Leo Casey and the United Federation of Teachers: Using Anorexic as an Insult

In last week’s Gadfly, Fordham’s Mike Petrilli looked at the costs of teacher obesity – by most accounts a preventable epidemic – that the public has to bear. It’s an interesting question and not an easy one. Healthcare costs on the public dime raise difficult questions about individual liberty/freedom, the responsibility of a society to pay for the [potentially expensive] choices of others, etc.

You can read Petrilli’s original piece, watch a short discussion on YouTube’s Fordham Factor, consider eduWonkette’s reaction, or grit your teeth and bear Professor Dorn’s attempt at Onion-like humor.

I understand that as Vice President of Lord-Only-Knows at the UFT, Leo Casey, the Logical Garbage Plate, has to defend all things teacher – particularly when teachers’ dignity is harmed in such an egregious way as to suggest they might be more apt to grab a 3/4oz. bag of Cheetos in lieu of the proverbial apple.

Cue the vitriol and indignation:

Haha, get it?! Weighs in? In a post about obesity? You slay me, Leo, you really do. I hope your union members don’t read your stuff – obesity be damned, they’ll die of laughter!

Personally, I like smear campaigns against bad things. If we hadn’t smeared polio and treated it as the serious, destructive epidemic that it was, we would’ve waited longer for a cure. Teacher obesity is no polio – hence a small smear campaign.

A fairly unscientific criticism of methodology supports Casey’s argument – an assumption about the relative rate of obesity in a population of millions. I can’t load SSPS to run the numbers right now, but I’m willing to bet that a few million is a sample size that deviates little from the national mean of other working adult Americans.

I’m also willing to bet that Casey’s aerobic regimen is less rigorous – and with a lighter impact – than he claims. Plenty of professionals are on their feet all day, like doctors and nurses, and don’t consider their job to be an adequate cardiovascular exercise plan. [And to teachers: stop running around the classroom. It's difficult for students to understand your explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem when you're constantly moving and out of breath.]

But the real story here is Casey’s original post:

You may have noticed the awkward anorexia reference in the first post. For those who haven’t watched the Fordham Factor YouTube clip, Casey was intimating that Fordham’s pair looked unnaturally thin. Check the clip – they don’t. They appear to be normal, healthy guys.

Casey had to have realized at some point – or a complaint came in, or another UFTie said, “What the hell are you doing?” – that referring to these two gentlemen as “two anorexics” was offensive, had nothing to do with the argument, and was incredibly catty.

So, Casey made light of a serious psychiatric disorder, anorexia nervosa – believed to have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder – to take a shot at an education policy tank with which he disagrees.

You stay classy, Leo Casey, and keep making the UFT proud. One can only wait for your future jokes about cancer and HIV.

In the meantime, I’ve got a few suggestions for Casey:

1. Read the basics about anorexia nervosa on the National Alliance of Mental Illness website – then browse a few YouTube videos.
2. Grow up, you petty, partisan hack.
3. The next time you’re a world-class jackass, have the good sense to update your RSS feed when you regret what you’ve written. Feedburner has a quick, easy option for this. [It's also quite handy when you've made a good-faith mistake in a post that you need to correct immediately.]

Don’t forget the header on their website, folks: The United Federation of Teachers: A Union of Professionals.

Tagged as: anorexia, eating disorders, edwize, leo casey, mental illness, teachers union, uft, united federation of teachers