Fired For Bad Jokes: Article Analysis

An article published by Thomas Bartlett “What Really Cost Chris Dussold His Dream Job?” Bartlett Tells the story of a college professor who saw his dream job devastated by rumors that spread through the hallways at Southern Illinois University in Evansville. Bartlett explains, the professor was fired for plagiarism. Dussold claims that was not the real reason to why he was fired. He believes it was a persistent rumor that he was sleeping with a undergraduate, a rumor proved to be false according to Mr. Dussold, Peyla, and university investigation. Now he’s on a mission to restore his reputation.

Although the superintendent has the authority to hire and fire teachers, it would be within his best interest to do so based on appropriate legal footing rather than personal bias. The superintendent’s recommendations for Barnhart’s change of employment appears to be grounded in bias. From the beginning he was a dubious supporter of Barnhart as athletic director. He has no proof that she contacted the reporter so is basing his decision on the weak legal footing of assumption. Understandably, he is doing so to balance teacher rights and promoting harmony within the work place which ultimately supports student learning. Several court cases provide guide lines for achieving this balance. The cases of Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) and Connick v. Myers (1983) developed a two pronged test to check the balance. First, does the speech address matters of public concern? Assuming Barnhart did contact the reporter, yes, the information is a matter of public concern since it involves Title IX, a federal civil law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in education activities. It is a federal law that high schools treat boys’ and girls’ sports equally. Also, can Burnhart demonstrate her speech interest outweigh the harmony of the district leadership? Again, yes, the speech is not affecting her immediate supervisor, principal Tara Hills as supported by Fales v. Garst

According to Nat Hentoff, if we allow censorship on the college campuses the rights of the students have been taken away. Hentoff gives us examples of colleges that have censorship on campus but these campuses have taken the extremist route. They do not allow the teachers to teach the students what hate speech is and what they can do to protect themselves.

There are also negative aspects that could come from publishing this story before fact checking and interviewing all who were involved; for example, this story shines a negative light on the University of Virginia, current students, faculty, staff and even alumni. Using facts within the story of how the of head of the University’s Sexual Misconduct Board, Dean Nicole Eromo, handled the incident when Jackie finally decided to report it months

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) made a statement “On Freedom of Expression and Campus Speech Codes,” 1994, which states, “In response to verbal assaults and use of hateful language some campuses have felt it necessary to forbid the expression of racist, sexist, homophobic, or ethnically demeaning speech, along with conduct or behavior that harasses…”

These are but a few of the provocative headlines to capture the attention of faculty and administrators in recent years. Such essays, for many, introduced terms like trigger warnings, microaggressions, and safe spaces, now commonplace in media coverage of academic life in the 21st century. The stories they tell involve a wide range of issues, but the overarching themes that bind them include concerns about restrictions on free speech, student sensitivity, and evolving campus policies regarding acceptable content and language in and out of the classroom. My role today as a member of

Censorship has happened everywhere and happens everyday especially inside schools. In city schools there have been conflicts over what students should or should not learn. Censors decide that they should protect students from materials and activities that are upsetting and issue the wrong ideas. These ideas are said to "weaken parental authority, challenge students political moral, or religious views, or brainwash them into other ways of thinking (Sherrow10)." By protecting them they mean targeting academics. Courses that deal with drug prevention, sex education, development of character, or clarification of

In the article “Universities are Right to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior,” Eric Posner uses science, logic, reason, and morality to challenge the idea that college students are mature young adults who deserve the right to control their own behavior and to exercise unfettered free speech on campus. Furthermore, Posner contends that speech and sex codes have not always been lax but they changed drastically in the 1960s in response to the circumstances of the era. Consequently, the changes have brought about unwelcome freedoms that students themselves are currently rejecting. According to Posner, both parents and students agree that it’s time to for college administrators to resume a more conventional role in managing the speech and behavior

Freedom of speech is a fundamental American freedom and a human right, and there’s no place that this right should be more valued and protected than in colleges and universities. A college exists to educate and to advance a student 's knowledge. Colleges do so by acting as a “marketplace of ideas” where ideas compete. It is important to be able to compare your ideas with everyone else as it helps to open your mind to other people’s views and can give you a different perception on things. In the article “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukiankoff talked about how too many college students engage in “catastrophizing," which is in short, the overreaction to something. They also said that “smart people do, in fact, overreact to innocuous speech, make mountains out of molehills, and seek punishment for anyone whose words make anyone else feel uncomfortable.”(Haidt) Many colleges have the belief that prohibiting freedom of speech will resolve such issues. But instead, colleges should take a different approach on the matter by teaching students how to properly utilize their Freedom of Speech which will help to resolve future conflicts and misunderstandings.

According to a Washington Post (11/21/02), Harvard Law School is considering a ban on offensive speech. Members of its Black Law Students Association has called for what they call "a discriminatory harassment policy that would basically punish or at least give the administration some way to review harassing behavior." Harvard's Committee on Healthy Diversity - made up of six faculty, six students and three law school staff members - will make its recommendations in the spring. It might be that Harvard's black law students, like so many other students, have come to believe that they have a constitutional right not to be offended or have their feelings hurt.

“Over the years, courts have ruled that college officials may set up reasonable rules to regulate the ‘time, place and manner” that the free speech can occur, as long as the rules are “content neutral,’ meaning they apply equally to all sides of issues” (Fisher, 2008). Speech codes and free speech zones on campus do exist for many reasons: many of the causes or topics that students or others looking to interact with students take up are controversial and can frequently take on less of an academic or social justice overtone and more of a hateful one. Hate speech is the greatest threat to freedom of speech on college campuses, and the limitations colleges and universities put on student’s verbal freedoms are largely in place as efforts to avoid it. Religion, in particular, is a hot topic on campuses and it has an unfortunate tendency to become more aggressive and argumentative than universities would like. However, under the First Amendment, individuals do have a right to speech that the listener disagrees with and to speech that is offensive and hateful. It’s always easier to defend someone’s right to say something with which you agree. But in a free society, you also have a duty to defend speech to which you may strongly object.

Authors of both articles disagree the suppressing and censoring of free speech observed in some universities. While Rampell is disheartened by violent reactions of students upon reading a conservative essay written by a ‘moderate conservative’ in a student newspaper, Stone and Creeley are worried, in general, about the broader measures of censoring free speech across universities. Rampell, in particular, had direct access to the writer of the conservative essay, which gave her a deeper understanding of the actual reactions and subsequent happenings. Stone and Creeley had off hand access to the past happenings of three individual cases of censoring free speech expressions by teaching faculties. In one case, a university dissented to a faculty member’s published essay on

Duna. Duna. DunaDunaDuna Dunaaaa (Jaws Theme Song). Chomp. Movies about sharks are very stereotypical. Jaws the movie was exaggerating the attacks of sharks on humans. Jaws showed that sharks are just out to get humans. We are there main meal. That’s not true. They are very stereotypical about sharks and their history as I have said before. Well your “Man eating, flesh ripping” sharks hunt and attack the humankind by using their senses, methods of attacks, and aggressiveness in history.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion regarding free speech on college campuses. Our first amendment gives us the right of Free Speech but many groups retain the ability to censor it within their own organisation, such as in the workplace and in both public and private lower education. I believe that the ability should be extended to colleges and universities (both public and private). Students should have the right to be at school while feeling physically safe. An example of this right being violated because of someone else’s “free speech” was last spring at American University in which bananas were strung up on nooses around campus with AKA (a historically-black sorority) labeled on them the day after AU’s first black female student

The lack of consistency in higher learning institutions can be attributed to that “until recently such institutions have not been subjected to legal sanction for failing to address the problem (Schneider, 1987, p. 525) Schneider writes, “only two reported federal cases have presented a claim of sexual harassment under Title IX” (p. 527). At the time, the only two reported cases were Alexander v Yale University (1980) and Moine v Temple Univ. School of Medicine (1986). More recently, however, in 2015, Michigan State was in violation of Title IX, as they were not appropriately vetting sexual harassment cases on their campus. “Prior to and during the course of Office for Civil Rights (OCR) investigation, the university made revisions to its Title IX policies and procedures in an effort to correct several Title IX compliance concerns” (ProQuest, 2015). Reiterating the amount of obscurity that exists within the policies that each institution enforces and abides by is, for the most part, no use.