02 May 2011

Despair might be underplaying his response

Lisa Foderaro has an article in The New York Times about a guy who couldn't handle rejection:
In the three weeks since a Spanish instructor at Princeton University killed himself, questions have been raised by students and professors there and on other campuses about the university’s handling of the episode. Princeton officials have said that the instructor, Antonio Calvo, was on leave at the time he died, but declined to provide other details, citing employees’ privacy rights.
Documents obtained by The New York Times, including a letter to Dr. Calvo from Princeton and an entry in his notebook, indicate that the university suspended him on 8 April, four days before his death, while it investigated serious complaints against him, and that the news threw him into despair.
“We have received information from multiple sources that you have been engaging in extremely troubling and inappropriate behavior in the workplace,” the chairman of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures, Gabriela Nouzeilles, wrote to Dr. Calvo, a senior lecturer who taught Spanish to undergraduates and supervised graduate students.
The letter did not elaborate on the complaints, but it informed Dr. Calvo that he was suspended with pay, pending an investigation, and barred him from campus, instructing him to leave his Princeton ID and keys on his desk. Because he was in the United States on a temporary work visa, he faced a forced return to his native Spain.
Dr. Calvo’s appointment was up for renewal, and the suspension came in the midst of his evaluation. Marco Aponte-Moreno, a friend and former lecturer in Spanish at Princeton, said a faculty member and a few graduate students had campaigned to block the reappointment.
On 9 April, the day after his suspension, Dr. Calvo made a notebook entry in Spanish that revealed his growing turmoil: “The emotional torture of the months-long wait has become unbearable in my job,” said the entry, which was translated by a friend, Celia PĂ©rez-Ventura, a former director of the Spanish-language program at Princeton. “It is better to leave it here instead of continuing this road toward a greater torture, left exposed as if I were guilty of a crime when in reality the committee refused to see the merit of my work, focusing instead only on the fact that I raised my voice at my subordinates.”
Friends and former colleagues of Dr. Calvo, 45, a popular figure on campus for more than a decade, say he had long had conflicts with graduate students. He oversaw their teaching of undergraduates and criticized some as not working hard enough. The students, in turn, complained that he was overly harsh.
With a loud voice and an occasional temper, Dr. Calvo did not fit the buttoned-down norm of American higher education, his friends said. He may also have felt looser around graduate students, viewing them as colleagues because they also taught.
Friends say the complaints about Dr. Calvo stem from two incidents. In one, they said, Dr. Calvo told a graduate student that she deserved a slap on the face; in the other, he sent an e-mail with a joking reference to a male student’s testicles, using a Spanish expression that exhorts someone to get to work. Dr. Aponte said that because Dr. Calvo was gay, the email was presented as evidence of sexual harassment. “Those are the only two incidents that we know of, and they were completely misinterpreted and taken out of proportion,” Dr. Aponte said. “They should have given him a warning of some kind.”
The letter from Princeton relieved Dr. Calvo of his teaching responsibilities, and told him to expect a call from an associate dean the next Monday to schedule an interview in which he could respond to the allegations. It is unclear whether Dr. Calvo spoke to anyone from Princeton that Monday. But the letter indicates that he was given a chance to defend himself, contrary to assertions by some supporters. The next day, 12 April, he was found dead of slash wounds in his Manhattan apartment.
In a letter to “the Princeton community” last week, the university president, Shirley M. Tilghman, described the process for reviewing faculty appointments, but said the content of Dr. Calvo’s review could not be disclosed without “an unprecedented breach” of confidentiality. She lamented that, as a result, misleading rumors had spread on campus and the Internet. “Most problematically,” she said, “innocent individuals on campus have been identified and fingers pointed in a manner that is deeply unfair, hurtful and unworthy of this university community.”
Twenty-three professors and students at Princeton and other campuses released a letter asking the university to issue a full report on how and why it suspended Dr. Calvo.

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