A01
4/18/2020
I am moved when I read the poem "Who Killed Soek-Fang Sim" in this week's reading list. It is a sad and powerful poem. I search for the information about Soek-Fang Sim. It is said she is a Singapore Chines immigrant who taught international studies at a Midwest liberal art college. The rumor had it that she was a poor teacher and scholar. She didn't pas her third-year review and soon died of breast cancer at 35. However, she had won two top paper awards at the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. She already had enough publications to pass her third-year review, but her senior colleagues in her department deliberately distorted those letters in their assessment. I am so sad about this. It's a game of smoke and mirrors where reputation (which can easily be destroyed) overshadows reality. And women of color are particularly vulnerable to defamation because it is very easy to stoke the presumption of incompetence. The saddest thing is that we come to believe these lies about one another---bad teacher, poor scholar. It's brave for the author of this poem to be honesty to talk about this. That's why we must speak up when we see any similar situation. One voice may not make a scratch, but two, three, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand... will make a huge impact and change the world.
References
Staff, H. (n.d.). Wang Ping Sues Macalester College for Employment... Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2013/03/wang-ping-sues-macalester-college-for-employment-discrimination
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