A Fordham University lecturer has been terminated after he allegedly confused the names of two Black students in his class.
Christopher Trogan, a lecturer in the university’s English department, was terminated because of his response to an incident on Sept. 24, The Observer reports.
Trogan reportedly mixed up the names of two students who walked into class late. He says it had nothing to do with their race.
In a nine-page email, Trogan declared that he has spent his “entire life” of working on “issues of justice, equality, and inclusion.”
“The offended student assumed my mistake was because I confused that student with another Black student,” Trogan said in his email to students. “I have done my best to validate and reassure the offended student that I made a simple, human, error. It has nothing to do with race.”
However, one of the students, who has remained anonymous, says it was not the first time. They said it happened over the course of four classes and that they tried to correct him.
“I felt really disrespected,” they said. “I did not feel heard because every time he (misnamed me) I would tell him, and it just seemed like he would brush it off or that he did not care.”
Trogan was suspended from his job with pay and benefits on Sept. 26 before being terminated on Oct. 29. He told students in his email that he wasn’t informed of why he was being investigated until his termination.
“I was never informed of the charges against me, nor of the nature of the investigation of which I was the subject,” Trogan wrote on Oct. 29. “I was kept completely in the dark.”
The second student, Chantel Sims, said that Trogan should have simply apologized.
“It seemed a little excessive, like all you needed to do was say sorry and it would have been fine,” Sims said. “We were not actually that upset about him mixing up our names. It was more so the random things he would throw into the response.”
