Illinois Prof to Have Case Reviewed

The University of Illinois religion professor who got fired for teaching about Catholicism in his Catholicism class is going to have his case reviewed by a faculty committee that will hopefully be more than a cover-your-butt rubber stamp for the school’s administration. According to the Associated Press:

A faculty group at the University of Illinois’ flagship campus will review the decision to fire an adjunct religion professor for saying he agreed with Catholic doctrine on homosexuality.

Urbana- Champaign campus Chancellor Robert Easter said Monday he hopes to have a decision on the firing of Kenneth Howell from the Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the time fall classes start. The review is to determine whether Howell’s academic freedom was violated.

“We want to be able to reassure ourselves there was no infringement on academic freedom here,” new university President Michael Hogan told members of the Faculty Senate on Monday. “This is a very, very important, not to mention a touchy and sensitive, issue. Did this cross the line somehow?”

I’m not sure how you can say that Howell’s firing didn’t “cross the line,” if Hogan is talking about the line between the university as a bastion of independent thought that welcomes a genuine diversity of views and the university as left-wing indoctrination center. There are clearly people in his administration who think that academic freedom is fine unless you dissent from left-wing orthodoxy. Hopefully, one or more of them will wind up paying a price for operating on that mindset, rather than being allowed to help continue the process of killing freedom of thought and speech in American higher education.

(Via Hot Air.)

Jason Says:

July 14, 2010 at 3:26 pm

I’m not all that offended that the guy was fired. If a university doesn’t like the views of a faculty member, go ahead and fire him. But don’t then turn around and claim (to yourself and to the outside world) that you’re something other than a propaganda machine. What offends me is that radical self-delusion and radical hypocrisy is what’s passing for sophisticated avante-garde thinking on university campuses that are funded with my money. Public universities ought to at least have enough integrity (intellectual and otherwise) to take my money and spit right in my face while doing it, rather than taking my money, spitting on the face of my kid who’s enrolled at their school, and then telling me they’re not what they so obviously are by pointing to charters and mission statements that are just empty words that never hit the street.

Christine Says:

July 14, 2010 at 6:35 pm

Having served 20 years in academia, I would submit that more important factor in this story is the current economic realities of public universities. For the past couple of decades state legislatures, who hold the purse strings, have increasingly demanded that public universities be run like businesses. This corporate model has caused university administration to treat students as customers rather than students. So when you upset a “customer,” the administration is generally inclined to side with the student rather than the professor. The fact that the professor in question is an adjunct without tenure who worked contractually just makes it easier to take actions against him. And the corporate model, as we all know, is most definitely a product of rightist rather than leftist orthodoxy.

The politicization of universities is nothing new. In the 1950s many faculties were purged of professors suspected of left-wing sympathies or views. Now the pendulum has swung in the other direction. The instructor in question was simply unlucky enough to be teaching now rather than during the McCarthy era.

July 14, 2010 at 7:40 pm

We are in the McCarthy era. It never died, it just switched allegiances. Those in academia who don’t condemn the current version with the same vigor in which they condemn the former are no friends of legitimate viewpoint inquiry, true diversity, or intellectual integrity. That’s fine, I can live with that, as depressing as it is. Just own up to it rather than continuing a charade that nobody believes except those who propagate it.

I have a background in academia too, and I know others who are as well. The ‘corporate model’ isn’t owned by any orthodoxy; it is claimed by whatever orthodoxy is in vogue as a convenient and ‘efficient’ means to an end. Universities don’t want outsiders meddling in their affairs; I can understand that. But tough. The outsiders make the public university system possible, and that comes with a measure of accountability that’s only marginally reciprocal to the measure of accountability the taxpayers have assumed to fund university processes and activities that snub their noses at those who are paying the bill.