Christian college constituents often have the impression that their institutions are the only ones that have blowups over who gets to speak on campus.
Not so.
Today's Boston Globe (Motto: "We are to the New York Times what the Red Sox would be to the Yankees if the Yankees owned the Red Sox") carries an op ed by a Boston College English professor declaring to his institution's president that he is resigning over the invitation to Condoleezza Rice to speak at the BC commencement.
Really! We are not making this up. An English professor refuses to listen to the Secretary of State and former Provost of Stanford University deliver a commencement address.
His reason? Condi is, in his unerring judgment, an unscrupulous liar. This apparently is more important than any notion of free inquiry or academic freedom. And apparently this professor views his students, even as they graduate, as so many credulous sheep ready to believe and follow whatever they heard most recently.
Not all extremist kooks are writing angry letters to Christian college presidents. Some are secular. And maybe kookier.
4 comments:
Let's hope he does resign. My suspicion, however, is that he's the one who's lying. When it all blows over, he'll still be in his office--with his door shut--clinging to tenure and congratulating himself for his courageous stand against social injustice.
P.S. I was under the impression that BC is a Christian college (and, as such, one of the prime examples of what's wrong with Christian higher education these days).
It occurs to us that the prof in question had already lined up another gig for next year and decided to garner a bit of publicity with the "I quit" routine.
BC is a Jesuit institution, one of many that remind me that I would not want to trade my Campbellite headaches for their Catholic headaches.
I should have read his resignation letter before I speculated about his situation. Had I done so, I wouldn't have called his integrity into question, which was unfair on my part.
Now that I have read it, I realize that "clinging to tenure" isn't (and wasn't) an option for him. Being an adjunct professor, he's not eligible for tenure. In fact, adjuncts have no security at all. They are hired on a semester by semester basis, and can be cut loose at (almost) any time, for any (or no) reason at all.
According to his own account, he's been teaching in this capacity at BC for five years. That's a long time to spend at an institution that's unwilling (or unable, as they usually claim) to reciprocate (for whatever reason) with anything more than a token commitment of its own. Such an unbalanced relationship between management and labor is bound to lead to a considerable amount of frustration.
I was once (in the late 1990’s) in a similar situation at a Jesuit University that decided to pay Cokie Roberts $15,000 for a half-hour commencement speech--three times what I made for the whole semester as a half-time instructor. My complaint at the time--like the BC professor's--wasn't with the speaker's political views (though I certainly disagreed with them) but with an apparent inconsistency between the university's stated mission and its actual practices. Had I been in a situation where I could have gone elsewhere, I too might have written a letter of resignation.
Oh, he's an adjunct! I missed that little detail. So an op-ed in the Globe and a dramatic resignation is just what he needs to get a tenure-track offer at a place like, say, New School. Clever career move!
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