And the Winner Is...

The votes are in, and we have a winner: the no-doubt proud recipient of the prestigious 2011 Curmie Award for Most Embarrassing the Profession of Education is…. (drumroll)… the unnamed teacher at Mercer County (KY) Intermediate School who decided that shoving a 9-year-old autistic boy into a bag intended to store gym balls was an appropriate punishment. Note: it now appears that it was the teacher’s aide, not the teacher per se who put young Chris Baker into the bag. Still, it’s difficult to exempt the teacher from equal if not greater culpability.

All told, some 32 votes were counted. Voters could choose as many candidates as they wanted. I sort of tracked the voting, so I know there was at least one ballot that included votes for six of the eight nominees, and there was at least one “bullet.” The eventual winner was included on exactly half the ballots; all eight nominees received at least two votes.

Thinking about the nominees after announcing them, I came to the realization that the eventual winner was sort of in a category of its own: the only nominee to be a teacher as opposed to some sort of administrator, the only one to deal with the potential for physical harm to a student, the only one in which the victim was a single child as opposed to a group, an adult or an adolescent. It was also the most recent case. One or more of these facts may have contributed to the margin of victory, even if no more than that. In any case, I appreciate and thank all those who voted. I thought this was kind of fun; I hope you enjoyed it, too.

Second-place finisher, and therefore de facto winner of the unofficial Curmie: Higher Education Division award, is David W. Rasmussen, the Dean of the College of Social Sciences at Florida State University, who tried to justify his decision to allow representatives of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation to have veto power over faculty hires in exchange for a substantial grant. His argument that “it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it” proves he is utterly devoid of the ethical sensibility we ought to require of our educational leaders in particular. Our readers agreed, and he attracted nine votes.

Tied for third, with seven votes apiece, were—to steal the phrase from our friends at Popehat—censorious asshats. More to the point, they’re just dumber than dirt: Thomas Fleming of Pennsylvania’s Richland School District decided to shut down a high school production of Kismet because the central characters are Muslims (yes, really).

Lisa Walter of the University of Wisconsin-Stout took down a transcendently innocuous poster of the TV series “Firefly” from a faculty member’s office door, then somehow managed to convince Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen to endorse her arrogant and stupid actions in the face of all reason.

Also in the “dumber than dirt” and “censorious asshat” categories was 6th-place finisher Dwight Probasco of Wasilla High School in Alaska, who refused to let his school’s choir sing “Bohemian Rhapsody” at graduation because it was written by a gay man.

In fifth and seventh places are administrators too biased, cowardly, lazy, or otherwise inept to stay out of the way of faculty who are just doing their jobs. The top brass at the University of Missouri hung two of their faculty out to dry after Andrew Breitbart, perhaps the single least credible person in the country, doctored and distributed a tape he shouldn’t have had access to in the first place.

And Dean Linda Ammons of Widener Law School went after the job of a veteran professor on the pretense that he had constructed a hypothetical scenario of killing his dean… and, because she’s black and female, that makes him racist and sexist, too. Well, she either has the mental capacity of a Cuisinart (without the functionality) or she has an agenda—political or personal. Note: while I continued to track this case, I didn’t write about it further after my initial piece. My blog piece drew some tentative conclusions: it turns out that I was right, but perhaps my reluctance to excoriate Ammons in February the way I would have later in the year accounts for a finish lower than I would have predicted.

Rounding out the group is Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, a Trustee of New York University, who, along with his gutless and compliant fellows, initially withheld an honorary degree from Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, because he didn’t support Israel enough. The over-reach and the irrelevance of the rationale netted him a couple of votes, but he wasn’t going to do any real harm to a public figure of Kushner’s status; this may have influenced some readers to vote elsewhere.

So… back to our winner. I confess that this wouldn’t have been my choice for the Curmie, but I said I’d go along with what the readers decided, and I meant it. My initial reluctance was founded on two things: 1). the fact that the story was recent enough that there’s still a possibility of some revelation that would affect our understanding of the story, and 2). the seemingly unpremeditated nature of the act (indeed, it was only the fact that this had occurred before that made me nominate this teacher at all). To some extent, this fiasco could be the result of inadequate training, a spontaneous reaction.

Except… well, no, it couldn’t. It does not require special training to understand that thus confining a young boy—any small child, stricken with autism or not—in this manner is criminal at least in the ethical sense if not the legal one. As reader Kirsten wrote in a comment, “The other stories are appalling on an intellectual level. But the last one is just plain inhumane and could easily have caused physical & mental harm to a child who already has other issues to deal with.” Yes. What she said.

As we look ahead to the rest of 2012, I’m thinking of dividing the Curmie for this year into taxonomies: administrators and teachers in separate categories, universities and primary/secondary schools, likewise. Or not. We’ll see what the year brings. Maybe there won’t be any worthy candidates. Uh huh. That’s likely to happen. The name of the blog is “Sweetness and Light and Everything Right,” after all…

“Firefly” and “Fosh”: Around Every Silver Lining, There's a Dark Cloud

You may recall that I wrote in September about theatre prof James Miller at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, who was threatened with a charge of disorderly conduct by university police chief Lisa Walter because he had a “Firefly” poster on his office door. No one with the intellect of a rather dim-witted chipmunk would think that the poster was a threat to anyone (in fact, it is precisely the opposite of a threat), but Chief Walter apparently doesn’t clear that heady threshold. What’s worse, even as the situation escalated, the administration—Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen and his stooges provost, vice-chancellor, and general counsel—backed the stupid and hubristic Walter over the stubborn but justified Miller.

Eventually, of course, they backed down to a tumult of public pressure and, frankly, well-deserved humiliation. Of course, there was no real apology, and the Idiot Sorensen continued to babble nonsensically about how the censorship he had tried to impose wasn’t really censorship, but rather sensitivity. Here was my response to that argument:

True, technically this was not an act of censorship. That would imply that the state qua state was prohibiting free expression. No, you gaggle of dimwits are acting not as the state but as employer, thereby possibly rendering your inanity legal, although still ethically unsupportable and professionally incompetent. And puh-leeze, spare me your sanctimony, your sensitivity, and your caring. Give me instead, please, an institution that values reason, personal liberties, and the free exchange of ideas… because this ain’t it, and an out-of-the-closet intellectual such as myself does not feel the slightest bit “welcome, safe, [or] secure” in this “shared community.” Indeed, you three, the chief of police, and the general counsel all terrify me.

I was rightly challenged by reader James, who pointed out that the threats to Prof. Miller were legal (criminal charges) rather than job-related (loss of job, pay cut, new assignment, etc.). So it really was censorship.

The snarkier of my readers might appreciate a new tidbit of information I only recently discovered. The whole force of the Walter/Sorensen argument relies on the notion that “it is unacceptable to have postings that refer to killing,” which, they assert, inherently involve a threat. Except that, as Ed Morrissey at Hot Air points out, “during the debate over the Scott Walker bill that limited collective bargaining for most public employee unions to wages only, this poster was seen on campus without any attempt to consider it a specific threat.”

Oops.

Anyway, two separate posts I encountered in the last couple of days have reminded me of the case. The first was Popehat’s Censorious Asshat of the Year contest, for which Chancellor Sorensen is a nominee:

...for defending the censorship of obviously satirical and non-threatening posters on a college campus and disrespecting Firefly. In Aggravation: even when he caved, could not resist justifying his clearly unlawful actions. In Mitigation: did eventually, belatedly, do the right thing. Also, Chancellor job market is awful right now, so unable to get other work.

The second prompt was a Facebook post by a friend of a video about the case created by FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). In the video, FIRE president Greg Lukianoff says that the case had a special appeal to him because he is “a huge fan of “Firefly.” In the intro, popular author Neil Gaiman warns (tongue in cheek, but not altogether inaccurately) that among “the people you do not want to upset,” that “out on the edges, beyond any of those [revolutionaries] are science fiction and fantasy fans whose favorite show has been cancelled in an untimely way.” Indeed, Lukianoff adds that after Chancellor Sorensen’s defense of the indefensible policy, “I knew that they were utterly underestimating the power of the friends of ‘Firefly’.” Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin got on board, but “when Neil Gaiman tweeted about this case to his 1.6 million Twitter followers, it was a game-changer.” It turns out that Gaiman actually knows Prof. Miller, but his tweet preceded that realization.

Gaiman makes the salient point: “what’s disappointing is that the university administration backed their police officer rather than quietly taking her aside and pointing out that she had done something that was stupid, wrong, and that would embarrass all of them.”

Finally, the university backed down, but without giving any assurance that a similar case won’t arise next year… or next week. Sorensen is either too stupid to realize the enormity of his blunder or too arrogant to admit it. Neither is a good sign for the future of UW-S.

Unfortunately, the most significant point is made by Lukianoff at the end of the video:

Something that really strikes me about this case is that one of the reasons we why won it is because the case has a built-in constituency of fans of the show “Firefly.” But what’s heartbreaking about this is that we deal with hundreds and hundreds of cases like this that don’t have a constituency. And you’d think and you’d hope that there was a constituency out there just for free speech.

This is sobering because it is true: petty morons like Walter and Sorensen can endure a little criticism; they just can’t stand up to the onslaught of celebrity. A few letters of protest: no problem. Nationwide humiliation in front of literally millions of people: that’s different.

I was thinking about this phenomenon in relation to a hot story in my own hometown (links here, here, and here). Farshid Nourimand has been soccer coach at Nacogdoches (TX) High School for three decades. He built the program from scratch, and it has been a consistent winner when bigger-name sports, to be polite, have been less successful. His former players include Clint Dempsey, now of Fulham in the English Premier League, quite possibly the best American-born soccer player now active, arguably the best ever. More importantly, Nourimand is, according to literally everyone I’ve talked to, the quintessence of “tough but fair.” He is loved in this community with a depth of sincerity and real admiration that coaches who merely win will never achieve.

One of his rules was that if you are arrested or caught with alcohol or drugs, you’re off the team for a year. Along comes a new superintendent, Fred Hayes, who thinks that’s too unforgiving a policy, and there’s a crisis… especially when three kids show up drunk at the Homecoming dance, at least one of whom had been at a party at the home of School Board President Matt Rocco. But there was no alcohol there. Nope. I believe him. My eyebrows are like that naturally.

Importantly, Nourimand’s policy had to do with athletes and athletics. He wasn’t proposing throwing kids out of school, merely saying you can’t be on my team if you don’t obey the rules. Needless to say, Board President Rocco radically misinterpreted that stance (intentionally, because he knew he’d been busted and was desperate? or unintentionally, because he has the IQ of a corn dog?): “Throwing them in DAP [NISD correctional facility] where they do nothing is not placing kids in a chance where they can win. The new policy allows students to return to school after a suspension, be monitored for drug use and undergo a rehabilitation program.”

This is, of course, classic misdirection. No one is saying the students can’t return to school after a short suspension. They just can’t play for “Coach Fosh.”  We have a similar policy in the theatre program in which I work. True, most programs require only that students merely not be on probation to be eligible for productions work. But our standards are unquestionably, unabashedly, higher. We understand that stuff happens, so there’s an appeal process, but the bottom line is that if you don’t have a really good reason why you aren’t making progress towards your degree, you’re going to sit out a semester to get your priorities straight.

Do I agree that athletes should have to sit out a full year for an arrest or a drug/alcohol related offense? It doesn’t matter. All that matters is whether it’s reasonable, and it is. If Coach Nourimand wants to hold his troops to a higher standard, so be it, as long as the rules are applied equally across the board.

Now, the lightened sanctions imposed against these (white, well-connected) students may or may not be a case of favoritism, because a new policy may or may not have already been railroaded into place over “Coach Fosh’s” objections. Anyway, there was much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, followed by the superintendent Hayes’s decision to re-assign Nourimand from his position as Director of Athletics. Here’s Hayes’s rationale: “The challenges I had with him had to deal with the management of people, specifically coaches that work with him and then the issue of response of consequences.” Gentle Reader, if you understand that nightmare of edu-speak, I pity you. Seriously, this is a university town. One would think that after several tries just in the eleven years I’ve lived here, we could find a superintendent who isn’t too stupid to pour piss out of a boot.

The coach didn’t feel he could continue under the proposed circumstances, so he announced he’d be leaving, although he hadn’t yet decided whether to resign or to retire. On to more posturing on all sides (except by Coach Nourimand, whose gentle grace stands in glaring contradistinction to the whirlwind around him). A petition garnered over 1900 signatures; a Facebook group, over 2700 likes: this in a city of 30,000. A logo (seen here) was plastered all over town.

Ultimately, Hayes backed down, even making public a letter of apology. So it all came down to a school board meeting. The meeting was moved to the high school auditorium to accommodate the expected crowd, but even that facility proved too small for the throng of Fosh fans. Two things happened: Farshid Nourimand stayed, his announcement meeting with a standing ovation from literally hundreds of people. And Matt Rocco, who had expressed a desire to have two board members communicate with him only through his attorney, was given the boot. And there was much rejoicing.

This wasn’t Penn State fans upset at the firing of Joe Paterno, despite both declining ability and clear evidence of ethical failings resulting in the ongoing abuse of perhaps dozens of boys. No, this was a community standing up for ethics, for a coach whose won-loss record is impressive, but whose positive influence in the lives of the young men he coaches is paramount.

But we’re back at the fame thing. Just as Mr. Lukianoff, though happy for the victory, frets that the next case won’t have a “constituency” of “Firefly” fans or a famous author publicly supporting one’s cause, we can fear that the next victim of a superintendent and a school board president run amok won’t have thousands of supporters, won’t have dozens of on-field victories, won’t get a public, trans-Atlantic, call of support from one of the world’s best-known athletes.

What if the next coach to run afoul of the power-hungry and boorish (why must those two characteristics so often go together?) is new and unknown to the community? What if Coach Fosh had been just as good a role model but only a good, as opposed to great, coach? What if Clint Dempsey had lived a few miles thataway, and had played his high school ball for someone else? What if the best player Fosh had ever produced got a scholarship to play Division I soccer, and used that educational advantage to become a librarian or a social worker or an optometrist? What if it isn’t a coach, but a choir director or a history teacher?

The lessons that monomaniacs like Walter, Sorensen, Hayes and Rocco will take away from this isn’t that thinking before acting is a good thing. Alas, it’s political, not ethical: that one has to pick one’s fights. Don’t go after someone who’ll call FIRE or who can get a couple million people agitated; don’t mess with a local legend. Other than that, though…

And that makes all of us a little poorer.

"Firefly," Fascists, and Freedom of Speech

For a year or two, there was a sign on my office door that read “Perge, scelus, mihi diem perficias.” That translates roughly as “Proceed, varlet, and render the day perfect unto me,” or, more colloquially, “Go ahead, punk, make my day.” It was, of course, a joke: the merging of a popular culture reference with my projected self-image both as intellectual and as (pedagogical) tough guy. Anyone who felt threatened, even after having the saying translated, is too stupid to be in my classroom.

Now a different professor of theatre at a different non-flagship state university is at the center of a controversy involving a very similar door decoration. James Miller teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. He put a poster (shown at right) from the now-cancelled television show “Firefly” on his office door. It reads “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.” Much to the consternation of some of my students, past and present, I’ve never seen the show, but commentators who are fans assure me that the quotation in question comes from the pilot episode, in which the hero responds to a question about whether the other character will be killed in his sleep.

I can’t confirm that, but anyone with any right to be in a theatre building can read a text well enough to understand that the meaning of the line is the precise opposite of a threat: “You have nothing to fear from me unless you take up arms against me, in which case I will annihilate you.” All of which proves that the Chief of the University Police, one Lisa A. Walter, is an idiot. She removed the poster and then informed Mr. Miller by e-mail that she had done so, claiming that “it is unacceptable to have postings such as this that refer to killing.” Seriously? I'm glad she wasn't the one deciding whether we could advertise our recent production of Yeats one-acts, including (OMG!) The Death of Cuchulain.

Miller reacted pretty much as I would have if my sign had been removed by some moronic campus cop who was as incapable of reading comprehension as she was of respecting personal liberties. (I hope I wouldn’t have called her “fascistic,” as Prof. Miller did in his response, but I make no guarantees.) And then the escalation began. Not content with being merely stupid, Chief Walter ratcheted up the stakes:

My actions are appropriate and defensible. Speech can be limited on a reasonable expectation that it will cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat. We were notified of the existence of the posting, reviewed it and believe that the wording on the poster can be interpreted as a threat by others and/or could cause those that view it to believe that you are willing/able to carry out actions similar to what is listed. This posting can cause others to fear for their safety, thus it was removed.

I am willing to schedule a meeting with you to discuss this further, if you wish. If you choose to repost the article or something similar to it, it will be removed and you could face charges of disorderly conduct.

Well, no, Chief, your actions were inappropriate and indefensible. No rational human being would come to a “reasonable expectation” that a poster from a television show (you might not have known that, but surely you could figure out that the poster was mass-produced, right?) could possibly cause a “disruption of school activities,” “material and/or substantial” or otherwise, or that the words on the piece of paper constitute a threat of any kind. If other people “fear for their safety” because of that poster, it is your responsibility to escort them to the psychiatric ward, not to confiscate private property without as much as a warrant. Certainly it is you, with your terrifying admixture of stupidity, arrogance, and simple bravado, that constitutes a threat: charges of disorderly conduct? Really?

Miller then raised the tension level again, e-mailing Walter in apparent disbelief:

Postings that "refer" to violence constitute a threat? As in a poster from Hamlet? Or a news clipping about Hockey players that commit violent murder? [EDIT: This last line seemed a bit strange, so I looked it up: sure enough, there was a local story about a group of hockey players allegedly causing the death of a fellow student. Two were charged with felony murder; ten were suspended from the team but not from the university: actual violence apparently fits in fine with the sense of warm fuzzies sought by the Stout administration.]

Don't threaten me with charges that have no basis in reality—I am a committed pacifist and a devotee of non-violence, and I don't appreciate card carrying members of the NRA who are wearing side arms and truncheons lecturing me about violence.

And, of course, he put a different poster on his door: the one to the left, showing a beat-down of a citizen by a cop, with the cutline “Warning: Fascism. Fascism can cause blunt trauma and/or violent death. Keep Fascism away from children and pets.” Whether Chief Walter was really too dim-witted to know that she was the target of the commentary or just wanted to pretend that she wasn’t, her response was sadly predictable: another removal, another inane justification e-mail:

My office removed another posting from the outside of your office. The posting depicts violence and mentions violence and death. The campuses [sic.] threat assessment team met yesterday and conferred with UW System Office of General Counsel and made the decision that this posting should be removed. It is believed that this posting also has a reasonable expectation that it will cause a material and/or substantial disruption of school activities and/or be constituted as a threat.

Notice that the precise “charge” is never spelled out. More importantly, it’s no longer just Walter who is on the silly side. I’ve spent the vast majority of my adult life on college campuses (I’ve taken or taught college courses for at least one semester in every calendar year since 1973), and I’ve known, at least in passing, a few dozen campus cops. Many are nice people, the majority are no doubt perfectly qualified to hand out parking tickets and break up parties that get too loud, but I don’t think many will ever be accused of being intellectual giants. Conversely, more than a few are self-important jackasses. It would be an exaggeration to say that I expected Chief Walter to fall into this latter category, but it certainly didn’t surprise me.

But now we have the portentous-sounding “threat assessment team” and indeed the university system’s General Counsel getting into the act. These people should know better. It is more than a little distressing that they do not. This is where I yield to Ken at Popehat:

If a rational person wouldn’t take it as an actual threat of violence, then it’s not a true threat that can be censored, however much the hysterical, irrational, nanny-stating, coddling, or professionally emo think about it, and however much university chancellors would like to believe otherwise….

A system in which what we can say is premised upon the likely reactions of the mentally ill and the undernourished pussywillows of the world is a system that encourages suppression of all unpopular, forceful, interesting, or challenging speech. The irrational and the morally and mentally weak are not entitled to have their feelings protected through the force of law, however prevalent they are on campus….

If your “UW System Legal Counsel” told you that these posters could be censored based on their content, then stop hiring lawyers out of the back of a bait shop.

Anyway, about the same time as Walter and the Minions launched into their tap-dance routine, Dr. Miller brought FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) on board. FIRE is best known for rallying around right-wing students whose tender sensibilities have been affronted by rationality (expecting students in a biology class to articulate the principles of evolution, for example), but, like the ACLU from the other direction, they actually do believe in a philosophy rather than an ideology. In other words, they really do care about free expression. And, alas, I must tell you that in my experience there have been more assaults on academic freedom and 1st amendment rights on campus from the left than the right.

Anyway, this is right up FIRE’s alley, and they blasted away with an article on their website and an all-out publicity blitz, sending an open letter to Chancellor Charles W. Sorensen of the Stout campus, and enlisting directly or indirectly the assistance of actors Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillion from the “Firefly” series (that’s Fillion on the poster), plus such decidedly disparate sites as Reason.com and Gawker. (Gawker’s story is particularly snarky and therefore dear to my heart.) Unfortunately, rather than listen to reason or to argumentation (and derision) from the left, right, and center, Chancellor Sorensen punted.

He and his equally craven, hubristic, and vacuous senior staff—Provost Julie Furst-Bowe and Vice Chancellor Ed Nieskes—sent an e-mail to all faculty and staff at the Stout campus, attempting to spin their thuggishness, repressiveness, and outright fatuousness into something comprehensible if not noble. I include the entire e-mail here, with my commentary inset and in brackets:

There have been recent news reports about an incident in which two posters hung by a UW-Stout professor outside his office were removed by campus police. There are some important points to consider in the wake of these incidents:

[Indeed, there are…]

UW-Stout administrators believe strongly in the right of all students, faculty and staff to express themselves freely about issues on campus and off. This freedom is fundamental on a public university campus.

[Then STFU.]

However, we also have the responsibility to promote a campus environment that is free from threats of any kind—both direct and implied. It was our belief, after consultation with UW System legal counsel, that the posters in question constituted an implied threat of violence. That is why they were removed.

[Bullshit. The first poster was removed before any such consultation, and everything after that came as a result of trying to justify that initial stupidity. So, first of all, stop lying. Secondly, if you think those posters “constituted an implied threat of violence,” you are barely intelligent enough to feed yourself, let alone sit behind a desk—even as students—at a reputable university. Finally, it is not your “responsibility” to enforce a threat-free environment, certainly not if the standard for an “implied” threat is what the most moronic reader (such as yourselves) might contort a perfectly innocuous expression into potentially meaning.]

This was not an act of censorship. This was an act of sensitivity to and care for our shared community, and was intended to maintain a campus climate in which everyone can feel welcome, safe and secure.

[True, technically this was not an act of censorship. That would imply that the state qua state was prohibiting free expression. No, you gaggle of dimwits are acting not as the state but as employer, thereby possibly rendering your inanity legal, although still ethically unsupportable and professionally incompetent. And puh-leeze, spare me your sanctimony, your sensitivity, and your caring. Give me instead, please, an institution that values reason, personal liberties, and the free exchange of ideas… because this ain’t it, and an out-of-the-closet intellectual such as myself does not feel the slightest bit “welcome, safe, [or] secure” in this “shared community.” Indeed, you three, the chief of police, and the general counsel all terrify me.]

There is one piece of good news… I have another reason to be happy where I am.

(Thanks to my netfriend Jack Marshall for alerting me to this story. You can read his commentary here and here.)