You can read my most recent blog entries at Collegefreedom.blogspot.com.

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.