If so, the question I ask is, why did it take that for this to happen? Where have the people inside his discipline been up to now? Where has the academic community of his college been? If you say, “If he hadn’t made those comments about 9/11, he’d probably still have a job,” you are very likely right. But I find the issue of his exercise of freedom of speech having a negative effect on him less worrisome than the issue of why someone as dishonest and unprofessional as this was able to persist and even thrive academically; after all, if he had been honest and professional, he’d still have a job.

On the other hand, if you’re an axe murderer on the run, you shouldn’t be going on Larry King. You draw negative attention to yourself, people look for negative things in your past.

I remember reading a few of Churchill’s essays from the radical left press from fifteen, twenty years ago. Maybe it was in Covert Action Information Bulletin, and/or other places. He seemed to be associated with the people around Chomsky’s followers. He struck me as a little unbelievable back then, and maybe I was right.

On the bright side, he could have claimed to have been a Native American and opened a casino.

The torture memo appears to be Yoo assisting the Bush administration in committing torture by using a bad-faith definition of torture and explaining that the law doesn’t apply to them. It fails the Rule 11 test that courts apply to pleadings; the torture memo does not explain settled law, nor is it a good-faith argument from established law and fact. It was fabricated to give cover to illegal acts, and appears to be unethical conduct on the part of Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Alberto Gonzales.

And Klocek should be rehired, although I think the situation is a little different because it appears he was an adjunct without a Ph.D. But there’s no indication he physically threatened the Palestinians or did anything else that rose above the level of a heated argument.

And Palestinians do appear to be a 20th-century construct - but that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to have a homeland in the West Bank and Gaza. Again, what makes someone a group that deserves to have a nation-state? Nations are born and die out - a Palestinian is as much as an ethnic group as a Jordanian, a Syrian, a Lebanese, or a Zionist, all groups formed in the decline and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the late 19th and early 20th Century.

For instance, practicing anthropology is very difficult. Taking an anthropology class (at least where I got my BA) could be really easy, since most of the teachers didn’t really believe in grades and preferred to allow the students the opportunity to self-motivate.

Just as long as you aren’t the student who picks a fight the first day of class, leaves in a huff and then writes and publishes an expose on the evils of ethnic studies. That’s so been done already.

But given this statement:

Nor do I need to be thoroughly conversant in the latest theory of discourse to know that making shit up doesn’t qualify as rigorous, regardless of what you’re talking about.

Maybe you should just stick to easier subjects.

Who’s the “world” anyway? Your friends? Your crowd? There’s a lot of different opinions on ethnic studies and gender studies out there.

Mandolin, I don’t know whether the perception is correct (because I’m not intimately familiar with the discipline). I do know that the perception exists. If Hugo wants the world to believe that the discipline of gender studies is academically rigorous, then he has to convince the world of it first - not remind us of something we already know. It was a minor point, intended to be made in a linguistically clever way.

And since you were talking about the “public perception” in second person, therefore including yourself, I was wondering whether you had any actual experience in the discipline to base your assertion on. I guess you don’t. So you must have some other kind of experience, then…What is it, pray?

You don’t need experience in a discipline to make assertions about what the world thinks of it. You just need to be in the world. In the world, right here.

Sheesh.

They should be able to say whatever they choose within the law without fear of a threat to their employment. But does that right extend to what they say in class?

A course’s catalog description, combined with an instructor’s syllabus, constitutes–at least this is how it is understood in my department at the college where I teach–a binding contract between teacher and students. (Whether it is legally binding, in the sense that a student could sue over a perceived violation of that contract, I don’t know.) At least one professor in my department has been disciplined for failing to adhere to that contract and his failure absolutely had to do with things that were said in class. I am not going to provide specific details because the information I have is privileged, but suffice it to say that the things he said were arguably legitimate from a broader intellectual/academic point of view. Nonetheless, they were inappropriate because they fell far outside the bounds of what the course description indicated the course would be about, and while, as I said, I will not provide detail, I can say that the problem had a great deal to do with the instructor’s politics and questions that were raised about the scholarship presented as teaching material in the class in question.

Then why the hell did you say “you have to convince us before you can remind us?”

And since you were talking about the “public perception” in second person, therefore including yourself, I was wondering whether you had any actual experience in the discipline to base your assertion on. I guess you don’t. So you must have some other kind of experience, then.

What is it, pray?

And I tell you what, don’t deride my questions as “games,” and I won’t point out your one-liners as mean-spirited, cool?

The public perception of gender and ethnic studies programs is a lot closer to “making shit up” than to “geez, lookit all the numbers”. That perception might be wrong; I don’t know. But it exists, and thus my statement to Hugo.

Or were you just trying to play an argument from authority game?

You’re going to have to convince us before you can remind us.

[You forgot to close the blockquote. No problem, I fixed it. :-) ]

we can argue that the school may have some say in determining what a teacher says as a part of his teaching in class

I specifically addressed that issue. I think it is arguable. I have not heard convincing arguments either way. I suppose it would be contingent under what circumstances the person accepted employment. If I were a teacher or a student I would not want my speech restricted, but if I were a school administrator or possibly a parent of a student, I can see why I would want speech that a teacher says in class as a part of the curriculum to reflect my ideas whether the teacher agreed with them or not.

I agree with Ron and Hugo that the best way to avoid this sort of problem is to expose dishonest scholarship in our own ranks. I’ve often had to say to less than reputable people who hold similar views, “Don’t be on my side.”

We have to do everything we can to remind folks that fields like ethnic and gender studies are academically rigorous disciplines; Churchills do real damage if we let them.