Why are we doing these "privilege" callouts? What does this add to the discussion? Should Malan apologize? Should the New Yorker apologize for him? Individuals are regularly used metonymically to represent a larger system. And those systems need a "face", because without it we don't care about the story.
You’re too used to privlage being used as a pejorative I think. It’s highly relevant that if a school admin wanted to use Malan’s work as an example to base some classes off of, that they can’t just throw a teacher at their normal course load and expect anything close to that level of work. I know many teachers in the public school system who’s admins don’t seem to realize how difficult a good online syllabus is to put together, and those administrators could do to be reminded that you need to put a lot of resources behind someone if you want quality work from them.
It’s not a bad thing that Malan has the privilege to be in a position where he can successfully focus on perfecting a single class. In fact it’s fantastic for us all that he’s doing this work. It’s just important to acknowledge the privileges he has so we don’t look at normal teachers and say “if you only tried a bit harder, couldn’t you do something like this?” It’s not just about effort and intelligence, it’s also about the resources that are put behind the educator.
