We have another example of a teacher being disciplined for an act of free speech in his private time. I have previously written about the increasing scrutiny given public school teachers in their use of social media sites. University of Kansas Associate Professor of Journalism David Guth has been placed on administrative leave after posting an anti-NRA tweet following the recent Navy Yard shootings that killed 12 people. Guth tweeted” “blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.”
Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little issued the following statement after Guth was placed on administrative leave:
“In order to prevent disruptions to the learning environment for students, the School of Journalism and the university, I have directed Provost Jeffrey Vitter to place Associate Professor Guth on indefinite administrative leave pending a review of the entire situation. Professor Guth’s classes will be taught by other faculty members.”
While the statement is framed in terms of avoidance “disruptions,” it does not appear to be at the request of Guth. Free speech is often limited in the name of maintaining order and avoiding disruptions. Once again, I find the statement of Guth to be repulsive in wishing the death of the children of gun rights supporters. Yet, it was clearly a political statement made outside of the university.
Nevertheless, Kansas State Senator Greg Smith wants Guth to be fired for engaging in free speech. He is further promising to oppose any appropriations for the university. That sounds like threatening students in protest of a tweet deemed threatening to children of NRA members. A curious moral high ground.
Smith, a former law enforcement officer, however may feel such a threat particularly acutely. His website cites the kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder of his daughter, Kelsey, as his motivation to continue in public service. I can certainly understand why Guth’s words would be particularly hurtful to Smith. Yet, threatening an entire academic institution for the views of a single faculty member is excessive and wrong-headed.
Likewise, the Kansas State Rifle Association President Patricia Stoneking has pledged that it “will do everything possible to see to the removal of this man . . . He should be fired immediately. His statements are outrageous!. . . Is this who you want teaching your children? I certainly do not want him teaching mine.” Of course, these are not children but college students who are part of an academic community built on the exchange of different ideas and values.
For his part, Guth is not backing down. He is quoted as saying “I don’t apologize for it because I’m not saying in the tweet that I want anybody harmed, and I expanded on it in my blog.”
He is not getting a lot of public support from Ann Brill, dean of the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Brill wrote that “While the First Amendment allows anyone to express an opinion, that privilege is not absolute and must be balanced with the rights of others. That’s vital to civil discourse. Professor Guth’s views do not represent our school and we do not advocate violence directed against any group or individuals.” The reference to the limits of the first amendment by Brill would seem to encourage those who want Guth disciplined by suggesting that this case might fall within those limits. However, this is an expression of a teacher on a matter of great social and political debate. I do not believe that he actually wanted harm to come to NRA family members. He used injudicious and offensive words to convey his passion. Since some of his students are likely gun rights supporters, it was particularly disturbing. However, he was on a social media site expressing his anger in the aftermath of a great tragedy. I do not see how the “limits” of free speech would allow the discipline of a teacher for such a statement in such a circumstance. Notably, it is Brill’s”limits” point that was quoted by the Regents of the University.
Ironically, Guth specializes in public relations according to his resume. He has a M.A. in Journalism, University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill (1990) and a B.A. in Radio, Television and Speech, University of Maryland at College Park, 1973.
Do you believe that a professor can or should be disciplined for such a posting on a social media site?
Mike Spindell:
I dont have a big fortune, you are probably worth more than I am. I just like my freedom, I dont really care about money except to the point where I can make enough to feed myself.
I am not smug at all, I have major health concerns in my family and try to do as much as I can. My ability to work is slowly passing, it isnt something I am smug about.
What I have a problem with is people who have able minds and able bodies who sit around b*tching that the world hasnt done this for them or that for them, who expect someone else to buy their supper and put a roof over their head. That is who I object to.
A person who is not able bodied or able minded is where our money should be spent. I am all for helping those people, the others? Not so much.
“I dont have a big fortune, you are probably worth more than I am.”
Bron,
I’m on a fixed income, pension and SS. My house is way “under water” and what savings I had were dissipated when I was dying and in the transplant that brought me back to life. Even with Medicare and a very good secondary plan there are expenses entailed in transplants that literally left me living from check to check. No one needs to throw a benefit for me since I’m much more fortunate than most in that I’m alive. However, since you own a business and have employees there is no chance in hell that my income in any way approaches your.
DavidM:
have you seen this new legislation?
The Americans With No Abilities Act
President Barack Obama and the Democratic Senate are considering sweeping legislation that will provide new benefits for many Americans. The Americans With No Abilities Act is being hailed as a major legislative goal by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition.
“Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society,” said California Sen. Barbara Boxer. “We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability (POI) to be ridiculed and passed over. With this legislation, employers will no longer be able to grant special favors to a small group of workers, simply because they have some idea of what they are doing.”
In a Capitol Hill press conference, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pointed to the success of the U.S. Postal Service, which has a long-standing policy of providing opportunity without regard to performance. At the state government level, the Department of Motor Vehicles also has an excellent record of hiring people with no abilities (63 percent).
Under the Americans With No Abilities Act, more than 25 million mid-level positions will be created, with important-sounding titles but little real responsibility, thus providing an illusory sense of purpose and performance.
Mandatory non-performance-based raises and promotions will be given to guarantee upward mobility for even the most unremarkable employees. The legislation provides substantial tax breaks to corporations that promote a significant number of Persons of Inability (POI) into middle-management positions, and gives a tax credit to small and medium-sized businesses that agree to hire one clueless worker for every two talented hires.
Finally, the Americans With No Abilities Act contains tough new measures to make it more difficult to discriminate against the non-abled, banning, for example, discriminatory interview questions such as, “Do you have any skills or experience that relate to this job?”
“As a non-abled person, I can’t be expected to keep up with people who have something going for them,” said Mary Lou Gertz, who lost her position as a lug-nut twister at the GM plant in Flint, Mich., due to her inability to remember righty tighty, lefty loosey. “This new law should be real good for people like me. I’ll finally have job security.” With the passage of this bill, Gertz and millions of other untalented citizens will finally see a light at the end of the tunnel. Said Sen. Dick Durbin: “As a senator with no abilities, I believe the same privileges that elected officials enjoy ought to be extended to every American with no abilities. It is our duty as lawmakers to provide each and every American citizen, regardless of his or her inadequacy, with some sort of space to take up in this great nation and a good salary for doing so.”
“The Americans With No Abilities Act is being hailed as a major legislative goal by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition”
Bron,
So smug that you and David have abilities? The joke is not only nonsensical, but shows a mindset that lacks both compassion and empathy for all those without your fortune for making money. I say fortune because a lot of those you would view as successful because of their professions are notably without skill, though bursting with ambition. Then again, perhaps Donald Trump is a hero to you.
Mike Spindell wrote: “The joke is not only nonsensical, but shows a mindset that lacks both compassion and empathy for all those without your fortune for making money.”
Oh, come on. It was hilariously funny, a demonstration of the evil nature of Democrats who want to reward those who do not apply themselves in their jobs.
It is flat out evil to reward faithlessness and cowardness. People should be taught to use their abilities and increase their abilities or suffer a terrible life of poverty. This is reality and the truly compassionate message of truth.
leejcaroll:
I wouldnt cover viagra either.
DavidM there was a comment from you in the filter, I restored it.
Maybe because contraception is often a medical issue and prescription? And would not be government, is private insurance. But hey Viagra is covered, women should be given the same opportunity
leejcaroll – Viagra should NOT be covered as healthcare by federal subsidies. Our politicians have lost their minds.
David, david….. Be careful of the cup you drink of… The first 4 years of Clinton were all deficits….. You partaking if magic mushrooms? Psychedelic frogs…
AY wrote: “The first 4 years of Clinton were all deficits…”
Interesting point. So why all the calumny against me?
Clinton came to office in 1993 and focused on deficit reduction rather than tax cuts. Republican Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995. The Republican’s Welfare Reform Act being the cornerstone of the Republican’s Contract with America was signed by President Clinton in 1996. In 1997 came the Capital Gains Tax Cut. In 1998, the first balanced budget since 1969 was passed and signed.
So first five Clinton years had deficits, but thanks to the Republicans and President Clinton’s ability to see past differences and work with people on the other side of the aisle, our country finally experienced some financial prosperity. Surpluses existed for 1998 through 2001 when the World Trade Center was destroyed. Now the federal debt is three times higher than it was under Clinton’s administration.
leejcaroll:
why should government pay for contraception? Contraception is readily available at wal mart for 10/month.
And yet David Repubs have tried (and succeeded in some states) to reduce access to contraception and women’s health care, including abortion services (for instance thru Planned parenthood although not one dollar goes to abotion services thru PP -or anywhere else for that matter. due to the Hyde amendment. That is smaller government? Nope.
@leejcaroll – I don’t know what planet you live on, but when government gives less money to an organization like Planned Parenthood, that results in smaller government. Think about it and take it to an extreme. If the government funded nothing, it would be smaller. If the government did nothing, it would be smallest of all.
I saw another woman on CNN today try to claim that a government shutdown would cost us $200 million a day. What idiots believe this drivel? The net effect of a government shutdown would be to save money. The government spends more than it makes. That is the problem. Shutting it down would therefore save money. That is what is up for vote right now, for government not to spend more than it has. So if they government shuts down because Obama and the Democrats don’t get their whiney way to spend more money than they have, it is going to cost the government even more money? Yeah, right, and voting to spend even more money and making government even bigger is going to save us all money. That’s the way the Democrat mind works. Not based in reality, sorry. I’m not buying it.
Obamacare was suppose to be revenue neutral. What happened to that? Why would not funding it save the budget but funding it moves our government closer to bankruptcy and a poorer credit rating?
DavidM:
yep, I didnt knock her up, why should I pay for it.
That is like going into a whorehouse and being forced to pay for someone else.
DavidM:
that is pretty much my understanding of the Clinton years as well.
furthermore, he had the benefit of a huge economic expansion which most honest economists attribute to the work Reagan did to get the economic house in order after the Nixon and Carter years.
gbk:
Do you mean finite element analysis? Yes, I have done that and do it regularly for my work.
I have not read those papers.
I look at math as a way to model the physical world, not to define it; which seems to me to be what you are doing.
My own thinking [such as it is] about quantum mechanics is that if it seems so strange then we are missing something that we have not yet found. Just because the quantum level doesnt seem to follow our thinking doesnt mean we have to change our thinking about the space we inhabit.
A cat cannot be dead and alive at the same time.
Politics has everything to do with the natural world, animals engage in politics, what about a wolf pack or merkats or any animals which live in a social environment? We just do it better[?]. Or at least much more complicated/sophisticated.
We all engage in politics at different levels, from kindergarten to congress. We form alliances, we compromise, we cajole, we threaten, it is just part of who we are as human beings.
“shear” should be “sheer”
Need to read my own sometimes before the “big click.”
Bron,
“‘The world is analog’ . . . What does that mean?”
You’ve never done finite analysis? Knowing there is error due to the inability to scale because of the shear number of calculations involved? Have you not quantized so as to arrive at a solution? Do you own musical CDs?
This quantized approach works for engineering solutions to any particular problem, but fails in the context of cultural adaptation. This is why your binary (your words) philosophy fails. It refuses to allow for adaptation to self-made conundrums — it is unaware of feedback within its own definition of a system.
Can’t you even casually observe that the mechanizations of nature defy our ability to precisely quantify observations? Heisenberg did — back in 1927.
Have you not questioned the existence of irrational numbers? And if you have, doesn’t it make you a little queasy that some value, X, might be more accurately represented as a fraction rather than a decimal equivalent? Doesn’t it make you think that there might be something wrong in our most basic perceptions?
Have you not read of how the distributive property of elementary algebra was brought into question at a quantum level through the work of John von Neumann (he of little praise) and Garrett Birkhoff in 1936? In other words the algebraic assumption of:
a(b + c) = (ab) + (ac) is false given JvN’s study of quantum mechanics.
And what of the paradox presented in the double-slit experiment; repeated ad nauseam since the early 1800’s?
So, Bron, to return to your original question of, “what is analog … what does that mean” is to suggest to you that you gladly take the admission that the natural world is complex and yet refuse to apply this observation to the cultural structures that brought about this very observation.
Politics have nothing to do with the natural world. It is our own invention.
gbk:
“The world is analog”
What does that mean?
In my opinion the world is and our senses show it to us. We dont perceive through some intermediary, our senses reveal the world to us directly and our brains make sense of it.
I am part of nature as all humans are. I would disagree about cultural adaptation, we adapt the world to our needs. In my opinion it depends on the culture as to how we adapt the world to meet those needs. In the beginning we were forced to adapt but as we developed we adapted nature to our comfort. Those early efforts to overcome nature led to individual cultures.
I havent really thought about it but it seems to me that we were once forced into certain behaviors by nature so we could survive. Cultures arose from these early adaptations for survival. Food, climate, terrain, etc all imposed certain restraints on our ancestors and various cultures came about due to what we could call natural selection.
As time went on and we became more sophisticated we differentiated into Egyptians, Germans, Persians, etc. based on physical location. Our cultures evolved out of the necessity for the meens of survival in a local area.
At some point we started changing our environment to suit our needs rather than having to adapt to survive. But at all times man must obey nature if he wants to command her. We must all act within the limits of the natural world, I cannot jump out of 34th floor and expect to fly.
Since man is part of the natural world, he must follow the rules/principles of nature if he wishes to rise above nature. To fly we must understand the principles of flight, to dive deep into the oceans we must understand hydrostatic pressure. These come from observations of the natural world.
How do you think the founders developed our Republic? They observed human nature throughout recorded history and tailored our system to be in harmony with human nature.
We are in disharmony now.
Bron,
“If it isnt simple, then maybe there is something wrong with the answer.”
Oh, of course. If it’s not simple it must be wrong.
So here is my “simple” answer:
Reduce the DoD budget to $200B a year.
Bring back the draft so that those most benefiting of our foreign policy expenditures pay the most.
I’ll leave it at that for now.
Bron,
“I am curious why it is bad to be simplistic or binary or whatever it is you want to call it?”
Look outside your window. The world is analog, Bron.
It is only human thought that tries to compartmentalize it, and this is a very sharp two-edged sword. It is necessary for our survival as a species as we are the only species reliant on cultural adaptation for survival, yet our very success can make us believe that we are not dependent on the natural world, that we are mere observers — which is not true. This is the height of hubris.
You miss this point. You seem to feel that you are outside of the constraints of the natural world, the one we all interact with everyday. You seem to think that political structures are defined by the natural world when, in fact, they are defined by cultural adaptation.
Remove yourself from your own equations of thought, Bron, and then see where they lead. The world will not crumble due to your absence.
Bron,
“Can you say something like “Bron: yes washingto does need to cut spending. Here is what I would do……”
I just did. So sorry I didn’t phrase it in a way that you recognized.
“I think if washington is spending too much money, the answer is to cut costs across the board. Why pick and choose?”
Because we can, or at least pretend we can; it’s probably too late though.
Because helping people is preferable to bombing them for thirteen years, as a most recent example.
Because the obscene amount of money we spend on propping up the illusion of “free markets” through our military excursions is distasteful to me and extremely hypocritical.
Why do your arguments never address our country’s foreign policy, nor the near mercantilism objective of said?
Why are your complaints of people feeding at the trough limited only to people that you consider lazy, uneducated, and deserving of the ramifications of their decisions? Why does your definition of the government trough not extend to weapons manufacturers, large corporations that pay little or no taxes, pharma, banks, etc.
I guess you’re truly a patriotic american as your proclivity is to denigrate those with fewer options and unable to fight the leviathan of free trade rather than the militaristic incursions and financial structures necessary to achieve that which you so blindly support.
gbk:
I am curious why it is bad to be simplistic or binary or whatever it is you want to call it?
I got on a discussion on another blog about implementing a particular management style within a company. From my experience and knowledge I offered 3 things which had to happen if it was going to take place.
I never had another word of input as I was dismissed as being too simplistic in my assessment of what needed to happen. They talked this way and they talked that way and some young MBA offered a complicated spread sheet that was near worthless but which he said companies paid big money to use to diagnose their management problems.
After about 6 weeks they came back with their well thought out conclusions which were the same exact 3 things I had begun with.
If it isnt simple, then maybe there is something wrong with the answer.
There is no complexity in a budget deficit, there is only too much spending. There is no great analysis which needs to done to understand the cure.
The type of spending is based on the overall philosophy of those in charge of the purse strings. The argument is not over what is purchased but why deficit spending takes place in the first place.
gbk:
I think if washington is spending too much money, the answer is to cut costs across the board. Why pick and choose? Why not just make a simple 1 or 2% reduction in spending, actual spending and not just the rate of increase and do it every year.
Can you say something like “Bron: yes washingto does need to cut spending. Here is what I would do……”
Then I would say that is a good idea or would say I disagree and here is why.
What do you think about a small cut in the actual spending applied every year until we get down to levels of spending in some predetermined base year?
But the debt under bush was no more than 4% of GDP. And the GDP increased by almost 50% as it did under Clinton.
Financially speaking, Bill Clinton was the best president we have had since Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge.
One thing you can take away from recent history is that a good economy can take care of deficits if spending is restrained.