BCC leaders throw out teacher's suspension

Bellevue Community College leaders have thrown out a one-week unpaid suspension for an instructor who wrote a racially insensitive math question that sparked a national controversy last spring.

School President Jean Floten decided Peter Ratener had made efforts to reach out to students about diversity issues and had 26 years of otherwise good performance.

"Jean has become convinced this was really more an act of carelessness" than anything purposeful, school spokesman Bob Adams said.

A few years ago, Ratener wrote a question that presented a scenario about a person named "Condoleezza" throwing a watermelon off a roof.

School officials said this demeaned U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and employed a racist caricature of blacks eating watermelons that dates to the 1800s.

A student complained last spring, and by April the issue had become a national story. Some in the black community said Ratener should be fired.

In May, an administrator at the college recommended Ratener's suspension, and he and the faculty union appealed. The school and Ratener went into mediation last summer and then had informal talks early this year.

Floten decided to drop the suspension Feb. 14. A letter of reprimand will remain in Ratener's file.

James Kelly, president of the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, was critical of Ratener last year and said Thursday he was encouraged the school didn't sweep the incident under the rug.

It's good that Ratener received some sort of punishment, he said, but more importantly, BCC has used the incident to ramp up its efforts to improve pluralism on campus. The school's Diversity Caucus, made up of students, faculty and staff members, appears to have more power to effect change, including the hiring of more minority faculty, he said.

"There's a great opportunity here to really have some lessons learned and really have a teaching moment," Kelly said.

Ratener, 61, has said the math question originally referred to the comedian Gallagher, who smashed watermelons as part of his act, and that he changed it to Condoleezza because it was a more recognizable name to students.

The suspension being dropped is "confirmation of what I said all along," he said Thursday, "... that this was merely the result of an oversight."

Ashley Bach: 206-464-2567 or abach@seattletimes.com