Statement from Professor Caitilyn Allen on Plant Pathology/Botany 123

I recognize that a PowerPoint slide from my Monday lecture of my Plants, Parasites and People class was offensive to several students taking my class, along with others who may have seen it in social media postings. It was not my intent to offend, and I regret the impact this may have had on our community.

I will no longer use the slide, but would also like to share more background and context about my work and how and why the image was used.

The class is a non-majors biology class that is designed to demystify, analyze and critique science, all in the context of agriculture, food production, and especially the diseases of plants. Students learn how humans domesticated plants and invented farming, and how plant diseases have disrupted our economic, political, and food security.

I have taught the class since 1992. My teaching has been recognized with a Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award and a national teaching award from my professional society, the American Phytopathological Society.

I teach mostly via case studies. Many of them involve epidemics of colonial cash crops, historically and currently. I am familiar with this because my area of expertise is tropical plant pathology, and I have done research in both Uganda and Guatemala. I respect and admire the women farmers of the developing tropics.

On Monday, we were discussing the Irish potato famine. I was trying to teach that the potato blight was caused not by a fungus, but by an oomycete, an organism no more closely related to fungi than to plants and animals. I used a rough tree of life diagram that included representative images for bacteria, fungi, plants, animals, and oomycetes.  The image I used for the animal kingdom was an African woman farmer, who I encountered in my research travels.

At that point in the lecture, a student asked why I chose this image. I explained that too often scientific images represent all humanity as a white male, and I wanted to give a more representative image, and especially to use a farmer because this class is about agriculture.

After lecture, a different student talked to me for a few minutes to explain why she saw the juxtaposition of the word “animals” with that image as offensive.

I understood then that the word “animals” was upsetting because of its non-biological meaning. I discussed this in lecture today. I told my class that it was a mistake to use that image because in addition to my intended inclusive biological meaning, the image also communicated a negative social message. This was the idea that women of color are “animals” (in a derogatory, non-biological sense: less than human). I thanked her and regret this error. The image will be replaced in future versions of this lecture.  As I told the class this morning, I appreciate their feedback.