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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 ^[2]
AND CHECK OUT VoB‘S UPDATE — WITH GMA/YAHOO! POLL RESULTS — CLICK HERE ^[3]