Formal Complaint against Doctor Rosemary Chai

Formal Complaint against Doctor Rosemary Chai for Mr Neo and Mr Mckelvey

This is a complaint lodged by us, the University of Buffalo (UB) student body, for the many grievances we have with Doctor Rosemary Chai in the module COM 217. As this is a formal complaint, we will attempt to be as unbiased and objective as we can in stating our grievances.

Teaching Methods

To date, she has only been a lecturer in the literal sense of the word. Her classes usually take about half an hour to start, during which she would be scolding students or making sarcastic remarks about people who are late, or people who have already dropped the module more than a month ago.
A few things to highlight about classes when they actually start:

1) There is a presentation scheduled on that day, and the 45 minutes long presentation will start. These presentations are prepared by the students, who have no prior knowledge of the subject other than their own (i.e., she has not taught that chapter at all. Students are expected to learn from the textbook). She expects the presenters to ask the class questions from the case studies on the back of the chapter, and she expects the class to be able to answer, having read through the chapter and the case study. She also interjects intermittently throughout the presentation, often cutting presenters mid-sentence and disrupting the entire flow of the presentation.

The rubric with which she grades groups is based on content and presentation. In the event that the group misinterprets the chapter or any of its parts (which is highly likely since we are not taught the chapter beforehand), the group would be badly graded since it is her interpretation that is supposedly right. While she (purportedly) does offer help before the presentation if the group needs it, it would still mean that learning is restricted to a few people rather than the whole class. We also learnt from her that she has to periodically remind herself to attend her own consultation, showing no enthusiasm on her part to clarify our doubts.

2) After the presentation, there is usually half an hour or so left on the clock. As stated earlier, she fails to use this time to expound further on the topics. Rather, there is usually an uncomfortable silence, the gap which would normally be filled intermittently by her with her own life experiences and situations happening around the world. Barely entertaining at best, these experiences have no relational context whatsoever to what we are studying. In fact, to date, only one example has been barely acceptable. And that was used in a context we had not reached yet in the textbook (Cultural theories). To date, the informative topics she has talked about include:

- The cultural symbolism of a chicken drumstick in relation to her foreign friends
- Shu Umera make up
- Tom Cruise and Scientology
- Obama (just basic speculation about whether he will win. Nothing at all to do with campaigning etc.)
- Edison Chen and the scandal pictures

Incidents to note

During one of our lessons (specifically, 13th February 2008), she played a video, Guess whos coming to dinner that lasted the entire lesson. While it was related to the topic we were supposed to be on, she failed to link it back to the chapter or any of the theories and concepts found within. All she said at the beginning of the video was to think about how this would be viewed from the perspective of people in the 70s. In fact, other than this small nugget to think about, there was no further thinking involved whatsoever. All we did was watch the movie. We did learn though, that it was one of (her) favourite movies of all time.

Also on February 27th, as there were no quizzes or presentations scheduled, we were expecting her to teach the chapter we were currently at. Rather, she decided to turn it into an impromptu consultation period instead, maintaining her current record of having only taught one class.

Complaints about teaching methods

Our primary complaint, to put it succinctly, is the fact that we seem to be paying our school fees to be doing her job for her. As stated above, there is no learning from her before presentations, unless we do actually go to her to ask. After presentations, she makes no effort to reinforce the points which have been made by the group, nor does she go further in-depth to the subject matter. She criticizes the presentation aspects but fail to generate further thought about the topic at hand. While we acknowledge that this could be an abstract form of teaching common in the U.S. where she studied, the effect is sadly lost on most of us, who gain nothing from this faux student-teacher relationship.

Personal Grievances

Racism

Dr Chai has at times, demonstrated a profoundly appalling lack of propriety or cultural sensitivity. This is especially shocking, given the fact that she holds a Doctorate in Communications. Add to that the fact that she states in her student guidelines to absolutely refrain from using potentially offensive language that denigrates another person or group of people [hate, sexist, racist, ageist, etc.], and you have a very compelling case of hypocrisy. A remark that she used on our class (COM 217 section A) is as follows:

Chinese New Year is a fake holiday (this was after she [literally] lectured the class after the Chinese New Year holidays)

There was also an instance in her previous classes where she claimed Plagiarism and copying is so part of Chinese culture, verbally debasing the class which was predominantly Chinese. When the class responds angrily, she became defensive and stated that she was just stating her opinion, completely disregarding the own guidelines that she set for herself. Given her status as a lecturer in a position of power over students, it is disturbing that she is at times, both hypocritical and contradictory, descriptive terms highly inappropriate for lecturers.

While we would not like to take the previous classes or COM modules into consideration, the severity of her statements still needs to be checked, especially since she is part of a multicultural faculty and the fact that she is practising bigotry on her own race.

Summary of Complaints

Overall, we feel that she is abusing the power she has a lecturer. To date, she has taught (in the conventional sense of the word) only the first chapter, with the rest of the chapters (currently, we are at chapter 7) being taught by our peers. She has only facilitated what we could have done by ourselves in the library or at home reading our textbooks. We feel that we are barely (or not at all) getting the education we paid for. To put it succinctly, as one student from the cohort put it, We are paying her with our school fees so that we can do her job for her.

In summation, we would just like to restate our stand that she is an ineffective lecturer. If this complaint sounds too much like we are trying to get emancipation, it is (ironically) entirely because she has never taught us that topic (Chapter 6) or anything much in the first place.