Syracuse U Professor to students: If you text message in class, I am OUT!

I know school is coming to a close for many, but this is an interesting story about Laurence Thomas, a black Syracuse University philosophy professor, who recently caused a campus wide debate on text messaging in class. Some students were texting in class and he walked out. Students and family members were angered, saying they pay $30,000 for tuition and he should not have walked out. I took a course where the professor had a rule: If your cell phone goes off in class, you are dismissed for that day. I never heard one ringtone in that class.

Here are excerpts from Higher Ed:

"Thomas followed through on his threat (as he had done just a few days earlier). And he then sent the university’s chancellor, his dean, and all of the students an e-mail message explaining his actions and his frustration at the “brazen” disrespect he had received in class. In the e-mail, he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class.

While Thomas noted that white students are also rude, he expressed frustration that — especially as a minority scholar himself — he would be treated in this way. “One might have thought that for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality, non-white students would be particularly committed to respecting a black professor,” Thomas wrote.