American University Professor Adrienne Pine breastfed her year-old baby while lecturing.
AMERICAN UNIVERSITY ANTHROPOLOGIST PAUSES TWICE,
ONCE TO EXTRACT A PAPER CLIP FROM CHILD’S MOUTH,
A 2nd TIME TO SHOO BABY FROM ELECTRICAL OUTLET
Accuses student newspaper of causing ‘hostile work environment’
BERATES REPORTER FOR ‘MANUFACTURED CONTROVERSY’
AND FOR ASKING ‘BIASED AND SOPHOMORIC’ QUESTIONS
By Alan Z. Forman
In the name of academic freedom and feminists’ rights an American University professor breastfed her year-old baby in full view of 40 anthropology students the first day of class for the fall semester, then intimidated a reporter and the editor of the campus newspaper to prevent them from publishing a news story about it.
Adrienne Pine, an assistant professor of anthropology in her fourth year of teaching at the Northwest Washington, D.C. university, further accused the student newspaper, The Eagle, of “threatening to create a hostile work environment” for her by reporting the incident, which she termed “a manufactured controversy.”
Declaring, “It feels like harassment that something like this should even become a ‘story,’” Pine said in an online published essay, “I’ve been breastfeeding in public for a year, and this is the first time anyone in three countries and numerous states has made an ‘issue’ out of it.”
However, despite what she termed the “current national anti-woman climate,” she said she works in a “family-friendly setting” and that it wasn’t until her undergraduate students “saw me feed my baby through my breast that my workplace became a hostile environment.”
Pine’s students spread the word about her public child-feeding habits on Facebook and Twitter.
‘EXPOSÉING MY BREASTS ON THE INTERNET’
In an essay titled, “The Dialectics of Breastfeeding on Campus: Exposéing My Breasts on the Internet,” published on the liberal website CounterPunch.org, Pine describes what she considered a hostile, anti-woman attitude on the part of the student reporter — a young woman named Heather Mongilio — who interviewed her for an article that has yet to be published, declaring: “I was shocked and annoyed that this would be considered newsworthy.”
Pine’s own description of Mongilio’s questioning leaves little doubt the reporter was polite and even conciliatory; however Pine took exception to Mongilio’s referring to her breastfeeding as an “incident” of some “delicacy”:
“If I considered feeding my child to be a ‘delicate’ or sensitive act, I would not have done it in front of my students,” she declared. “Nor would I have spent the previous year doing it on buses, trains and airplanes; on busy sidewalks and [in] nice restaurants; in television studios and while giving plenary lectures to large conferences.”
She describes Mongilio’s questioning as “biased and sophomoric,” thereby making it “clear that the goal of the article was to explore/create a controversy where there was none,” and expresses annoyance that Mongilio showed up at her classroom after having “emailed me during class” — Pine’s emphasis, in her essay — “to ask if she could come after class,” adding: “(I guess there are faculty out there who think it’s appropriate to check their BlackBerries while lecturing).”
‘HEATHER CONTINUED HOUNDING ME’
She says she “tried to explain to her… that the Eagle targeting me as the unwilling subject of a ‘story’ about something so banal was so outrageously sexist that it showed how anti-woman the newspaper was”; and that although “Heather continued hounding me,” being “in professor mode,” Pine insists she was “too polite to tell her to go to hell.”
When Mongilio asked, “When the incident occurred, were you worried about what your students would think? Did they seem uncomfortable, did they say anything?” Pine reacted again with annoyance, at what she later termed the “naïveté of the reporter’s questions”:
“I slapped my palm on my forehead in frustration,” she declared. “What I wanted to say was ‘Who cares? Do university students really need to be so mollycoddled that they should not see something I do on public transportation nearly every day?’ But I believe my answer was more along the lines of ‘I’m the professor. I’m in a position of authority in the classroom. How likely is it that they will out themselves as being afraid of a partially-exposed breast on the first day of a course on feminist anthropology?’”
Pine, a single mother, hadn’t intended to bring her baby to school, she said, but the child woke up the morning of the semester’s first class with a fever. Dressed in a blue onesie, the infant girl alternately crawled on the floor of the lecture hall, was strapped briefly to Pine’s back, and then breastfed, to the dismay of many of the students, several of whom subsequently told the Washington Post they had no problem with the child’s being in the classroom but that the breastfeeding crossed a line.
SHOULD NOT BRING SICK CHILD TO CLASS
“I found it unprofessional,” said one. “I was kind of appalled.”
So, apparently, were university officials.
“For the sake of the child and the public health of the campus community, when faced with the challenge of caring for a sick child in the case where backup childcare is not available, a faculty member should take earned leave and arrange for someone else to cover the class, not bring a sick child into the classroom,” university spokeswoman Camille Lepre said in an email, which seemed to focus more on the illness of the child than the alleged indiscretion of the mother.
The university also said Pine’s essay “does not reflect professional conduct.”
Nor did her classroom care of the child meet safety standards.
At one point, by her own admission, she had to pause to extract a paper clip from the year-old infant’s mouth, expressing annoyance in her essay that the “flow” of her lecture “was interrupted… by, ‘Professor, your son has a paper-clip in his mouth,’” seeming to concern herself more with what she termed the heads-up student’s “gendered assumptions” than the danger to her daughter.
‘END OF CLASS CAME NONE TOO SOON’
At another interval, she said, her lecture was again interrupted when the child “crawled a little too close to an electrical outlet.” All of this causing Pine to speed through her 75-minute lecture and syllabus review for her “Sex, Gender, and Culture” course and to experience relief that “the end of class came none too soon, and I was happy to be able to take the bus home and put my sad baby in bed where she belonged.”
Pine has declined media requests for comment, referring reporters’ questions to Lepre.
In her essay, she says she told Mongilio she “had two choices: cancel class, which would have been disruptive to students (and which could also negatively affect my student evaluations, putting my tenure at risk), or bring the baby to class.
“I chose to do the latter. As it turned out, the baby got hungry, so I had to feed it during lecture.
“End of story.”
Student evaluations affecting Pine’s tenure are pending.
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
TO READ ADRIENNE PINE’S ESSAY IN ITS ENTIRETY CLICK HERE
AND CHECK OUT VoB‘S UPDATE — WITH GMA/YAHOO! POLL RESULTS — CLICK HERE
September 13th, 2012 - 1:54 AM
I work for Pediatricians whom on many occasions have had their husbands bring their babies to work so they could breast feed them. Also, I myself have done the same at work and in class. I also pumped during class using a privacy cover, but others could certainly hear the pump and see the milk flowing into the bottles. Milk content and flow is determined by how often the baby nurses and how much per feeding the baby takes. The content of the milk changes as the baby grows to meet the needs of the infant. If the infant does not nurse directly and majority of the milk extraction happens via pump, the content does not match the maturation rate of the baby. This could cause decrease in much needed fat, protein, DHA, omega 3’s, etc… If more employers would be sensitive to the needs of breast feeding mothers, America’s general IQ scores would be higher. Formula doesn’t come close. Look at the new “Healthier baby incentive 2012” by the CDC. Formula is popular because it makes life easier for working moms, but I’m sure most will agree that the struggles we face for breast feeding in public is worth the developmental advantages proper nutrition provides.
September 13th, 2012 - 3:23 AM
Thanks, April, Voice of Baltimore appreciates your Comment.
So, then, apparently you would say it’s OK that if a man is speaking in a public forum, like for instance a lecture hall, and he needs to take a leak but isn’t able to leave the room, that it would be permissible, even appropriate, for him to use a hospital-style hand-held urinal, so long as he kept it hidden, say, under a long coat, even though everyone around him could hear the tinkling sound?
September 14th, 2012 - 3:47 PM
Dude, you seriously just compared breastfeeding to taking a leak? Why? Because men can’t breastfeed, so that’s the only way you can make a guy/girl analogy? It doesn’t hold up, because, duh: girls urinate, too. It’s not legal or acceptable for them to do it in a public forum, on, public transit, or at a playground, any more than it is for us, though. Pretty bad analogy.
Why not ask if it would have been as disruptive if a guy brought his sick brat to class and let it crawl around everywhere, since you seem to take issue with the baby’s safety?
I thought the teacher writing in the linked article that it was like getting in trouble for teaching while she was on her period was stupid, but after reading your comment above, I kind of see her point. There’s enough wrong to legitimately complain about, when it comes to men’s rights in child-rearing, without resorting to acting like a baby, yourself. Maybe this is the flipside of the feminist movement: guys acting like bitchy gossipers? Both sides are embarrassing themselves.
September 15th, 2012 - 12:52 AM
We really have no problem with the breastfeeding, Evan, just think that students paying big bucks to attend a university like American U. are entitled to the professor’s full attention when she’s lecturing. Whether Prof. Pine was up to that task seems questionable, given that she was also distracted by paper clips and electrical outlets as her baby crawled around the lecture hall floor.
This is a news story however and we feel that VoB has been more objective in reporting it than most. We’re not taking a position either way, or editorializing, just reporting the facts so you and other readers can form your own opinions. Why don’t you tell us what you think about this “incident”?
That said, as journalists we’re personally offended by this professor’s vituperative attitude toward the press, not to mention her arrogance in deciding for all of us what is and is not news, culminating in her inexcusable attacks and denigration of the reporter who tried to interview her and the student newspaper in general for having the audacity to “annoy” her, way before they had even published a single word.
September 15th, 2012 - 11:58 AM
A Federal law enacted in 1999 specifically provides that “a woman may breastfeed her child at any location in a federal building or on federal property, if the woman and her child are otherwise authorized to be present at the location.”
Why is a University or any other grounds different?
September 15th, 2012 - 12:12 PM
As for your offense to her comments, I think if you look at it from her perspective: She is a breastfeeding mother (minority in America these days) and there are a lot of prejudice views and opinions to make breastfeeding difficult to do in society. We want to be successful working women, we also want to provide our infants with the best nutrition. There is a stigma that working women should bottle feed their babies, but this is not the best way to provide the breast milk, nor is it better to use formula. According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), “Health professionals and public health officials promote breastfeeding to improve infant health. Both mothers and children benefit from breast milk. Breast milk contains antibodies that protect infants from bacteria and viruses. Breastfed children have fewer ear, respiratory and urinary tract infections and have diarrhea less often. Infants who are exclusively breastfed tend to need fewer health care visits, prescriptions and hospitalizations resulting in a lower total medical care cost compared to never-breastfed infants. Breastfeeding also provides long-term preventative effects for the mother, including an earlier return to pre-pregnancy weight and a reduced risk of pre-menopausal breast cancer and osteoporosis. “
September 15th, 2012 - 4:51 PM
Thanks, April, that 1999 law has been cited in some of the other news stories, and the American University Eagle referenced the Washington, D. C. law in their finally published article Thursday: “D.C. law states that a woman has the ‘right to breastfeed her child in any location, public or private, where she has the right to be with her child.’”
As for VoB’s “offense to her comments” as you put it, we think any reasonable person would agree that Prof. Pine’s attitude is belligerent, if not patently misandrous, whether one sympathizes with her point of view regarding breastfeeding or not. We do not disagree with what appears to be her sincere desire to do what’s best for her baby nor do we object per se to public breastfeeding: It is not our place as journalists to do that.
However we do take offense at the way she treated hapless Eagle reporter Heather Mongilio and at her bullying of the student newspaper not to write a story, or to at least redact her name from it. We also object strongly to her attempt to tell the press what should and should not be considered “news.”
That is our bailiwick, not hers.
September 18th, 2012 - 10:39 PM
First of all the guy that compared feeding a baby to urinating, needs to have a psychiatric evaluation to find out if he has some sort of repressed thoughts about breasts and penises.
Every state in the US has a law that states that a woman can breastfeed a child in any location that she and the child have the right to be in. End of story. As a mother I can understand her frustration as it clearly seems that the reporter wanted to embarrass her and put her in an uncomfortable position. And I agree, someone breastfeeding a baby in public is not news, its everyday life, and if some people are too immature to handle it, then maybe they’re not ready for college.
September 19th, 2012 - 5:31 AM
Thanks for your Comment, DoctorV, but we don’t believe anyone is questioning a woman’s right to breastfeed her baby in accordance with the law, anyplace she and the infant have a right to be. However it’s not clear that Prof. Pine’s daughter had a right to be crawling around a college lecture hall putting paper clips in her mouth, distracting and otherwise being babysat by a faculty member/mother who was supposed to be giving a lecture, assisted by a TA who was not being paid to perform childcare.
Neither are we aware of any students in Pine’s class objecting to public breastfeeding per se, nor do we. Virtually all the criticism has focused on the professor’s failure to devote her full attention to the class vis-à-vis her baby, as evidenced by her being distracted by removing a paper clip from the child’s mouth, shooing her away from an electrical outlet and then breastfeeding her. Not to mention, by Pine’s own admission, speeding through her lecture.
American University tuition costs are off the chart. Do you actually believe, as one student succinctly put it, that he and his classmates should be paying “to watch a professor babysit”? (See our Update at http://voiceofbaltimore.org/archives/6219) That’s the “story,” it would seem, the student newspaper reporter was interested in pursuing.
As for “the guy that compared feeding a baby to urinating” as you put it, the analogy was actually suggested by a woman; so much for your misandrous assumption. But as with any analogy, the risk exists that an occasional reader will miss the point; the point being, in this case, that breastfeeding while lecturing is as inappropriate as urinating while addressing a public forum.
September 26th, 2012 - 7:23 PM
Bringing a child to a university class is a distraction for both students and instructor. If a male instructor brought his child to class, the same would apply. As for breastfeeding in front of a class, one would think that a professional instructor like Adrienne Pine would have made arrangements for emergency childcare, or have taken earned leave to attend to her feverish child. Instead, she appears to be making this a feminist issue, instead of the simple common sense one that it is, by declaring that her emergency childcare needs should be provided by others (the university? taxpayers?) – rather than her own personal responsibility.