"The Bully":

I have known and worked with the following individual off and on for several years. He is an incredibly complex individual, full of contradictions and incongruous behavior. To describe him as a teacher and critic is difficult, as he can be sensitive and insightful on one hand, brutally sarcastic and discriminatory on the other. If you are a talented male student your problems with this individual should be minimal. The difficulties usually begin in the studio surrounding his awkwardness in critiquing female students. He would often avoid in-depth discussion of design issues with his female students, and was often quite authoritarian with them in his demands that they follow his guidelines explicitly. In the juries, slight deviations from his instructions could bring harsh verbal abuse, and most of the female students eventually succumbed to the relentless pressure. Their pre-jury anxiety levels were quite high, especially for those who chose to think and design independently. It appeared that this teacher / juror's need for control of his students would often lead him to totally abandon the independent thinkers in the juries and at times even publicly debase their efforts before the other jurors.

As the number of female students began to increase in the nineteen-eighties his discriminatory ways became more apparent. One particularly outspoken and talented female student was assigned to his advanced design studio. The verbal battles were awful between these two, and quite disruptive to the class and juries. Tearful scenes were common, but the student persevered and pinned up an original and very good project for her final jury. Her jury was well attended as the entire school anticipated another fray. As she finished a fluent and well developed verbal presentation of her project her studio teacher immediately began to attack several relatively obscure points in the plan. He then moved on to a more personally oriented attack on women in the profession in general and how they were a disruptive force in the studios. At this point one of the faculty / jury members had heard enough, and grasped the offending juror by his shoulders and turned him to face the student's drawings. He then squeezed the juror's cheeks together between his index finger and thumb and pointed to the drawings with his free hand and said, "Now look at this project.....look at the quality of its presentation and the quality of its thought.....now say the word `good' for all of us, G..O..O..D.....good, I know you can do it". Explosive laughter from the audience and jury followed this scene, as if a huge balloon of steam had burst and gone flying off out of view. Although the `bully's' comments for the remainder of the day were meticulously fair, he did slowly revert to his former ways as time passed. Eventually a group of his female students kept detailed written accounts of his discriminatory practices throughout one semester, and presented these to the University Vice-President for academic affairs. Suit was filed against the school, but was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence. The teacher remains in his position today.

Although we see that a particularly strong student was able to combat this teacher's discriminatory practices, we also wonder how much more she could have accomplished given a more positive learning environment. How much energy was devoted to personal defense and anxiety rather than to learning about design and designing? Another relevant question concerns how many alented but less forceful students were overcome by his oppression and either became his `draftsperson' or left the profession altogether? The school's administration and most of the faculty did little to rectify an obvious and long-term problem.

The following transcripts were collected during the opening juror commentary of a preliminary jury for an advanced studio. There are five other jurors present and a student audience of ten or fifteen. The student presenter's studio teacher is the first to speak although there are four guest jurors present. Informal interviews with the student indicated that the issues discussed by this teacher had been discussed in the studio prior to this jury. The student chose not to respond to his teacher's suggestions to alter his design, and it would appear that the teacher spoke first to bias the opinion of the other jurors in support of his negative views on this student's site design. The teacher then further masqueraded his critical opinions with a very sincere tone of voice and a vague look of puzzlement on his face.

The juror's final, one sentence statement was all he/she really needed to say if he was not really interested in asking a question. Of course the option exists to truly discover the student's initial intentions without `telling' him what you think he may have been thinking as this juror did. A simply phrased request could have gone something like this, "Please explain the developmental reasoning behind this approach to the site plan." If the student response does not seem satisfactory at that point, the juror can then begin to explain his qualifications of the student's reasoning and design approach. These comments should in turn be followed by some constructive idea building which could eventually include the ideas of other jurors as well. Informal conversations with students indicate that they usually pick up these rhetorical manipulations and realize that the juror does not really desire a response since he/she is obviously in a `telling' frame of mind and not necessarily an `understanding' one.

I believe that if this juror had the opportunity to observe this behavior through the eyes of the video camera and the other jurors, he/she would realize that this habit does hinder communication. He/she may even become concerned enough to modify certain aspects of this behavior.

The following dialogue begins just after a four-minute-and-fifteen-second student presentation where the student explains a system of analyzing some of Aalto's works which allowed him to generate new design forms using a series of three-degree angles inscribed on the plans. Interruption-type and speakers are coded as follows: Speaker codes precede their comments and are in bold; student presenter (SP), jury leader (L), jurors (2)(3), student audience (SA). Interruption-type codes follow the comments that they interrupt; interruptions (i), power interruptions (pi):

(L) "In practice I think you can start with things you know will work and (continues for thirty-five seconds in an incoherent manner the practical applications of using angles to analyze design)"

This tit-for-tat interrupting goes on for approximately ten more interruptions, in the one-minute-and-thirty-seconds remaining. It finally dissolves into factional dialogue, with two or three conversations proceeding simultaneously. The jury ends with the leader shouting out, "Who's next?".