My Seventh Class — Software Engineering

My seventh graduate class at Hopkins was also pretty terrible.

I’m a disabled graduate student in Johns Hopkins School of Engineering for Professionals (EP). Usually there’s a culture of silence around how terribly colleges and universities live up to their obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). We’re supposed to take the shit, graduate anyway (or drop out) and shut up.

I’m done with being silent.

My seventh class was Software Engineering, which concerns how engineers structure the creation of software. What features are built first. How do you decide what the core of your product is, and incorporate documentation and testing into the software build process.

It’s also why I think Cathie Axe a currently employee of Hopkins Student Disability Services, should be disciplined or asked to leave.

After Sadowsky’s class I received help from outside the department in setting up my disability accommodations. Mark, disability coordinator for EP, simply couldn’t make the professors implement the accommodations Hopkins promised.

Cathie Axe, newly hired to help improve disability services for the entire university, volunteered to take charge.

This gave me hope.

She scheduled a time to speak with me. At first, she wanted me to come in in person during working hours. This seemed a little odd. I explained to her that I work for a living. She proposed a time in the late afternoon, which also seemed odd. Like her suggestion that we meet during working hours, it seemed a bit tone deaf.

I looked her up; she’s not from Maryland. Maybe she didn’t understand Maryland traffic. (I remember the shock a Midwestern friend had. Even a close California friend finds our traffic dismaying.)

Then she suggested we talk over the phone.

I’m hard-of-hearing. If I know person well, or they have a deep voice, I’m ok on the phone. By this time, I’m pretty sure she knew I was hard-of-hearing.

I suggested instead that we meet for a Google chat. We set up a time.

Cathie Axe failed to show.

When we went to reschedule, she suggested the phone again.

We ended up communicating via email. She promised me the professor, Tushar Hazra, understood my accommodations and agreed to them. I began to breath a sigh of relief. She also assured me he understood about keeping my disability and accommodations confidential.

I was a bit confused that my first course appeared to be on Labor Day. As I remember it, Axe said no. My first course was the Monday after. I figured she had the inside scoop. EP’s professors often have incorrect times and dates on their syllabi.

I arrived at class a half hour early. The professor arrived about 15 minutes early. I showed him how to use the streaming microphone. Everything seemed good.

Then class began. The professor started to ask me in front of the class how things were working out with my streaming mic. I used a streaming microphone, he explained — to everyone. He used my name.

I was horrified.

During break, I asked the professor into the hallway with me and asked him, politely, not to share my personal information with the class. I explained that it was actually contrary to the law. Hadn’t Cathie Axe explained to him?

He said, no. I was mistaken. He could say anything he wanted. It was his classroom.

He began to get angry, leaning into my face The Applies Physic Lab has these skinny stand-up tables at chest height for students to use. I was glad one was between us.

It was a matter of freedom of speech, he said.

No, I explained. I recalled how early in the lecture he stressed his decades working in industry, including on NASA projects. It’s like in the workplace, I said. You can’t tell other employees about a person’s health situation or disabilities.

No, he said. If he was a manager in a workplace, he had every right to tell anyone he wanted about an employee’s health or disability status.

By this time, he was really yelling, leaning into me, gesticulating wildly. I was working hard to keep the shake out of my voice, while scanning for the exits. I thought I might have to make a run for it. Was he going to hit me? ‘Freedom of speech’ he kept yelling.

Maybe he thought I was the PC police ready to hit him with some new-fangled political correctness. Actually the laws protecting the privacy of disabled people concerning their disabilities go back to 1974.

Going over his resume, he’s co-written a number of papers on data-analytics in healthcare, including one paper on the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which guarantees the privacy of medical data in America. Among this medical data is data about a person’s disabilities.

He also mentioned during lecture that he’s an expert with Matomo, a popular free and open source web analytics program. His publications and LinkedIn suggest he works frequently as a private consulting. So he likely has access to a great deal of private website and web metrics data from his clients.

I wonder if they know his ideas about medical privacy?

When academia allows its experts to be careless with the personal, private information of individuals, what’s to keep that sloppiness from seeping into industry?

Tushar Hazra didn’t hit me, and we went back into class.

Later I realized that, by screaming about my disability and my disability accommodations in the hallway, Tushar Hazra had not only reinforced to the class that I’m a student with disabilities, he’d also told the class next door to ours, and the people in the office.

I figure he told over forty people that day that I’m disabled and use classroom accommodations.

Soon after, I wrote Cathie Axe a long, rambling email — plenty nasty — in which I suggested she quit her job, join a monastery, and spend the rest of her life staring at a wall.

I also used the word “fuck” in the email. As in “quit your fucking job.” I told her this was in the best interest of disabled students. I still hold this view, though I’m ashamed now of my delivery. Understand, my professor had just violated my privacy to scores of people and done so while acting physically threatening toward me.

Her response was a long, rambling email explaining, point-by-point, all the things she had done right. How she had covered everything and done everything she could. Mostly, she was angry at my inappropriate behavior — namely that I had used “fuck” in an email.

It’s possible that some of the professors at EP are so entrenched in behavior towards students that is, frankly, illegal, that even high-level officials at Hopkins cannot budge them. It’s also possible that Axe really did everything she could.

But a teacher had violated my privacy to over forty students while acting in a manner that was physically threatening. The violations occurred in the context of me being a disabled student receiving accommodations. But she was more concerned that I had used the word, “fuck.”

Axe spoke to Hazra, but the damage was done. The entire upper floor of APL had received a lecture on how Laurel Maury is disabled and uses disability accommodations.

The course appeared to mostly normally after that. We broke into student groups to model software development. Our practice problems involved hypothetical software for a hospital. My group dealt with janitorial work and room cleanliness. Pre-covid, we were surprised in our research at how much hospitals thought about airflow and incorporated it into our design.

I set up a wiki on my private web-hosting for the group to use. We described it in our software engineering plan to Hazra. He liked the idea enough to incorporate it into a couple of his lectures.

I thought things were going well for me.

Hazra’s violation of my privacy wasn’t the only boundary he crossed.

In the hall before he started screaming at me, he also started to go into his own personal problems. I tried to steer him away from these. I’ve found it usually ends poorly for the student when a professor discusses their personal problems with them.

Hazra may not respect my privacy, but I’m going to respect his and not go into what these problems were.

About halfway through the semester, he decided to tell the entire class about his personal problems during lecture. We were treated to 45 min of him standing in front of us, sobbing, talking about what was wrong with his life. How this class was the only bright spot in his existence.

The next class, he did the same again.

Toward the end of the semester he brought in a ringer from Australia to talk about Agile. Agile is a software development method that’s somewhat akin to a spiritual practice for some. Agile ‘scrum-masters’ ply their trade throughout the software ecosystem. Personally, I think it’s a good system, though some people take it a bit far.

The scrum-master had a high-pitched voice, an Indian accent, and a full-beard that covered his lower face, including his lips. He met with us over Zoom, his image projected on an overhead projector. The distance from Maryland to Australia meant there was a great deal of lag on the system, and sound did not always sync with image.

High voice, accent, full beard, grainy image, lag and lack of sync — no I really couldn’t lip-read enough to understand the guy.

After lecture, I reminded Tushar Hazra of his responsibility to submit the lecture for transcription. I was interested in what the expert from Australia had to say — not only for the class. I appreciate Agile and find it useful.

Hazra assured me he’d submit the lecture soon.

Then he didn’t.

I asked again a few days later.

Nothing.

Finally I asked Axe to take up the matter with him. The lecture took place three weeks before the final exam. After Axe’s intervention, Tushar Hazra submitted the lecture a week and a half before the exam. I received the transcript six days before the exam.

Cathie Axe told me this didn’t matter. She’d talked with Hazra, and he assured her that the lecture would not be on the exam. I had other things to study, so I didn’t prioritize the lecture.

The final exam had six questions. One of them concerned Agile, the topic of the lecture.

Yes, we’d covered Agile in other parts of the course, but this lecture — what I understood of it — really brought Agile together. All the other students in the course had access to it; I didn’t, not until a few days before the exam.

I brought the matter to Axe’s attention. I’d structured my studying based on incorrect information the professor gave her. She’d told me the lecture wouldn’t be on the exam and apparently hadn’t double-checked.

I suspect Hazra lied to her — told her it wouldn’t be on the exam — to retaliate against me for going to the administration about him.

I didn’t initially suspect this, but then I received a B in the course.

My classmates went on about how this was, by far, the easiest Hopkins course they’d taken. How they all received good grades.

I looked at my grade breakdown. Yes, I’d not done well on the final, but we’d done well on our group project.

Then I saw the reason: I had 6/10 on class participation. That made no sense. I had asked polite, interested questions in every class. I had shared my software engineering experience — unlike most students in the class, I’d actually worked in the Waterfall method, which is now rarely used. Heck, I’d set up a wiki for my student work group, and Hazra had incorporated this into two of his lectures.

No one gets a 6/10 for class participation. It’s ludicrous.

With the class participation score and the way Hazra lied to Axe about the exam, I came to the conclusion that he had, rather cleverly, set me up for retaliation.

And Axe — she should have known better. She eagerly conveyed incorrect information about the exam without double-checking. And even had that information been correct, what right did she have to tell me it was ok for me not to receive the same full and timely access to material as other students? I should have have a transcript to that Agile lecture 48 hours after it ended.