, since the post is so long on herding me to a predetermined conclusion, I’m forced to speculate, bringing my own years of classroom experience to bear in trying to sort out what likely happened, as well as what alternative explanations might be possible.
The grader may be a tool of the first order, and one who is about to get him/herself and the school righteously sued. Or, alternately, he/she may be an experienced, talented professional who called Martínez on something – maybe simple overwriting, or perhaps something worse.
At this point, I don’t know enough to have an opinion. I just have questions.
As to the crux of the controversy – the “not your language” and “not your word” allegations, I’d give anything to have a copy of the essay to review. Here’s why.
All of us who have taught have seen this thing that inexperienced writers try to do. They believe that the success of their essays hinges on sounding cultivated and intelligent, and being inexperienced they may not be all that confident in their writing ability or their knowledge of the subject matter. This is especially true these days, when very few students arrive in college with any degree of writing instruction under their belts at all. There is nothing wrong with being conscious of these kinds of deficits, per se.
So they respond by trying to sound intelligent and expert. And when they do, they overwrite. They use words they don’t know very well, they write longer sentences than they’re used to writing, and they attempt complex constructions they don’t have the expertise to pull off. The result is what I used to call themese, an awkward, artificial language that exists only in college essays.
I have seen students – Latin, black, white, Asian, etc., as well as male and female – use words that were “not theirs” more times than I could even begin to guess at, so even if the instructor did and said what Martínez alleges, I cannot, based on years of experience grading undergrad papers, assume that the motivation was racial.
In this case the controversial term is “hence.” That apparently sounded a little off to the grader. Could be Martínez was overwriting. Could be it’s a word she knows perfectly well but doesn’t use in regular conversation (very plausible – she seems to be a sharp student). Could be she was plagiarizing, although she denies it and the nature of the exchange, as presented, doesn’t suggest the instructor had any evidence. Given her credentials and what can conclude about her from a little online research, there is no tangible reason not trust her. So it could instead be that the instructor is a self-involved jackass.
Then the instructor accuses her of lifting the term. Dangerous move, that, especially if it happens in front of a class full of witnesses. If he/she isn’t able to substantiate that charge, any lawyer Martínez hires is going to take Suffolk to the cleaners. And since the instructor asked instead of presenting her with proof (“Please go back and indicate where you cut and paste”), I’m guessing it was a moment of impulsive snark or a fishing expedition.
Regardless, plagiarism is another issue you’ll know about if you’ve taught. This happened to me dozens of times. The first three assignments come in and the student is a solid C. Or worse. The fourth assignment is handed in and magically it’s publishable. Or worse, parts of it are still C level, with some totally left-field instances of, ummm, “advanced compositional elegance” sprinkled in. If Martínez isn’t someone the instructor knows to be a fluid writer, “hence” may have set off a warning bell. What came after may have set off more warning bells.
We don’t know. I will say this. Martínez is a good enough writer, it seems, but she still has things to learn. Like singular/plural agreement. Just saying.
The second issue is institutional. Suffolk could well have a much larger problem on its hands than an instance of potential bias or a FERPA violation.
For starters, Martínez refers to the “professor,” but I wonder. That term refers to a tenured or tenure-track full-timer, but students don’t always know the official status of the person in the front of the class. I have been a professor, and professors are taught about things like FERPA, because if they aren’t the school can get sued. In addition, if you’re a prof, you’ve likely been teaching awhile, perhaps as a graduate assistant. This could be your first rodeo, but it’s not likely. You’ve probably also received a good bit of training in teaching, to say nothing of diversity and sensitivity training, all of which are intended to steer you away from scenarios like the one Ms. Martínez describes. None of this is guaranteed to make you a decent instructor, let alone a great one, but there is enough going on programmatically that the scene related in the blog sounds … odd.
Maybe the instructor is a tenure-track professor who slipped through the nets. If so, I absolutely want to know more, because what happened here would then raise larger concerns about the university generally. If I’m her lawyer, these are questions I will absolutely be asking.
Is it possible the instructor isn’t a professor at all? Absolutely. Classes at universities get taught by non-professorial full-timers with less than a terminal degree, they get taught by adjuncts who may or may not have terminal degrees, and they get taught by graduate teaching assistants. Suffolk touts its teacher:student ratio, but 54% of its classes are taught by adjuncts. This is well above the national average of 49.6%. The number doesn’t include courses taught by grad students, so the actual percentage of courses taught by non-professors is a bit higher.
What does this all mean? Well, maybe nothing. Often adjuncts are fantastic instructors (I used to be one, and I was pretty good), and a lot of full profs are horrible (I wish I had less first-hand knowledge about these people than I do). But professors do get more training in FERPA type issues than adjuncts, and all of this has me wondering if the instructor was an actual professor. When I took my first prof job, I quickly learned all kinds of things I had never been told as a student instructor or an adjunct, and I have no reason to think I was the exception.
In the end, I may be simply engaging in pedantry. If it happened, the official title of the offender may not matter a great deal. Someone charged with teaching undergrads messed up, and that raises questions about why this person was in front of a class if he or she wasn’t properly equipped to deal with issues like the ones raised here.
I put it all on the table, though, because the charges leveled by Martínez could wind up being worse than the post would lead us to believe. Martínez may have only encountered the tip of the iceberg.
I hope it all works out for Ms. Martínez. I have done a bit of online snooping and she’s a prominent presence who seems like an absolute model student and citizen, dedicating herself not only to academics but to service and social justice. To all appearances she’s the sort of student teachers wish they had more of in class.
I don’t sense anything malicious about her story, given the evidence before me at present, and as someone who faced some academic headwinds of his own (not on a par with hers, but enough to teach me some respect), I am very sympathetic to the challenges she faces as a Latina in an environment that is still working to free itself from class, gender and racial bias.
I also hope that in the coming days more details surface so that I can replace some of my questions with answers and some of my speculation with hard knowledge.
Finally, as long as we’re speculating, if I had to make an educated guess I’d say the instructor messed up. Martínez seems credible in many ways, and if she fabricated any of this she’d have to be an idiot, as there was a room full of witnesses.
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Related: The Tiffany Martínez case and journalistic malpractice in the first degree
lullaby pit 
What is your purpose with this post? You conclude by saying that you think Martinez is probably in the right – but only after you’ve spent 20-30 paragraphs arguing that we don’t really know the story and she may well have been manipulating us. You critique her personal blog post because it’s short facts and long on emotion – completely ignoring the fact that it’s a PERSONAL BLOG POST where the student was sharing her feelings following this offensive experience, not a piece of reporting on institutional bias in academia. And you spend so many paragraphs trying to argue for all the ways that the professor/instructor may well have been right in her/his critique, bending over backwards to ignore the clear markers that this wasn’t just an attempt to correct “overwriting”: the choice to publicly humiliate a student; the unfounded assumption that the student had copied and pasted portions of the paper (the instructor’s lack of foundation for this accusation made clear by the fact that the instructor had to ask the student to go back and noted where she’d plagiarized, as opposed to the instructor providing any evidence of the alleged plagiarism); and the dog-whistle terminology of “not your word/language,” which is a very specific way of othering people of color and assuming they don’t have the ability to use elegant or technical English unless they copied it from someone else.
I’ve had this exact same situation happen to me, and many other students and professionals of color go through identical or similar incidents. And for folks who don’t really believe in the pervasiveness of institutional racism, there’s always some reason to believe that we were making things up or weren’t telling the story accurately. If the white instructor shared their side of the story, everyone would default to, “See, that person of color just misunderstood what was happening” – because the perspective of the white person is always considered the more credible one that should define the interpretation of the event. And as we’ve seen with police brutality videos, even more accurate recording of an event doesn’t keep people from working overtime to justify egregious violations of people’s dignity, civil rights, human rights, or right to life.
Structural racism and other forms of structural oppression continue not only because of people who are blatantly discriminatory toward oppressed individuals or groups, but also because of everyone else in our society who acquiesces to these acts through their silence and their rationalizations. Your post just provides more cover for bigoted academics and for people who want to believe that people of color are always “playing the race card” when we share how structural oppression shows up daily in our lives.
Who said the instructor was white? Tiffany didn’t.
We can’t accuse the instructor of racism until we know more facts. The paper itself is a crucial piece of evidence, and we could determine in five minutes whether or not parts of it were plagiarized. Martinez has not provided any useful information in that regard, in fact, her silence is deafening.
Absent any cooperation from Martinez in this regard, I’d consider this just another case of CSD (Chronic Snowflake Disorder), a disease which has plagued college campuses worldwide in the past few years.
You are correct that she did not specify. However, given that she’s talking about having the experience and abilities of people like her erased or denied in a place full of people who don’t look like her, it’s pretty unreasonable to assume that the professor was not a person of color. That said, people of color still can and do oppress one another as they seek to fit into the roles and narratives of the dominant culture.
* pretty reasonable (originally read “not unreasonable”)
She strongly implies the professor was white, but she doesn’t use gendered pronouns, so we don’t know if they are a man or woman. “As a student in an institution extremely populated with high-income white counterparts”
She went back and changed her blog post after it had been up for a while. Originally she used feminine pronouns to refer to her professor.
Excellent take on this. I left a long comment on her blog entry in which I also shared a link that I’d tracked down to Suffolk’s academic discipline policy. (I’m faculty at Ole Miss and sit on their academic discipline committee.) I hadn’t thought about FERPA, per se, but it’s clear from SU’s own policy that if this was, in fact, an ad hoc, middle-of-the-class charge of plagiarism, the professor–or adjunct, whomever–should be called on the carpet and probably dismissed. So yes: major investigation is called for. By the same token, I encouraged Tiffany to post her entire paper on Google Docs to make pointedly clear that the plagiarism charge–and that is clearly what the professor’s phrase “cut and paste” implied–holds zero weight, assuming that it does, in fact, hold zero weight. Interestingly, my very first thought on seeing the word “Hence” in the screenshot of the paper was NOT that the professor was accusing her of plagiarism in so many words, but that he was engaging in a racist sort of linguistic profiling and telling her that she SHOULDN’T use that word because it wasn’t “street” enough”: not a part of what you might call her achieved literary voice. Archaic. Too old-fashioned and bookish–which in some sense it is, if we’re talking about the contemporary college classroom. Still, the “cut and paste” accusation makes clear, at least to me, that we’re not talking about that sort of professorial guidance but instead, as you ultimately argue, a charge of plagiarism. And here the facts, again as you ultimately argue, suggest a pretty clear misuse of the power that the institution vests in the instructor. It’s important, always, to think critically rather than sentimentally when confronted by such stories. Procedural justice, always. Nice thinking-through of the relevant issues. Thanks.
Thanks for stopping by, Adam. I hadn’t even thought about the “street” angle. Not something I’d ever have done, but I guess I see how some people might push that approach.
I’m waiting for more news. And by news, of course, I mean actual journalism, as opposed to what we have seen so far, which is the wholesale swallowing of everything she says and implies without question.
I miss journalism….
The Suffolk Journal published an article a couple of days ago, and she has taken this to the higher ups in the University hoping to rectify the situations. She clearly is sticking to her guns and following up on this incident with the University. Therefore, I suspect she definitely has compiled a list of arguments that support her accusations.
Who uses the word”hence” either in speech, or in writing? It is extremely rare and was undoubtedly a tipoff to the professor. SOMEBODY SHOW ME COLLEGE KIDS (NO MATTER HOW SMART) USING “HENCE”, PLEASE.The REAL point here is Martinez nowhere denies plagiarism,why not? That would/should be her FIRST impulse,not national origin discrimination.The prof justifiably implies plagiarism based on the archaic, rarified use of this word(probably the first time he has ever sen it from a student) and it is up to the snowflake Martinez to at the very least, DENY the accusation. N’est pas?Does crying discrimination replace a straightforward denial?
I don’t think it’s very common among students, but it’s not uncommon among hispanic/Latino academics, as a basic google search shows.
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=%22hence%2C+the+question%22+latina+hispanic
This doesn’t mean that Martinez plagiarized it. It may well mean that she’s imitating the intellectual cohort that she’s reading and would like to join. That’s a good thing.
Absolutely. Young writers imitate in search of their voice. I sure as hell did. That’s not a problem in the least.
Right now I care about one big thing: did it happen the way she said it did. We have to settle that in order to proceed with the rest. This is why I spent so much time bitching about her failure to provide detail.
Talk about overwriting. I think your unnecessarily long “critical” text is missing the point. The post is in a personal blog created by Ms.Martinez to share her thoughts, in this case (and others) fueled by reasons and emotions. The post in the blog is not a legal accusation (it could not be used to support a legal case) and, in this or any other context, Ms. Martinez doesn’t have the burden of proof on academic misconduct. Although you are entitled to your own opinion (which anyone can read and reaffirm/rebut/ignore), you are not her or the faculty member’s judge and it is very likely that more solid evidence on both sides was already presented on what exactly happened, hence the institutional silence (by the way, the improper use of this final conjunction was the only observation that should have been pointed out).
Ms. Martinez could have chosen to present her blog readers the case with legal clarity but she chose to share her thoughts and emotions about something that seems important to her, In addition, as I pointed out before, proving her innocence is not her responsibility and, as a faculty member (mind your title, it’s irrelevant) you know that you’d better done your job before suggesting the possibility of plagiarism to a student. I want to underline “to the student” because here’s were things got really bad. Even if there was an academic offense (and plagiarism is a bad one as you well point out) the first issue here is that of keeping the student’s privacy, which was violated according to an account that, at this point, the university has not contested. So, long story short, I understand the post as a sharing of an emotional experience resulting of an evidently terribly handled case by a college. I understand Ms.Martinez, she doesn’t need to prove me anything and I will keep an eye on how things evolve.
I have followed this a bit and done some of my own digging. I agree with the primary point of this post, we do not have sufficient facts to warrant any conclusions as to what “the professor” did or did not do. When you don’t know, you don’t know.
As to the the word “hence”, I did a word search on standard translations of classic sociology texts – “hence” is a favorite in translations of Marx. I see no problemm with its use and if the professor had noted, “Archaic, avoid” the issue disappears. The cut and paste comment is more serious and requires more specifics. The public “scolding” is the most problematic, but even that depends on whether it was a 20 person lecture class or a 5-person senior seminar. As I said, we do not know what we do not know and “the professor” deserves a hearing before his or her execution.
One final point, I read many of the comments on Tiffany’s blog and elsewhere. The collective rush to judgement, reminded me of the Duke Lacrosse case and the more recent “Hands Up Don’t Shoot”. Tiffany’s description may well be accurate and complete, but I cannot draw that conclusion from what she presented.
I can see what you are trying to say, but there is something definitely wrong here, By publicizing it in this way, her paper and how it was marked will be fully investigated. Also, by taking it public, she ensures it will be taken seriously and not just covered up – that even the most liberal of Universities tend to do. They are now on the clock.
If you look at the Baylor Title IX case, there is now no choice but to take things public like this now because Universities will do everything in their power to sweep any problem under the rug and deny, deny, deny. She has done it right here, not naming the Prof publicly, yet still doing something that might stop racism from happening again – even if the marker was acting in good faith.
I think it’s good that more info on this hasn’t come out, as an Independent review without public pressure – and people saying they know better – is needed.
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You can’t plagiarize one word. The professor would know this, ‘hence’ “This is not your word” would not be an accusation of plagiarism. It may be a style critique or something we haven’t thought of. There does seem to be a question of plagiarism. The professor makes a note about cutting and pasting, but that may be that she needs to show exactly which parts are word from word from the source.
“Martínez is a good enough writer, it seems, but she still has things to learn. Like singular/plural agreement. Just saying.”
It’s 2016. Young people use “they” as a singular, gender neutral pronoun for intelligent, informed reasons. This will only be more common as times goes on. Language changes as we change. Get over it. Just saying.
I was a university writing and communication instructor for a long time, and when I wasn’t doing that I was spending most of my time since the mid-80s as a marketing and communication guy in the corporate world. Yes, the language changes over time. But what she is doing here is wrong right now. If you want to change the rules or break the rules that’s cool, but first show that you KNOW the rules.
I believe she’s using “they” in order to conceal the prof’s gender. She’s in a bind, trying to respect the professor’s privacy, for which she deserves credit, without making it sound as if multiple profs are involved. The preferred form is he/she or s/he but some of my students are being taught in high school that “they” and “their” is correct as well. Whether that applies to her or not, it was done to give some anonymity to someone that she believes has been very unfair to her.
If you look at the source she referenced in her paper (Izziarry and Donaldson), they use the word “hence” an unusual amount in their work. I really think the teacher was trying to warn her about plagiarism, but because she was an aspiring professor writing a paper about how Latinx are underrepresented as college professors, she took this critique are being more critical than it was. Also, many people seem to think the professor stood her in front of class and openly critique her paper. This wasn’t the case. She was brought up to have a private conversation which she felt others could over hear. She has no proof of this. Someone did ask her if she was ok, but she could have been visibly upset. A lot of the drama she has is that she imagines that everyone would think she is not good enough to be a professor. We certainly don’t have all the information, but I feel like this is a misunderstanding on Tiffany’s part, because she wants to be a professor so badly. Also, why does she mention that she is writing this journal entry instead of writing an English paper due tomorrow? That seems relevant.
Did she, in fact, offer for public inspection a version of her paper, or of a page from her paper, that enabled you to suss out that source? I went searching for information to confirm your claim, in any case, and discovered that you’ve misspelled one of the scholar’s names. It’s Irizarry, not Izziarry. Jason Irizarry and Morgaen L. Donaldson authored a 2012 article entitled “Teach for Ame´rica: The Latinization of U.S. Schools and the Critical Shortage of Latino/a Teachers.” I assume this is what you’re referencing when you speak of “their work”? What’s strange is that that article–which I’ve just downloaded from JSTOR–doesn’t contain the word “hence.” Yet it does indeed seem like just the sort of scholarship she would have consulted for her paper. Perhaps you’re talking about a different article by this pair of scholars. Please clarify.
there is a photo that shows the title of her paper that has the “indicate where you cut and paste” hand written in blue ink on the top. It cites a paper by Irizarry and Donaldson, but doesn’t mention which one.
My apologies, I did a search on the names and come up with “Its Teach for america’s paradoxical diversity initiative” found http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/2100/1721, which was written by Terrenda White, which quotes Irizarry and Donaldson (2012) which is the “Teach for America” source. She may have quoted Irizarry and Donaldson from this paper, but that’s pure speculation.
“Hence the representation gap between Black students and teachers was nearly three times in the charter sector compared to district sector (ASI, 2015).”
“Hence, critical policy perspectives on educational phenomena prompt interrogation of dominant policy agendas, such as high-stakes accountability and market-based reforms, and note disparate impacts of these reforms on schools in high-poverty communities and communities of color (Baker et. al., 2013;”
“Hence, a group of policies shaping TFA’s expansion is considered, as are the relationship of those policies to co-occurring policies in a shared context, which work to contract large pools of educators of color, particularly veteran Black educators.”
“Hence, well-meaning educational programs geared toward serving Black children fall adversely, yet again, on the shoulders of ToCs.”
“Hence, despite the range of interested variables and the methods of inquiry, the guiding criteria of inclusion in the present review was whether the study identified policy-related factors and conditions moderating the retention of teachers of color.”
Hence, new hires across cities spotlighted in this review, and in cities with similar interventions, worked often to decrease teacher diversity (ASI, 2015).
Hence, while teachers themselves were committed to students and promoted more equitable outcomes for students of color, the context in which they taught worked against their roles as professional and cultural role models (Achinstein et al., 2011).
Hence, diversity efforts must take seriously the contexts in which teachers work and critically interrogate policy imperatives associated with less favorable conditions in order to support the retention of targeted groups from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds.
Okay! And touche´. That’s a lot of hences. (And this is one of the very rare contexts in which one might actually need that plural of “hence.”) I found another article on the subject, it might have been a blog, by a Latina academic in which the phrase “hence, the question” (Martinez’s phrase) shows up twice.
In any case, you’ve not only convinced me that other social scientists approaching this subject use the word “hence,” but in doing so you’ve made a pretty good case for why the instructor is wrong and the student is right here. “Hence,” judging from this particular article, seems very much a part of the social scientific lexicon, part of the lingua franca that any student aspiring to join the tribe would want to deploy. So although “hence” MAY not be a word that Martinez tossed around as a Dominican girl in the Bronx–and I’d caution against making assumptions even there; her HS teachers might have encouraged its use–telling her that it’s not HER word, in this particular review-of-the-literature context, is telling her that she shouldn’t be making precisely the small leap into in-group lexicon that she SHOULD be making.
Thanks for the clarification.
You are free to moderate this out as not contributing substance to the discussion, but after reading the comments on Martinez’ blog, it’s very refreshing to encounter a more nuanced and thought provoking discussion.
I miss journalism too.
I realize this is a late addition to the post but there’s more than a FERPA problem here. At my school, professors are REQUIRED to report plagiarism, and it looks as if that’s Suffolk’s policy too– there is a procedure to follow. Either the professor chose not to follow it, and is in violation of university policy, or something is very off with Martinez’s belief that this is about plagiarism. (A third option is that the professor chose not to report her officially, trying to cut her a break by dealing with it through comments and reminding her in the future to cite.)