Jo Boaler Stanford woke professor calls police on Jelani Nelson black professor at Berkeley University following twitter disagreement.
A professor at California‘s elite Stanford University has allegedly threatened to call police on a black professor after revealing her $5,000-an-hour consultation fee.
The imbroglio follows Jo Boaler, a white education professor at the school, being embroiled in a heated disagreement with Berkeley University’s Jelani Nelson — one that went viral on Twitter and resulted in accusations of racism and harassment.
Nelson and Boaler’s public breakdown is rooted in a controversial debate over how to teach math to California’s K-12 students.
Boaler is behind the ongoing effort to change the math curriculum framework in California that includes, in part, increasing equity, pushing algebra 1 back to 9th grade and applying social justice principles to lessons.
Opponents, including Nelson, say the proposed changes will negatively affect students and leave them unprepared for higher education.
I’ve written before on the really terrible proposed California Math Framework that would set back California students for years to come. The head of the CMF is Jo Boaler (@joboaler) a professor in the Education Department at @Stanford. https://t.co/UC8009BkYr
— Elizabeth Kelly (she/her) 🪡🧵 (@BethKellySF) April 5, 2022
The saga first unfolded when Nelson retweeted a filing on Twitter on March 31 that showed Boaler had been paid $5,000 per hour — totaling $40,000 — to consult math teachers within the Oxnard School District.
On Tuesday, Nelson — who is black — shared a screenshot of an email Boaler had sent him in the wake of his tweet that mentioned alerting police.
‘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 in the email to Nelson.
‘I was shocked to see that you are taking part in spreading misinformation and harassing me online,’ she added.
The person who put out the initial tweet — a high school teacher in San Francisco — had shared Boaler’s home address in a separate post, but later deleted it and apologized. Nelson said he did not post her home address on his Twitter account.
Nelson went on to compare Boaler’s threat to contact authorities to other white privileged women aka Karens who have called the cops on black men in the past.
‘A @Stanford professor just threatened me with police. After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel,’ he wrote.
Opinion: Jo Boaler is the ultimate “Stanford Stacy”, a privileged white woman who somehow ascended the heights of academia despite her inferior intellect and meagre accomplishments, and threatens police violence as soon as a black professor calls her out. https://t.co/0l6PDEa3W8
— The San Francisco Daily (@TheSFDaily) April 6, 2022
When your white privilege is checked by a black man
‘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 later told the San Francisco Chronicle that she wasn’t threatening to go to the cops — and later apologized if it had been perceived that way.
‘I wanted him to know that the posts by a teacher sharing my address had been sent to police/lawyers, as a courtesy, because I thought it better that he did not engage with her,’ she told the outlet.
‘He changed that to say I was threatening him with police/lawyers. I was not.’
Added Boaler: ‘I am really saddened by what has happened on Twitter — and the number of people who believed his claim that I was ‘calling the cops on a black man’.
‘I wrote to him to invite him to chat, professor to professor, and am very sorry that my mentioning the police was ever perceived as a threat. That was never my intent.’
Stanford professor Jo Boaler has done more to sabotage the future of low-income students of color in California than perhaps any other single individual.
Does anyone else find it racist of her to assume that disadvantaged students can’t excel if they’re given the right tools? https://t.co/utoVBAooXP
— Adam Mayer (@AdamNMayer) April 6, 2022
Professor Karen
Nelson said he was wrongly accused of harassing Boaler online because the screenshot he shared didn’t contain private information — and instead was taken from a public record on a public website.
‘The accusations came immediately after a sentence invoking police and lawyers, a sequence that could only be read in context as a threat against me specifically,’ he said.
‘These false allegations are very serious, and I do not take them lightly.’
After Nelson’s tweets about Boaler started gaining traction this week, the Stanford Review, a conservative campus publication, published an article calling her ‘Professor Karen’ and ‘woke.’
‘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 in the wake of the ordeal.
‘This pathway leaves students unprepared for quantitative four-year college degrees via a newly proposed pathway for teaching mathematics that lacks essential content.’
