BERKELEY, Calif. – After making a sexist Ed post comment about “women’s behavior outside the Bay Area,” CS 189 professor Terry Smawldich doubled down by writing an equally-controversial midterm question. Namely, he is forcing all the female students in his machine learning class to answer if they “like-like” him.
One student, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described a pattern of concerning behavior from the professor over the course of the semester.
“The first class meeting already had some red flags,” recounted the student, a female-identifying sophomore CS major. “Instead of a regular syllabus, he had a photo of him holding a fish where a sane person would put their office hours. The next two pages were dedicated to his favorite bands (a damning amount of Midwest emo) and foods, and outlines for our mandatory project; we could choose between playing ‘would you rather,’ ‘truth-or-dare,’ or ‘never have I ever.’ By week eight, I was having serious doubts about his treatment of other women in the course – especially after three problem sets where we wrote scripts to compute the ‘total number of deplorable females in artillery distance of San Francisco.’ What the hell is artillery distance? The radius around him where he’ll ‘shoot his shot?’ If that’s the case, I’ll just take the mortar shells.”
While the vast majority of the community was outraged, one CS 189 student applauded Professor Smawldich.
“About time these women realize how easy they have it in this world,” lamented Junior Alfred N’suffrable, shifting uncomfortably in his chastity belt. “Once you scroll through 4chan, you realize that it’s actually super easy to do well as a woman in STEM, because all you have to do is overcome systemic sexism and ongoing harassment. They don’t know the real struggles people like me have to face. If I go up to a woman alone at night and ask her very politely for her number by screaming how beautiful she is and how I want her to be my tradwife, I’m considered a predator? I’m literally just being a classy gentleman but this woke society punishes me for that. And that’s exactly what Professor Smawldich was rightfully calling out. Why does God give his nicest guys his most evil succubi?”
Smawldich, however, was unrepentant of his actions. In an interview with the Daily Cal, he doubled-down on defending his behavior.
“My job as an instructor is to guide the malleable next generation,” Smawldich said with great dramatic irony, while his desktop background of Dan Schneider peeked over his shoulder. “Part of that responsibility is imparting the moral codes of an upstanding university education, and part of that is understanding the proper behavior men and women should have,” he huffed, punctuating the sentence with great aplomb. “My wife is well aware of all comments I leave on the internet, even of the ones made with the burner account I use to disparage women. In fact, our marriage is so strong because my credit card cleared and my wife loves traditional masculinity. Trust me, nothing says traditional like notions of gender norms 70-90 years behind modernity. If I’m such a bad professor, why does my Rate My Professor say I ‘care way too deeply about my students?’”
Following the outcry generated from this incident, UC Berkeley announced they would combat the issue by raising Smawldich’s yearly salary and doing nothing to punish him.