Cornell student strips during thesis presentation to protest professor
A Cornell University senior stripped to her bra and underwear during her thesis presentation — and got two dozen others to join in — to protest her professor’s contention the week before that her clothing was inappropriate.
Letitia Chai led the revealing demonstration Saturday during her “Acting in Public: Performance in Everyday Life” class to stand up “against oppressive beliefs,”
she said in a Facebook Live video of the event.
It came days after her professor, Rebekah Maggor, questioned whether the denim cutoff shorts Chai was wearing during a test run of the presentation were too short.
“The first thing that the professor said to me was ‘is that really what you would wear?” Chai wrote in a Facebook post about the incident. “The professor proceeded to tell me, in front of my whole class, that I was inviting the male gaze away from the content of my presentation and onto my body,” she wrote.