James Franco’s “D” Grade Spurs NYU Racial Discrimination Lawsuit

The school has bent over backwards to create a Franco-friendly environment, that’s for sure. The university has done everything in its power to curry favor with James Franco.

Scandal is brewing in the New York University Graduate Film Department, prompted when NYU graduate film professor Jose Angel Santana was fired presumably after giving James Franco a “D” grade in his “Directing the Actor II” class.

The grade seems to be warranted as Franco missed 12 out of 14 classes, an accomplishment that would grant most students an incomplete, a “no show”, or an F. Santana also states that Franco was given passing grades despite failing to attend any of the classes that are required and mandatory for all 3rd year students. So assuming that actually attending film school is necessary to receive a film degree, many would call Santana’s grade generous.

But this is James Franco.

As an undergraduate at UCLA, he was allowed to take as many as 62 credits in a single term, roughly equivalent to 20 classes! He’s been simultaneously enrolled in four graduate programs across the country, MFAs at NYU and Columbia, fiction writing at Brooklyn College, and poetry at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina, and now he’s enrolled in the Yale PhD program in English and reportedly a host of other schools such as University of Houston’s creative writing PhD program and the Rhode Island School of Design. All while maintaining a steady acting career – Spider-Man 3, Knocked Up, In the Valley of Elah, Pineapple Express, Nights in the Rodanthe, Date Night, Milk, Eat Pray Love, 127 Hours – in 2007-2010 alone.

We get it. Schools love to schmooze with the rich and famous. But rather than giving Franco an honorary degree – which is meant to extend and curry favor – handing out a real degree to a student who doesn’t attend classes degrades the value of the program and really does a disservice to all the actors/celebs out there who actually earn their degrees.

Of course, classic rules don’t apply to students with Oscar nominations or parents who are generous donors. A celebrity like Franco can bring publicity to schools and help promote their students’ and professors’ projects. Franco hired NYU professor and Head of Acting Jay Anania to direct a film in which Franco stars. Another film financed by Franco was written and directed by Anania and included a cameo appearance by Graduate Film Department Chairman John Tintori.

Clearly Franco is riding high on his privilege but as in any case of advantage, there is disadvantage. Professor Jose Angel Santana is the real victim of this controversy.

Santana was not just any professor. He was a rare exception in a racially and ethnically homogeneous group of professors in the NYU Graduate Film Department. According to the lawsuit, throughout his employment tenure Dr. Santana was the only full-time professor of color in the Department, which has been historically devoid of representation from the Hispanic and African communities.

Dr. Santana alleges that he was the only Hispanic full-time Arts Professor during his tenure and the only full-time teaching Arts Professor of African ancestry in the history of the NYU Graduate Film School Department.

Santana also reports being marginalized in the program. Unlike other full-time professors, he was placed in an equipment supplies closet with a leaky ceiling for his ‘office’. He later shared this makeshift office with an instructor of lower rank. He also states that he received significantly less pay than other white professors of equal rank.

In spite of these substandard conditions, he continued to teach at NYU and was given especially harsh treatment – told not to attend faculty meetings, had emails ignored, and was not given a mandatory faculty evaluation – after he refused to give Franco a higher grade.

It’s fortunate that Santana filed a lawsuit (click on the pdf logo to read it). Otherwise, this incident would have been swept under a rug and NYU would still be on its pedestal as the Mecca of film excellence.

Maybe it still is.

But I’m curious to know what all the die-hard NYU fans in the black community make of this controversy.