Professor: I Didn't 'Silence' Stuttering Student

Elizabeth Snyder says she did nothing wrong by refusing to call on a stuttering student, calling herself the “victim of a character assassination.” Snyder, a professor at a New Jersey community college, tells the New York Times that she’s “gotten the most hateful, vile, vicious emails” since it ran a front-page story Tuesday in which the stuttering student, Philip Garber Jr., accused her of “discrimination,” saying that she emailed him asking him to write out his questions and comments instead of speaking in class.

“He seemed to want to answer every question,” Snyder explains. “You’d have to take into consideration the amount of time he takes to get an answer out.” But she says the email was only a suggestion, and that she told Garber she’d still call on him once per class. In the article, Garber said he’d held his hand up an entire class and not been called on. Snyder says she didn’t call on anyone that day; she was giving a “detailed presentation.” She assumed Garber, who is in 10th grade, was “unfamiliar with the college lecture format,” adding that she thought it was “frankly a little rude” that he kept his hand up. (More stutter stories.)