Tuesday, June 17, 2008
San Antonio Professor plays the stupid card
Last year a professor at The University of Texas San Antonio was caught viewing pornography in the comfort of his office. He was basically nabbed as an unsuspecting graduate overheard moans of pleasure emanating from the office. Before he was suspended he deleted hundreds of files and destroyed other evidence. To this day the man still has a job. This is all because of the beauty of academia and good deal of word play.
Following his suspension, professor Ayers claimed that he was doing research on accessibility to porn to minors. Apparently a very exciting research project. So exciting in fact that he failed to secure the necessary permission before launching tax-payer funded computer into the world wide web of porn. Given the amount of files deleted there seems to have been quite a bit of in-depth research going on.
Since Ayers is tenured he was allowed a hearing after which he was to be terminated. A panel of his peers found otherwise and had him reinstated on suspension. Their reason? These extremely well educated people have come to the conclusion that the good professor’s free speech rights were violated and he was within the guidelines of the school’s computer use policy.
In a May 6 letter to UT regents, the five-member faculty tribunal acknowledged that UTSA’s computer use policy banned accessing “obscene” materials. But because Ayers’ termination letter accused him of accessing “sexually explicit” materials, the policy didn’t apply, the tribunal reasoned.
“If the intent is to regard accessing sexually explicit Web sites as improper, then the policy should clearly state that,” the tribunal wrote.
Just to add insult to injury, Ayers’ attorney went on to basically label the school officials ignorant and the small sleepy town of 1.4 million as backward.
Maldonado, Ayers’ lawyer, said the professor didn’t tell anyone about his research because he was embarrassed.
“This is in many ways still a fairly small town,” Maldonado said. “He didn’t feel comfortable that it would be accepted, even in an academic institution.”
Puleez. Cry me a river. A tenured professor makes enough to surf all the porn he wants on his own computer and the fact that he’s tenured shouldn’t separate him from the other professors and administrators that have gotten the boot for the same thing.
Posted by deadscot on 17 Jun, 2008 at 14:16(2) Comments • Permalink
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