From "Florida Professor Fired for Assigning a Profane Story, Lawsuit Says/South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing" (NYT gift link).
That article links to a review of the story collection, "In Ottessa Moshfegh’s Stories, Fringe Figures Make Feckless Attempts at Connection" (NYT gift link):
The collection opens with “Bettering Myself,” a portrait of Miss Mooney, a 30-year-old divorced high school teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic school in the East Village, as she passes the days with her students and her college-age boyfriend, who lingers outside the story most of the time as a symbol of pure millennial angst. Her students’ lives are a mess, but her own life is even more of a disaster, and together they share snarky dialogue and mirrored despair. Nothing much seems to happen, as Miss Mooney describes her life — drinking too much and snorting cocaine, going out with her girlfriend, a pseudo-transgressive clubgoer: “Most evenings she bid me adieu on the arm of some no-face corporate type to show him ‘the time of his life’ back at his condo in Murray Hill or wherever those people lived.”
Imagine getting fired for assigning that. Is it that a female character has a "girlfriend"?!
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>Ann Althouse said:
Imagine getting fired for assigning that. Is it that a female character has a "girlfriend"?!<
Yeah, that's got to be it - because, who has ever heard of a female having a girlfriend?! Way too edgy. I'll bet it was men who fired her.
"In colleges, such materials 'take students out of their comfort zone, expose them to new ideas..."
I appreciate that, but why does it seem as if the "new ideas" are always those that serve the progressive movement, whose ideas are now nearly a century old?
Has the role of higher education always been to "take students out of their comfort zone? And when's the last time the definition of "comfort zone" has been updated?
Does a reading assignment ever involve a character who regrets climbing the corporate ladder and wishes she had a family, or are teachers expected to preserve the comfort of that zone?
cf, Catcher in the Rye.
Which I got about halfway through (if that) because all I kept thinking was "Christ, I wish this dope would just get hit by a bus and die already."
“contrast narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style, according to the lawsuit.”
This seems fine. There are lots of literary choices to select for contrasting narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style. Hell, you can do this all day in almost any comment section anywhere on the internet.
Then that next sentence…. I’m ok with taking college students out of their comfort zone. I did ROTC in college. It wasn’t comfortable. I was exposed to new ideas that offered opportunity for maturation. However, I don’t think the professor makes a great argument for her reading assignment “Better yourself” if she believes it will teach her students news ideas for intellectual maturation, when the book covers drinking in excess, use of hard drugs, and a clubbing lifestyle at age 30.
At the heart of this article is a person fired for cause now fighting to suggest they were competently performing their duties. I’m sure the statements in the article quoted from the court case were cherry picked and rearranged out of the context used in the court filings in order to create a certain narrative voice and perspective.
The offense is suspiciously slight, something is missing. I'll wait for the rest of the story.
In Jr High (in NE and I imagine many other places) we had to read May Angelou's "I know Why the Caged Bird Sings"; OK, really well-written, but always thought it was kind of weird pushing this biographic depiction of barbaric black families in the south to all these white middle / upper middle class teens. Did it open our eyes? Maybe. Did it take us out of comfort zone? Yes. Did it improve our perceptions of black America?
It's just about sex, and the thrill of having young people talk about it with you. Otherwise the uncomfortable materials would be something else for a change, like the role of Africans or other nonwhites in slavery, or the horrible human costs of collectivist ideologies. Or the costs of suicidal empathy. It's the educators who need to go outside their own comfort zone first. They act like they have experience with it after spending their lives in the safe space of academia with well-defined guardrails that are never breeched.
I wonder what really happened, since we can't rely on honest reporting. I don't wonder why newspapers are failing, though.
The Bible (which I actually read) I is quite full of stories of misbehavior. I don't take that inclusion as encouragement of the activities. Amnon raping his sister for example, yet I still read it. The value I suppose is in that it forces me to evaluate my own choices and their effect on myself and others. I feel like the assigned reading does exactly the same thing.
A handmade tale? Maybe, baby, a fetus... feature of narration, rather than reporting. NYeT. Never.
“take students out of their comfort zone“
why not school as sanctuary?
If Miss Mooney’s girlfriend is not platonic, then they’re both poly and bi since Miss Mooney’s college-aged boyfriend was also mentioned and her girlfriend seems to go out with a different guy each night. I would wager the scandalous part isn’t described fully in the article rather than that Miss Mooney is lesbian, which seems to be an incorrect reading.
I’m an older woman from the south. I am married, but have lots of female friends. I call all of them my girlfriends.
Lol at the NYT description of the short story:
This is the plot:
The narrator is Miss Mooney, a 30-year-old, recently divorced math teacher at a Ukrainian Catholic high school in New York. She’s an alcoholic who pukes in the nuns’ bathroom in the mornings, keeps a sleeping bag in the back of her classroom to nap off benders, and fabricates her students’ standardized test answers so she doesn’t get fired.
The sex talk is a defining feature: she treats her students almost like drinking buddies, telling her seniors things like “Most people have had anal sex. . . etc.
I guess I’m reading too much into “girlfriend” since I can see. She also had a “ boyfriend”.
@Eva Marie ha ha that sheds a different light on this
…taking them out of their comfort zone is the new this school is a safe space?
…taking liberal kids out of their comfort zone is never allowed…
There's a reason why NYT and WaPo are seen as even less trustworthy than government. There is much more to this story than the New York Times has revealed. Colleges and universities don't fire professors willy-nilly. Those decisions are jointly arrive at in a committee environment, typically a board of trustees, by a margin established by charter, a three fifths majority of the members present, for example, quorum rules applying. It is substantially more difficult to fire a professor than anyone else in public or private service, consequently this dismissal hinges on much more than the GF status of a fictional character given as a reading assignment.
Cancel culture? Transgenderism causes homos, Politically Congruent ("="), and liberals in Progressive sects to socially distance through banner and rhetoric. #NoJudgment #NoLabels #AllsFairInLustAndAbortiom
Eek, sex! At university.
typo alert: Those decisions are jointly arrived at...
She made eye contact with the wrong student.
"You popped my safe space bubble, you bitch."
Plus you gave me a C+ on my mid-term.
To think this generation gets offended when they are referred to as 'snowflakes'.
They wouldn't have lasted an hour in college circa 1967-1977.
"I can't define pornography, but I know it when I see it." - Florida
“ Imagine getting fired for assigning that.”
Maybe she was fired for not giving a “boring crap” trigger warning. If I had to read that my brain would start gnawing its way out of my skull.
Make them read Huck Finn if you want to explode their bubbles and get some phone calls to the dean.
I think this was covered in The Crucible.
According to AI, Florida is an employment-at-will state, which means you don't need cause to fire somebody. So the university can remove under-performers when somebody better comes along.
An "under performer," of course, is often based on how students grade their teachers. I imagine there is a lot of payback in that loop, which is why grade inflation is skyrocketing way higher than real inflation.
There's a 17-year-old who graduated from high school recently with an 11.99 gpa.
Rewrite the gpa code!
Wasn’t the story a first draft of the script for the movie Bad Teacher?
"Okay, we are all reading the Satanic Verses. Out loud. If you complain to the dean, you will burn in hell. Let's go."
bagoh20 said...
It's the educators who need to go outside their own comfort zone first. They act like they have experience with it after spending their lives in the safe space of academia with well-defined guardrails that are never breeched.
This is a good point. But we're told that taking a Leftist outside of their comfort zone was an aggression or a microaggression or violence or something.
Imagine getting fired for assigning that.
Socrates: "She got fired? Poor baby."
How Socrates Corrupted the Youth
(I heard a rumor he was banging the kiddies, but I wasn't there).
apologies to Socrates for the joke
That's a great clip on Socrates.
Dead Poets Society, final scene.
RIP, Robin Williams
I suspect the article isn't telling us all there is to the story. The professor had students read that work for many years, and agreed to remove it.
The article expends a large amount of text telling us how awful the DeSantis administration is.
Thanks to Eva Marie. I bet hers is the more accurate summary of the story. I still don't think it's a firing offense, but neither do I see how reading such a story would make you a better person. It's no great challenge to take a person out of their comfort zone. I just have to get out of bed to get out of mine........The real trick in life and sometimess literature is in finding a comfort zone. I think the enduring pleasure of reading Agatha Christie or P.J. Wodehouse is because they offer the reader a comfort zone. The story of Ulysses is that of a man trying to reach his comfort zone.
I think the enduring pleasure of reading Agatha Christie or P.J. Wodehouse is because they offer the reader a comfort zone.
"I have my books and my poetry to protect me." -- Paul Simon, I Am a Rock
"Women weaken legs." -- Sylvester Stallone, Rocky
If she wants to get college kids who have gone through 12 years of education-system indoctrination "out of their comfort zone," she should have assigned something by Thomas Sowell.
Admiral McRaven's idea of getting college kids out of their comfort zone was telling them to make their beds. It was a needed speech for the students at the University of Texas.
“ "Women weaken legs." -- Sylvester Stallone, Rocky”
It was actually Rocky’s trainer who said that. Rocky was not convinced.
It was actually Rocky’s trainer who said that.
Yes, but it was Sylvester Stallone who wrote the line.
Doing a little digging on this. First, she wasn't "fired;" she was told that her contract, which was expiring, wouldn't be renewed. Also, this suggests that she did not have tenure (plus she was only at that school since 2023). Second, as near as I can tell, all of the reporting is using her complaint as the sole source (maybe with some additional comments from the professor), and the school has thus far not commented on it.
If I ever shoot a remake of Rocky, I will insert an extreme close-up of his legs shaking right before he sinks to the canvas.
nah, he made it to the bell
Nice Rocky commentary from The Jagged Word
"Where the Sacred & Profane Collide"
Somehow I bet a leftist school firing a professor for assigning, say, C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity wouldn't have the NYT singing the praises of the professor... but it would certainly be taking modern leftists out of their comfort zone! Or maybe try assigning some Russell Kirk or Frederic Bastiat.... make leftists go berserk! They'd probably tar and feather any professor who did that!
Or we could just, you know, read it for ourselves and then decide:
https://electricliterature.com/bettering-myself-ottessa-moshfegh/
Seems like being fired was taking the professor outside her comfort zone. She should celebrate the university for such a great learning experience that can help her grow as a person, if she isn't too narrow-minded to embrace it.
What is with the education establishment and the obsession about promoting and talking about sex with students? You can't talk about his shit in any other profession or these same liberal educators want you fired.
Are educators just horny? Could it be that simple? Is their horniness elevated and acceptable?
"expose them to new ideas"
Narrator: These weren't new ideas at all but very old, tired ideas for anyone born after the 1940s.
Reminds me of a video Glenn Loury made with McWhorter about his... burning the candle at both ends, if you will, while he was a tenured professor at an Ivy League university.
In fact, Glenn wrote in his memoir about it and here is a NYT book review.
None of this makes any sense.
No college professor anywhere (except, perhaps, in strictly religious institutions) has ever been fired for introducing anything "profane" to college students.
Also college students are adults.
Like many above, I suspect there's a lot more to the story.
once you realize what sort of person would WANT to be a teacher in today's world..
the Whole Thing starts making much more sense..
much more depressing, but much more sense..
Florida state college there is no such animal
Sounds a lot like the novel that William Barr’s dad wrote, the guy who hired Epstein as a math teacher even though he had no degree. You remember Bill Barr? He’s the guy who looked into Epstein’s death and said “nothing to see here.” Except his dad’s novel had a lot of sex with the underaged, let’s call them.
Ahhh…this made me laugh. In Junior year HS, I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next, in which a character commits suicide by castration right in the middle of the book. We also went as a class to see the play in a tiny downtown San Francisco theater. As a college freshman I took a Comp Lit class. The “teacher” (my guess is she was a grad student) was very focused on sex…everything we read centered on it. Including “Philosophy of the Bedroom” by The Marquis de Sade, which is straight up porn. She had long, straight black hair and smoked clove cigarettes. Good times. Good times.
Imagine a world where we fire a president. And he sues, saying there was "no cause" not to renew his contract. And the district court judge bangs his gavel and gives the president his job for four more years.
Libertarian NYT is actually power-grabbing NYT in disguise (as usual).
"you can't fire somebody for cackling in public"
yes we can
Jonathan Haidt has argued that universities must decide between competing purposes: open inquiry and social justice. In this case the two are aligned, this instructor wants open inquiry into social justice.
In high school we read the Canterbury tales, including the Millers Tale, which is quite hilarious and very sexually descriptive, tag line “Fie! A beard!” It was pretty erotic talking with all the girls about it the next day, so I did not mind having porn readings in school at all, I felt different when my daughter went to school.
I guess as John Prine suggested, we’ll all mark it off to the progress of man.
As a college freshman I took a Comp Lit class. The “teacher” (my guess is she was a grad student) was very focused on sex…everything we read centered on it.
I took a class at the University of Georgia (class of 1990): Psychology of Sex and Sexual Deviation. Soft porn. Horrible soft porn. And photos of untreated VD (that's what we called it back then) in the back of the textbook.
Academic porn is the worst porn you can imagine. Still, it was way more fun than my Accounting class.
This was spring in my sophomore year. When I discovered, night school. Oh my God. I would sleep until noon, play beach volleyball all afternoon, get something to eat, and go to class at 6:40 p.m. And another class at 8:45 p.m. And beer drinking after that. It was like a four-day weekend. Dude. Night school is the bomb. Unfortunately the class options were severely limited. Adults don't like working at night, apparently. My favorite trimester at Georgia.
None of this makes any sense.
They didn't give her a reason, I'm guessing. So the attorney had to make one up.
There must be a lot of sexually unfulfilled lefties out there. They spend more time writing and fantasizing about sex than actually having sex.
Seems par for the course.
A certain kind of English instructor isn't much better than a cathouse madam these days. But a madam does a better job of expanding experience; and does it for women as well as men since many college girls are now sex workers. This comment is irrelevant to the story of the English instructor in Florida but it expands our horizons as she liked to do. So I'll let it stand.
When you take students out of their comfort zone the girls end up needing abortions.
All the stuff in-between is just fashion trends.
I am Laslo.
Unlikable and unreliable narrators are the best. Students, go home.
Also, if you think your professor is assigning certain works because of fantasies about students, that should especially amuse you, not scare you. I once saw that a certain professor assigned a novel wherein the protagonist was a man very much like himself who ended up in a passionate romantic relationship with an undergrad. I still laugh about it.
*Reddington said...
Or we could just, you know, read it for ourselves and then decide:
https://electricliterature.com/bettering-myself-ottessa-moshfegh/
7/31/26, 1:15 PM*
Thanks for that. 10 minutes of my life I won't get back. I did have to laugh at the dinner scene with her ex. She was clearly getting ready for a little horizontal action, then started compatibility about how he treated the waitress better than her... and he ends the evening with: I'll pay you to stop calling me. Comedy gold in a sea of irredeemable blather. Worse than Metamorphosis, and I am no fan of Metamorphosis...*BELIEVE THAT*.
Compatibility == complaining
Raymond Carver is a helluva writer.
Now, I've read it. Have no idea how you could get fired for assigning that. I don't even know how it could take a student out of his comfort zone. It's very tame. Also, it won an award and is well-written.
I was once assigned "In the Penal Colony," which became one of my favorite short stories. What happens if these students are assigned something like that? Do they literally faint? Students, dropping suddenly, all around campus, flat to the floor, a few head injuries. "What happened to them?" "Literature."
Remember "Cat Person"? I remember that one being controversial on this blog. Great story. Still makes me laugh to think of it. Later had it assigned in a class. No one fainted, so no one hit his head and died. No one got fired.
It would be really unfortunate if she said something truly regressive like:
College is a scam.
Bettering Myself was a quick read. Thanks for the electric literature link, the Paris Review link had the first two-thirds of the short story but wanted $59 for the end.
I loved the part where the narrator’s ex-husband offered her money if she would stop calling him, and she took the deal. That’s the titular moment in the story, I think.
Ottessa Moshfegh‘s awards and honors:
2013–15 Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University
2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction from The Paris Review for her story "Bettering Myself"
2014 Believer Book Award winner for McGlue
2016 MacDowell Colony Fellowship
2016 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for Eileen
2016 Man Booker Prize (shortlist) for Eileen
2018 The Story Prize finalist for Homesick for Another World
I think the key point here is that the school is Ukrainian Catholic. I know several Ukrainian Catholics and I know that they would not want their children taught using this type of material.
Paul Harey's tag line was "And now you know the rest of the story.
For the WaPo and NYT it should be, "This much and no more".
Freeman Hunt pretty much summed it up, for me. Perhaps there's more to the story, but as it is, not a firing--or contract non-renewal--offense.
And college-age students are not "children," regardless of ethnic background or religion. If they're too delicate to handle this story, just wait until "real, real" life hits 'em.
The professor used the N-word. Cultural sensitivity has Diverse precedents.
It's a selfie-parody woke of art.
Why is the narrator of “Cathedral” purported to be unlikable? I know people who are objectively much worse behaved and I like them just fine. And I like (whatever that word might mean) both the kid and Judge Holden from BLOOD MERIDIAN, even though they are both openly awful and one of them kills the other. And I know, for instance, a certain Episcopal priest who is objectively nice and well behaved, and I like him as well as I like a cup of warm spit. It’s all very confusing, who we should like versus who we do.
bettering-myself-ottessa-moshfegh
Not bad for a horror story, I'd say.
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