*A white Stanford educator has been nicknamed “Professor Karen” after threatening to call the police on a Black UC Berkeley teacher who shared her home address online.
The man also shared her $5,000 hourly consultation rate in a Twitter post, and now claims her reaction to his antics was racially motivated.
The Stanford professor, Jo Boaler, has been sparring with Jelani Nelson — a computer science professor at UC Berkeley — over how to teach math to California’s K-12 students. According to numerous reports, Boaler, 58, is catching heat from Nelson over her support of a potential new math program in California’s schools.
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Here’s more from Daily Mail:
The controversial suggestions, which would have lowered the rigorousness of the state’s curriculum in an attempt to increase ‘equity,’ have made some angry because in part they ‘question the concept of student giftedness.’ Nelson has long been critical of Boaler’s work on the new ‘California Math Framework’ saying Boaler was charging $5,000 an hour to peddle controversial theories while black academics were ignored.
Nelson not only retweeted information showing Boalar was paid $40,000k for her work with a school district in Oxnard, California, but he also retweeted a user who made her address public.
Boaler responded in an email she sent to Nelson that he shared online.
“As a courtesy to a fellow faculty member I wanted to let you know that the sharing of private details about me on social media yesterday is now being taken up by police and lawyers,” Boaler wrote to Nelson. ‘I was shocked to see that you are taking part in spreading misinformation and harassing me online.”
Nelson then claimed that Boaler “threatened me with police” and compared her to other white women who have made headlines for calling the police on Black people for petty reasons.
“After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel,” he said. “Public advisory: don’t call the cops on black people for no reason. Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime.”
Boaler said she considered getting the police involved “as a courtesy, because I thought it better that he did not engage with” the Twitter user behind the doxing tweet (public releasing of her private information).
In an email to SFGATE, she denied accusations of racism.
“I would never even think of threatening a Black man with the police, I know how serious that is in our society and there could be nothing further from my intent,” she wrote. “It goes against all of my life work which has been to support and elevate the needs of marginalized students. I have publicly stated that I am sorry for the way it read – that I did not intend it to be threatening.”
She also accused of Nelson spreading misinformation about her hourly rate for the school district.
Boaler said she apologized to Nelson, adding that “the result of his posting was that I received threatening, hateful and misogynistic emails and texts’ and ‘I have even received graphic threats to kill my daughters, it is terrifying.”
“What must not get lost in this troubling incident is the much larger issue of K-12 math education in this state: the California Math Framework (CMF) proposal is a misguided revision of state guidelines on math education that will negatively affect tens of millions of Californians, including my own two children,” Nelson said.
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