There are some serious principles at stake here. Number One is whether a tenured profs can be fired at will for disloyalty ro a president.
Update
http://dailynous.com/2016/02/09/bunny-drowning-president-sets-sights-on-philosophers/
Petition
(Petition prepared by John Schwenkler.)
In the last three days, at least two faculty members have been fired from Mount St. Mary’s University, and a high-ranking administrator was demoted.
One of the faculty members, associate philosophy professor Thane Naberhaus, received a letter Monday from President Simon Newman stating that Naberhaus had violated his “duty of loyalty to [the] University” in unspecified “recent actions” that “clearly justify your termination of employment.”
Naberhaus, who had tenure, said he was unsure why he was fired and is considering a lawsuit against the university….
Like Naberhaus, Ed Egan, director of the pre-law program at the Mount, was also fired on Monday. Egan said he believes his firing was retaliation for his role as faculty adviser to the student newspaper, The Mountain Echo, which published a controversial story in January.
That story, which has since spread nationally, accused Newman of seeking to dismiss 20 to 25 struggling freshmen to improve the university’s retention numbers. The Echo article detailed a controversial retention program, which Newman said was mischaracterized. It also described a conversation in which Newman compared students to bunnies that should be drowned and have “a Glock [put] to their heads,” a metaphor for which he has since apologized.
Though it doesn’t show up in most journalistic discussions, OF COURSE race and class matter.
Lost in the panic about Zika is an important fact: The epidemic mirrors the social inequality of Brazilian society. It is concentrated among young, poor, black and brown women, a vast majority of them living in the country’s least-developed regions. The women at greatest risk of contracting Zika live in places where the mosquito is part of their everyday lives, where mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and chikungunya were already endemic. They live in substandard, crowded housing in neighborhoods where stagnant water, the breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes, is everywhere. These women can’t avoid bites: They need to be outdoors from dawn until dusk to work, shop and take care of their children. And they are the same women who have the least access to sexual and reproductive health care.
More here.
Thanks, A!
