There's a report at The Raw Story about the firing of Roger Shuler, an editor in the University of Alabama at Birmingham for 19 years. It appears that Shuler was fired for blogging about the Republican crusade against former Governor Don Siegelman.

On the same day that anonymous commenter asked if his employer knew about his blogging, Shuler received a formal reprimand for leaving his vacation request on his supervisor's chair rather than asking her, which Shuler says was normal procedure. Then the university conducted an audit on his computer, claiming that he conducted 3 hours a day of "non-work related" online activities. Shuler argues that much of this computer research, even though it related to his blog, was also relevant to his work about the university.

The key factor is this: if Shuler was getting his work done, it doesn't really matter how much time was deemed "non-work related." The fact that his computer time was monitored only after these apparent complaints relating to his blog were made only heightens any suspicion about it. To fire a long-time employee on such trivial grounds as where he left his vacation request letter is difficult to believe.

This is not just a case of the First Amendment; it's a case of academic freedom. No one who works at a university should ever face punishment or firing (or even scrutiny) because of their external political speech.

Yesterday, I wrote about Edward Glick's imaginary quote. Today's InsideHigherEd has an update with Glick admitting that I was right, and he mistakenly confused the original source of his story.

Also, "Blog of Convenience" deserves credit for independently raising the same questions I did a day earlier. That blogger got an interesting quote from Glick via American Conservative: "I am afraid I can't be more specific. It happened months before I decided to write the piece. However, please assure readers that with my own ears I heard a Duke University professor says this on NPR."

Glick was so determined to believe that Republicans are banned from academia that he imagined a conversation on the radio that apparently never happened.

In the comments of the InsideHigherEd article, Feudi Pandola claims that Glick's quote is "the essence" of Brandon's statement. I think that's fundamentally untrue, as Scott Jaschik points out in the article. Glick's quote made an explicit statement that "we don't hire Republicans." Brandon has said exactly the opposite, that they don't inquire into the political beliefs of applicants. Glick's statement claims that all Republicans are stupid. Brandon's statement is that stupid people are generally conservative (which is not the same as saying that all conservatives are stupid).

For example, people who believe that the universe was created 6,000 years ago and humans lived alongside dinosaurs are highly likely to be conservatives, and they are unquestionably stupid (at least in that view). These people are highly unlikely to be hired by an astronomy or evolutionary biology department. Likewise, someone who believes that human reason is worthless and the Bible is the only book that should be read is likely to be a conservative, likely to be stupid, and unlikely to be hired by a philosophy department (and unlikely to pursue a Ph.D. in philosophy). However, that doesn't mean that all conservatives or religious people are stupid, and Brandon, for all his inept terminology, never said that.

However, I would strongly oppose any official investigation of Glick (or the more egregious errors of Michael Bellesiles or Ward Churchill), because I think the proper punishment for unintentional mistakes of this sort is public disclosure.

Edward Bernard Glick has a tirade against liberal academia in an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post this week (it originally appeared on American Thinker last month) this includes a very interesting quote. And by "interesting," I mean, "made up."

According to Glick, "Duke University is a case in point. The chairman of one of its major departments was once asked in a radio interview if his department hired Republicans. He answered: 'No. We don't hire Republicans because they are stupid and we are not. Why should we knowingly hire stupid professors?'"

There's only one small problem with this quote. It's entirely fictionalized.

As the blogger Evil Bender pointed out, Glick gives no source and no quote like this exists anywhere.

It appears that Glick was paraphrasing (albeit with quotation marks and the wrong source) a famous quote that Robert Brandon, chair of the Duke philosophy department, gave to the Duke Chronicle in 2004.

In the interview, Brandon noted: "I don't know the political affiliation of all of my colleagues in philosophy, nor do I care. Our last hire was in the history of modern philosophy. We hired an expert in Kant and Newton. Politics never came up in the interview."

Unfortuntely, Brandon added his speculation on the reason why more liberals worked in academia: "We try to hire the best, smartest people available. If, as John Stuart Mill said, stupid people are generally conservative, then there are lots of conservatives we will never hire. Mill's analysis may go some way towards explaining the power of the Republican party in our society and the relative scarcity of Republicans in academia. Players in the NBA tend to be taller than average. There is a good reason for this. Members of academia tend to be a bit smarter than average. There is a good reason for this too."

Brandon explained a few days later that he was trying to tell a joke and noted, "Typically, we know nothing about the candidates' politics until after they are hired."

As I explain in my new book, Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies, the reason for liberal dominance in academia is not because conservatives are stupid, but because liberals are stupid: in general, far more liberals than conservatives are willing to spend years pursuing a Ph.D. in order to desperately search for a job that, if they're lucky, pays far less than most other professional positions. You'd have to be an idiot to seek out this miserable excuse for a career, and it turns out that liberals are usually those idiots.

Of course, some people might point out that a prominent conservative professor who makes up quotes because he can't be bothered to find the real words is, in fact, stupid. But there are many smart conservatives who do pay attention to basic professional standards. However, these smart people on the right are far more likely to go into business, law, medicine, or politics than the tough, low-paid road of academia.