The Jurisdictions Here are Backwards... Aren't They?

Both of these stories have been around a while, but I didn’t get a chance to post on them when they first appeared, and it seems to me that they fit together in a way that hasn’t yet been discussed by anyone whose commentary I’ve read.

First up is a story out of Houston. Diane Tran is an honors student at Willis High School. She works a full-time job and a part-time job, and goes to school full-time, taking advanced placement and dual-credit courses as a high school junior. She uses the money she earns to support two siblings; her parents divorced and both left town. Not surprisingly, even the most focused and responsible adolescent will sometimes buckle under that kind of pressure. Ms. Tran sometimes overslept, and missed school because of it.

Her case ended up in the Justice of the Peace court of Lanny Moriarty, who (of course) sentenced her to 24 hours in jail and a $100 fine for truancy. Yes, really. Moriarty, of course, is a moron, as only a Texas Republican can be. He sputtered “If you let one [truant student] run loose, what are you gonna do with the rest of ‘em? Let them go too?” Well, no, sir, you’re supposed to exercise a little judicial discretion: that’s why you have your cushy job, because you are alleged to have more critical thinking skills than a banana peel. Sorry to have over-estimated you. Because if you want to use someone like Ms. Tran as the vehicle by which to “send a lesson,” the only lesson in question is that you are a heartless douchebag who shouldn’t ever be allowed into a courtroom except as a defendant (again).

It didn’t take long for an on-line petition on Ms. Tran’s behalf to get started, initially with a goal of 5,000 signatures. That number was shattered within an hour or so. The petition closed with over 277,000 virtual signatures, when Moriarty, his profound unfitness for office now trumpeted around the world (the Internet is sometimes a wonderful thing), decided to cut his losses, reverse himself, and vacate the charges. Oh, did I mention the $100,000+ in donations to Ms. Tran?

Somehow I suspect that Mr. Moriarty might not run unopposed next time, as he did last. He’s not important enough to be this embarrassing.

The other case is from Indiana, where three 8th-grade girls were suspended for the remainder of the school year for joking (obviously) on Facebook about which of their classmates they’d like to kill. As Gavin Rose, an ACLU lawyer, points out:

The fact of the matter is that no reasonable person looking at this conversation would think that these girls were going to go out and inflict harm on anyone. If you make a legitimate threat against someone ... you don't follow it up with an emoticon.

Moreover, the “threats” were not directed at the presumed “victims,” as they were visible only to the Facebook friends of the girls. Of course, some officious mother called attention to the posts, and the Facebook conversation, conducted outside school hours, on personal rather than school computers, was seen by idiot administrators (apologies, as ever, for redundancy) as somehow disruptive to schoolwork—it would have to be, as even the megalomaniacs as Griffith Middle School don’t claim jurisdiction otherwise.

I am reminded of one of the first essays I wrote in this iteration of my blogging life, about Gloria Gadsden, who was suspended by her employer, East Stroudsburg State University, for posting the following two Facebook status updates: “Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ...” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic] hitman, it's been that kind of day.” No rational person would think there was any real threat to anyone involved here, but educational administrators at any level don’t necessarily meet that “rational person” threshold.

And so we have the ACLU filing a lawsuit to protect what they describe, quite accurately, as “teenage banter.” The salient part of the ACLU suit follows:

At no point in this conversation were the girls expressing any actual intentions to inflict harm on any person, nor were they threatening or attempting to intimidate any person. Rather, they were simply engaging in a casual conversation and joking with one another. A reasonable person would interpret the entirety of the conversation as made in jest, and would not interpret any portion of the conversation—or the conversation as a whole—as threatening or as a true threat.

The conversation did not cause an actual disruption at school, nor was it likely to or foreseeable that it would substantially disrupt the school or the educational environment. All three (3) girls attended school for the entire day after this conversation took place, and nothing out of the ordinary occurred. To their knowledge, the conversation was not even mentioned at school by any person, and it certainly was not mentioned by them.

But that, of course, didn’t stop the Amalgamated Hand-Wringers from punishing a trio of 8th-graders for the crime of acting like teenagers while on their own time.

As I wrote in April of 2010 about the Gadsden case,

I have an inkling that about midnight at some tech rehearsal somewhere along the line, I’ve probably told my stage manager not that I’d like to kill some actor or designer or props person, but that I was going to do so. I never followed through, though, curiously enough. I don’t recall ever posting on Facebook that I’d like to kill a student, a colleague, or a boss, but I might have… if I did I, like Prof. Gadsden, would have been careful to ensure that anyone with an IQ over room temperature would know I was joking. And I’m certain that I’ve volunteered to be the “discreet hitman” (I’d have spelled it correctly) for a friend. I was, however, never actually engaged to perform such duties. One of my favorite people, a former student, now a teacher, posted a Facebook status not long ago that suggested her desire to “beat someone to a pulp.” I even endorsed that sentiment because… wait for it… I’m not a moron, and I know—not just think, know—that she didn’t plan, literally, to commit assault.

We saw the same phenomenon play out in the case of Widener law professor Lawrence Connell, whose obviously hypothetical scenario about killing his dean got him in deep doo-doo. Inability to recognize humor, even humor we don’t think is terribly funny, is a crippling malady in an irony-rich society such as ours. It is sad that so many people in the education hierarchy seem to suffer from this affliction.

But there’s something else that ties these two cases together—apart, that is, from the rampant stupidity of the people with decision-making power. What I find fascinating is how the logical jurisdictions of the school system and the courts seem to have reversed. Once again, Gentle Reader, I remind you that I am not a lawyer, and that I’m arguing what should happen, not what current laws dictate. This is, in short, another When They Make Me Tsar© musing.

OK, so I wonder if I’m alone in this. When I first read about Diane Tran’s story, my first thought wasn’t that Lanny Moriarty is a cretinous yahoo, although that idea did occur pretty quickly. My first response, however, was to wonder what the hell Ms. Tran was doing in a courtroom at all. I suppose I had some dim recollection of students being charged with some sort of legal transgression for truancy and/or chronic tardiness, but it makes no sense. And, as an intriguing if perhaps over-wrought article by Sarah Seltzer on AlterNet suggests, the incarceration of teenagers for the most minor of transgressions ultimately independent of even minor-scale criminality poses a series of rather disturbing questions about American culture in general. In other words, even if we leave out the whole backstory to Ms. Tran’s case—say she’s just an ordinary kid with an ordinary family, getting ordinary grades—one is still tempted to wonder what the hell she’s doing in court.

Truancy is, in a reasonable universe, its own punishment. And if Ms. Tran can successfully complete her coursework without necessarily being in class every day, it’s really not a matter for the courts. True, some courses have legitimate attendance requirements, and the school should have the right to deny advancement to students who fail to comply with those rules. But I’m hard-pressed to understand a rationale for transferring the decision-making power out of the hands of the schools themselves.

Conversely, what happens outside school hours and outside school property is none of the school’s concern, yet there are myriad instances of absurd intrusions into students’ private lives: the Indiana case discussed here, the Illinois case of a principal’s prowling through a student’s Facebook account, the Kansas case of a school district going apoplectic because of a student’s Twitter feed… you get the picture.

If, for example, in the Indiana case, there really was a suspicion that this trio of (barely) adolescent girls was plotting some sort of violence, then the authorities—the criminal justice system, in other words—needed to be called in. But either that didn’t happen, or the cops took one look at the alleged “evidence,” laughed in the sniveling administrators’ faces, and told them to call back if and when there was anything a sane person would deem problematic. In my dream scenario, they also prescribed a couple of bowls of All-Bran.

When They Make Me Tsar©, in other words, school decisions will be made by schools, and non-school activities will be regulated only by legitimate law-enforcement authorities, and only to the extent that there is probable cause that a real crime has been committed or is about to be committed.

I know, I know. I’m a cockeyed optimist. But I’d rather be from South Pacific than Les Mis on this one.

It's OK to Kill Santa Claus, But Not Your Dean

A recent blurb on the Chronicle of Higher Education website links to this article about an associate professor at the Widener School of Law, a 26-year veteran teacher named Lawrence Connell, who is fighting to keep his job after he used a hypothetical story about killing his dean as a means of illustrating a point and attempting to provide a little mnemonic assistance to his students.

Wade Malcolm reports that “at least two students filed complaints with administrators, calling it violent, racist and sexist, according to Connell's attorney, Thomas Neuberger.” The dean in question, you see, is black and female. And… cue the Rorschach Test.

The story really couldn’t be more predictable. On the one side, we have a hand-wringing bureaucracy concerned about the tender sensibilities of law students. It’s not that the dean is hyper-sensitive, you see, it’s that this is an “‘ongoing pattern’ of misconduct” such as “cursing and coarse behavior,” “racist and sexist statements,” and “violent, personal scenarios that demean and threaten [his] colleagues.”

On the other side, Mr. Connell’s academic freedom is being threatened, he wouldn’t be being harassed by the administration if he weren’t a conservative, and besides, some of his best friends… Cripes, I can’t even finish the sentence, it’s so trite.

The truth? Well, I know what I believe, but I also note for the record that my belief is set firmly in Jello: it is perfectly possible that I’m backing the wrong horse in this race. It may well be, in other words, that Mr. Connell really is crossing a line. Or that the administration’s concerns are politically motivated. Or that he’s quite consciously pushing the envelope and they’re over-reacting.

What do know is this: short of actual threats against colleagues, and by this I mean statements that a reasonable observer could not construe otherwise, there are no grounds here to revoke Mr. Connell’s tenure. (I assume he’s tenured, given his rank and his length of service, although the article doesn’t explicitly say so.) The whole idea of academic freedom, and indeed of the tenure system, is to protect faculty from the political or personal agendas of those up the food chain from them. It means nothing if “controversial” is allowed to be conflated with “bad.” I’m not arguing here that sexist or racist comments aren’t problematic, but this is a freaking law school, and I confess I have difficulty mustering a considerable amount of sympathy for the fragile little flowers who can’t endure a bit of a challenge to their world-view.

More to the point, the kinds of examples noted in the article—assuming, of course, that these scenaria really are the crux of the contretemps—sound more than a little familiar to me. I don’t recall ever using my dean in such a hypothetical situation, but I very well might have. I know that in discussing Aristotle I’ve hypothesized that George W. Bush got hit by a bus (tragedy requires the protagonist be important). But, curiously enough, I never got visited by the Secret Service for that flight of fancy, because it was clear that I was making a very different point than threatening the President. And, of course, the victim of that purely theoretical bus accident is now Barack Obama.

Actually, of course, my style is more to use students in the room for my musings: this one is the playwright; that one, the producer; the one over there, the angel. On the very day I read about the Widener case, I was talking of Bertolt Brecht’s “Street Scene,” and created a story in which a driver ran over a pedestrian because he was distracted by trying to get his Egg McMuffin out of the bag. The driver and pedestrian were both students in the class—and, get this—the driver was an African-American man and the victim was a petite white woman. No rational observer, certainly not one who had seen previous classes with different students as characters in these hypothetical examples, would come to the conclusion that there was any message in my “casting” decision—it was simply these students’ turn, as it were. But someone with an agenda might see it differently.

This happens all the time, by the way. There was the student who complained to my superiors that she received the only failing grade on a speech because she was black. It clearly had nothing to do with the fact that her 6-minute-maximum speech rambled on largely incoherently for 17 minutes. There was the student who quoted me to my dean as saying “women simply aren’t very important,” oh-so-casually omitting that the context of that statement made it clear I was discussing the socio-political mores of Ancient Greece. (Did I mention that she didn’t get the role she wanted at auditions the previous week?) There are other examples, just from my own experience, but you get the idea. To be a teacher at any level is ultimately to face situations like this.

As for cursing and coarse behavior—I doubt that I often go a full week without doing something along these lines that someone might not like. It is a strategy I employ to make a point, to loosen up the classroom environment, to try to make an idea more memorable. It works for me, and, if student and administrative evaluations are to be believed, it seems to have its desired effect. I’ve taught a couple thousand students in my current position, and I recall no complaints. On the other hand, in a previous job at a not dissimilar university, I got a half-dozen negative comments in the first semester. So I changed my approach, because the tactics I had been employing were actually counter-productive in that place and time for enough students that a change of direction seemed warranted. So I adapted for the short term and reverted to my old vulgar self as soon as I left that school.

That said, while I don’t claim to know what’s really going on in Mr. Connell’s case, I’m virtually certain it has, well, not a f*cking thing to do with being a little crude. That’s a throw-in complaint, something that is at least objective: he used a certain word derived from the Anglo-Saxon or he didn’t.

But back to my earlier point: this is the kind of case where what we think is largely a reflection of who we are, rather than of the facts of the case. A glance at the comments on the article confirms this. Here’s thelawone:

Mr. Connell is no saint, he once referred to students in such a disparaging way during an in-school debate that he was barred by an earlier dean of the law school from ever participating in a debate again. His rhetoric is not provoke thought as any good professor should, it incites anger and promotes fear which no professor should. As a Widener student, his leaving, if it comes to that, is a win for Widener students ... not a loss.

By contrast, here are the comments of AmazedinDE:

How much does one wish to bet that the two complaining students are African-American? If they can't deal with hypothetical situations offered by their professor to make a point of law understandable, if not memorable, then they should quit law school and get a job at McDonald's where they won't have to think about anything but Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets.

Probably the most valuable insight is offered by ClassicFriend:

I am a Widener Law Alumni and I had professor Connell for Criminal Law and everything they said about his teaching methods are true. He killed people, he made them sell drugs, and yes he cussed. But, last I looked we are adults and can handle a cuss word. I remember he always used to go back to killing Dean Ammons as a default and quite honestly could you think of a better person that everyone in the class room is guaranteed to know? He also killed celebrities, politicians, he even killed Santa Claus. He was an equal opportunist hypothetical murderer….

I sincerely hope Widener and Dean Ammons do what they told me to do on graduation day. Show courage and do the right thing in the face of pressure. Professor Connell is a good, effective and unique professor. The students need to lighten up, I experienced what they experienced and I can tell you, they are over reacting.

My first thought is that this case sure is populated by lawyers who don’t understand grammar or punctuation. My second thought is that Mr. Connell is, quite possibly, an ass. And he is, even more probably, good at his job. Is he being persecuted because he’s a conservative? Possibly, but I doubt it. More likely he’s just a pain in some administrator’s butt. I’m not betting the mortgage payment, but I’ve got 20 bucks that says the dean (or someone) is a little thin-skinned and wants to get rid of an annoyance: not the smartest thing to do, given the fact that he’s a law professor and all…