commentary on apology (part 2)

In Duangchay's letter, he repeatedly emphasized the public-ness of the environment—students come and go, other labs are open—but he also less overtly underscored his status as a member of a private, scientific community: (a) he identified himself as a member of an advanced chemistry class and (b) he used lingo that implied a certain level of comfort with esoteric scientific technologies. In his own words, he went to “sc 289 simply to get [his] work done.” Duangchay’s considerable experience in scientific laboratories [1] may have made him feel particularly entitled to use the resources in what I perceived to be my classroom. The competing names for SC 289, in part, led to our conflict, as did the duality of the public/private laboratory, a duality that is contingent upon spatial and temporal factors. Sometimes SC 289 functions as an open lab; at other times, it is a closed classroom. Problems arise when students fail—or refuse—to see how the time of day leads to the ascendance of one metaphor over another.

Read a few conclusions.

[1] From his now defunct personal website, I learned that he is a graduate student of molecular biology in the biological sciences department, and he specializes in DNA structures & functions. His academic goal is to “interpret the human genome information by integrating the power of both wet lab (traditional molecular biology lab) and wired lab (computational biology lab).” Clearly, Duangchay is no stranger to laboratories.