Now the U.S. ambassador to Hungary, Brinker is the E.F. Hutton of the breast-cancer world. When she speaks, anyone who’sanyone listens.
Brinker relies on the blockbuster PR value of the 5K Race for the Cure. The year-round calendar of cancer walks that draw grief-stricken yet hopeful patients and their loved ones, along with a fawning media, preserve Brinker and her group’simage as being on the side of the average American woman tragically afflicted with breast cancer.
So, most people would be surprised to learn that the Komen Foundation helped block a meaningful patients? bill of rights for the women the foundation has purported to serve since the group began in 1982.
Despite Brinker proclaiming herself before a 2001 congressional panel as a “patient advocate for the past 20 years” who demands access to the best possible medical care for all breast-cancer patients, Federal Election Commission records show the foundation and its allies lobbied against the consumer-friendly version of the patients? bill of rights in 1999, 2000 and 2001. Then, Brinker trumpeted old friend George W. Bush in August 2001 for backing a “strong” patients’ bill of rights, although most patient advocates felt betrayed.
Mary Ann Swissler —The marketing of breast cancer (Sacramento News & Review)
My student Amanda, a freshmen who’s already been in five of my clases, says my insistence that she go back to the source of statistics means that she’s almost too nervous to use a statistic in her freshman composition papers. Good! I want my students to think critically about all their soures.
Swissler’s article, though too strident for my tastes (just what exactly are those protestors dressed like nuns doing? Is the Church being blamed for breast cancer, too?), it’s an excellent example of not taking PR at face value.
I’m blogging this for future reference — I’d like to see whether my students can address
- their response to seeing the apparently squeaky-clean motives breast cancer research fundraisers being challenged,
- their response to rebuttals and Swissler’s response (and more) and
- their response to learning that Swissler is the former Seton Hall instrutor (not Seton Hill) who made a name for herself by sending a bulk e-mail calling her students “brats” and “lying sacks of [excrement].“
I’m thinking that last detail will probably bias the students against her… will they be so biased that they will dismiss her claims about the Komen Foundation, especially when put up against the Komen Foundation’s slick online presence?
I think I might split the class in small groups, pretend that I didn’t run off enough handouts, and give them overlapping but not identical groups of handouts.. one might be this sympathetic defense of Swissler, that explains the frustrations felt by “adjuct” faculty (part-timers with no permanent contract), but probably alienates student audiences by observing “those of us who teach in colleges and universities will have to face students exactly like the ones Swissler described: sexist, racist, immature, and sheltered. Fact is, she left a few things off the list. Let’s add: bored, apathetic, cynical, stoned, and drunk.”
Thus, no one student will have the whole picture, and they’ll have to work it out among themselves.
It’s too late in the semester to spring any more reading on my current students (who are, or should be, deeply involved in their final papers by now). Next term.
An introduction to the breast cancer section, this article sums up the essence of the content that will be
explained at length in the course of the articles.
I fixed that display problem.
Mary Ann, something seems to be wrong with the way my blog presents the URL in comments… that’s a display issue that I’ll fix later tonight. Meanwhile, here’s Mary Ann Swissler’s side of the Seton Hall story.
Mary Ann also contacted me via e-mail to explain the “nuns”:
oops, typos…ridiclous should be ridiculous…let me know if you guys find any others.
Also, I find it odd that Jill Carroll’s Op-Ed about me in Chron of Higher Ed should be called “sympathetic.” She never bothered to call or e-mail me, just like the New York Post writer, Andy Soltis (who has Seton Hall relatives, so I’m not as surprised). I actually feel a bit foolish after this whole experience for the way I strain to be fair and balanced in all my articles; at the very least I call people for comment, to get their side of the story. Jill told me she was “pushing the envelope” when in fact she was unprofessional.
Hi, I hope my response will help clear up some unfortunate and well-publicized misconceptions about what happened during the semester, how and why I responded to students the way I did, and why it was so widely reported in the media (here’s a hint: nepotism).
I keep getting asked if I regret sending my e-mail out. Regret is such a strong word; I only regret not quitting such an abusive and ridiclous work environment early in the semester. I opted to teach at the “prestigious” Seton Hall U., instead of as a K-12 sub; at least as a sub I am welcomed into the community of teachers, students and administrators, and frankly, I make more money. Students of course try and give subs a hard time, but they don’t exercise the high level of agressive, mob-mentality I found at Seton Hall U.; if they’d spent a fraction of their time on studies as they did complaining about me, they would have had a much more productive semester.
Whoops, sorry — fixed it.
Even if the link is misspelled.
Thanks for the link–even if it is to trumpet my fears. :-D And yes, I am very involved with my papers–I have found my opposing argument for single fathers(just a little FYI). Everything is going great–swimmingly.
The article appears in a commercial news magazine marketed to professors, so it’s no surprise the content of that magazine makes the profs look better than the students. Still, that same source did publish this article about an alcoholic professor who’s aware he’s drinking his career away…
“Fact is, she left a few things off the list. Let’s add: bored, apathetic, cynical, stoned, and drunk.”
Wait a minute – are you talking about students…or professors? Yeah, definitely more students than professors, but a suprising number of my professors fall into these categories at all.
On a slightly different subject, you also have your typical work-aholic professor who himself is a work-aholic, and thus has no problem teaching his class in such a manner that you must be a work-aholic student to do well in it. He somehow loves his family, yet simultaneously trivializes away his students socialization time where they might meet that “special someone” as inconsequential compared to academic work. (One definition of academic: having no practical or useful significance).