Policies (in alphabetical order)

Academic Integrity: Have it. Don’t cheat. See me if you’re struggling.

Because this course is a collaborative project, you will see a lot of your classmates’ work. I encourage you to build on it and credit them for their ideas. But using their work without crediting them is plagiarism, and, more generally, presenting anyone else’s work as your own, or using outside assistance or referring to other classmates during quizzes, is cheating, and violates Penn State’s principles of academic integrity.

If you find yourself considering any of the above violations due to personal stresses, frustration or difficulties with the course, or any other reason at all, reach out to me about how I can help you. I’m happy to accommodate you as best and as fairly as I can—such will be a much better use of our time than going through an Academic Integrity violation process. 

Visit the College of the Liberal Arts’s Academic Integrity Information for Students page for details on the policy and process for addressing violations.

Accessibility: Use SDR and/or let me know how I can help.

I endeavor to make the course and its materials broadly accessible, but in the event that you require an accommodation, visit the Student Disability Resources website and go through their enrollment, intake, and documentation submission process. They’ll then give you a letter that you can give to me. If they don’t, or if you’d rather not go through that process, let me know what might make this course a better learning environment for you and I will do my best to make that possible.

Attendance: 3 free skips.

  • You can miss up to 3 classes without impacting your Attendance grade. See the Assignments section for details on how your Attendance grade is recorded.

  • If you miss class, any Major Assignments remain due on their assigned dates. Quizzes and In-Class Writing cannot be made up on another date.

Classroom Behavior Standards: Behave and wear a mask.

Disruption, disorderly conduct, and harassment is prohibited, as defined in the University Code of Conduct. I will dismiss you from the class meeting for these or other code of conduct violations, and may file a report with the Office of Student Conduct.

Wear a mask in class. I will dismiss you from the class meeting if you fail to comply with this requirement, per Penn State’s guidance on enforcing masking policies. 

Counseling and Psychological Services: Use freely as needed.

If you are facing personal challenges or have psychological needs to be addressed, please make use of the university’s services for addressing these issues. The modern college experience can be extremely stressing in a normal year, and much more so during the course of a global pandemic. Dial the numbers below to reach trained professionals who welcome all students, are eager to help, and will keep your information confidential. 

Education Equity: For. And report bias if you experience it.

Acts of intolerance, discrimination, or harassment due to age, ancestry, color, disability, gender, gender identity, national origin, race, religious belief, sexual orientation, or veteran status are not tolerated and can be reported through Educational Equity via the Report Bias webpage.

Extensions: Use a one-time, 7-day extension for any major assignment but the last one. 

You can use a one-time one-week extension of your due date for the Course Journal Entry, Close Reading Essay, or Historicization Presentation assignments. Because the Historicization Presentation is a group project, you can only use an extension on that project if no one in the group has yet used their extension. This will then count as the entire group having used their extension.

Email me to request use of this at any point, up until one week after the assignment due date has passed.

Due to a tight deadline for submitting final grades, you cannot request an extension for the last assignment.

Late Submissions: 5% deducted per day.

For each day that an assignment is late (rounded up), Canvas will automatically deduct 5% from the grade ultimately entered for that assignment.

Racism: Against.

RACIST: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.

ANTIRACIST: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.

- Ibrahim X. Kendi, excerpt from How to Be an Antiracist

This course recognizes that racism is a socially constructed force that exists in society and materially impacts people living in the world. The academic discipline of English Literature itself has had its own role to play in supporting white supremacy, in large part by historically tending to enshrine as epitomes of culture and erudition predominantly works written by white men.

I say this not to say that those works are not worth studying, only to say that to propagate the notion that the only works worth studying are those authored by persons of one very specific race and gender combination doesn’t make much sense, unless one claims that persons of those characteristics are inherently, essentially, and disproportionately more likely to write texts worth reading than persons of others. And that’s racist.

So, to work against those long-established practices, I’ve tried to include work by creators with a range of lived experiences and backgrounds. And this composition will, I hope, give us a fuller picture of what works of culture have to say about the world of business, and how race and gender impacts both those representations and lived experiences.

Talking about race is difficult. We (myself included) will make mistakes, have to backtrack, apologize, refine our understanding, correct ourselves, and try again. But this is worthwhile and necessary: to not talk about how racism effects our society and culture not only perpetuates racism, but also performs willful ignorance, and we as a group of capable, smart, and curious Penn Staters are not in the business of performing ignorance, but of creating knowledge.