Two very brief notes about high-profile scandals in academia:<\/p>\n
1) While it involves one of my faculty colleagues, I have no special insight to offer into the case of Valerie Barr’s firing by the NSF over long-ago political activity<\/a>. I know and like Valerie as a colleague, and she did some really good stuff as chair of the CS department, but that’s all I know.<\/p>\n As reported by Science, the government’s actions in this case seem like that very special<\/em> kind of stupid that you get in extremely large organizations, where this probably isn’t really about her at all. Either somebody in a position to make trouble has a bug up their ass about this particular organization from the early 1980’s, or somebody in a position to make trouble has a beef with the NSF and is taking it out through petty bureaucratic horseshit. <\/p>\n Regardless of the actual reason, this reflects very badly on the NSF, on the Office of Personnel Management, and the Federal Investigative Services. <\/p>\n 2) The other Great Big Scandal running through academic circles is this whole Steven Salaita business<\/a>, where he was offered a tenured position at Illinois, then had the offer taken back at a very late stage because of “uncivil” comments he made. There’s been a lot of back and forth, and calls for boycotts, etc.<\/p>\n This one doesn’t reflect well on anyone involved. Salaita’s Twitter comments were intemperate and asinine, the flip-flopping by Illinois has been disgraceful, and I strongly suspect that had the asinine remarks been of a different political slant, a lot of the people writing outraged essays about the whole business would be writing similar volumes about how the tweeter in question richly deserved to be drummed out of academia (and a completely different subset of people would be outraged at length). Which is why I have no real enthusiasm for writing about this (part of why I’m posting it on a Saturday morning when nobody will read it…).<\/p>\n As long as I’m commenting on scandals, though, I might as well note that while Salaita’s comments were very dumb, they’re not half offensive enough to deserve firing. Especially by the standards of jackassery on Twitter. The actions of the Illinois administration in caving to pressure from donors were venal and cowardly, and reflect very poorly on the university. I’m basically in agreement with Sean Carroll’s comments on this and other bothersome speech issues<\/a>: the bar for firing\/disinviting\/banning people for saying things we disagree with ought to be very high indeed.<\/p>\n And that’s it for academic scandals this week. On the bright side, um… at least academia is having a better week\/month\/year scandal-wise than the NFL? Yay?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two very brief notes about high-profile scandals in academia: 1) While it involves one of my faculty colleagues, I have no special insight to offer into the case of Valerie Barr’s firing by the NSF over long-ago political activity. I know and like Valerie as a colleague, and she did some really good stuff as… Continue reading On Academic Scandals<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}