A woke Stanford professor threatened to call the police on a Berkeley professor who exposed her $5,000 per hour consulting fee, according to a report by the Stanford Review, the student-run newspaper that serves Stanford University. The Berkeley prof fired back, saying: “Public advisory: don’t call the cops on black people for no reason. Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime.”
Berkeley professor Jelani Nelson says that Stanford Graduate School of Education professor Jo Boaler threatened to call the police on him after he criticized her $5,000 per hour consulting fee charged to public school districts and questioned if she was really working to help minority students.
“A @Stanford professor just threatened me with police,” Nelson tweeted. “After BBQ Becky, Permit Patty, Golfcart Gail, and all the memes, we now have Retweet Rachel.”
“Public advisory: don’t call the cops on black people for no reason,” the professor added. “Black people disagreeing with you on Twitter is not a crime.”
In his tweet, Nelson also included purported screenshots of emails he had received from Boaler, in which she suggests she had contacted the police over his online criticism of her.
“As a courtesy to a fellow faculty member I wanted to let you know that the sharing of private details about me on social media yesterday is now being taken up by police and lawyers,” Boaler wrote in her email to Nelson.
“I was shocked to see that you are taking part in spreading misinformation and harassing me online,” she added.
In her purported email, Boaler also shared a screenshot of a tweet by Nelson that she found problematic, in which he wrote the following:
The proposed CA Math Framework states improving math learning for black students as central motivation and has 0 black authors. Instead, one author has alarmingly lucrative consulting deals with school districts with large minority populations, charging $5,000/hr.
“Please take down this social media post and consider acting in more collegial and productive ways to help students get a better future in mathematics in California,” Boaler added in her email to Nelson.
Twitter has since removed other posts by Nelson that Boaler claimed share “private details” about her, reports the Stanford Review, which also notes that the removed content consists of public records taken directly from the Oxnard School District’s website.
Those records expose that Boaler charged tens of thousands of dollars to public schools in California, the report adds.
“It is horrifying that the CMF claiming to uplift black children was co-authored by a person who finds police intimidation against blacks acceptable,” Nelson tweeted, firing back at Boaler.
“I encourage concerned alumni and members of the Stanford community to express your concern to the university administration,” he added.
According to the Stanford Review, the original contract Boaler signed with the Oxnard School District in November 2020 agreed to provide eight hours of consultation across four sessions at a rate of $5,000 per session ($20,000 total).
But “$5,000 per session wasn’t nearly enough for Boaler,” the report added, stating that the professor “had meant to charge $5,000 per hour, i.e. $10,000 per session, for a total bill of $40,000,” ad that the Oxnard School District agreed to that change in August 2021.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.