My favorite college instructor was a leftover hippie who lived on a sailboat on the Great Salt Lake. He was an anachronism in the conservative climate of the late ’80s, but he was cool and I learned a great deal from him about philosophy and life and how to approach new ideas. Last I heard, he’d been forced into an early retirement and had moved his boat to Puget Sound, a victim of interdepartmental politics and changing notions of what constitutes a good teacher.
Now I hear that another professor for whom I have some fondness has been denied tenure. The reasons cited in the denial letter (which is published in its entirety here) sound almost like the sort of “guilt by association” nonsense of the McCarthy era:
Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.
Dr. Jones’s interpersonal skills and relationships are no better. By Dr. Jones’s own admission, he has repeatedly employed an underage Asian boy as a driver and “personal assistant” during his Far East travels. I will refrain from making any insinuations as to the nature of this relationship, but my intuition insists that it is not a healthy one, nor one to be encouraged. Though the committee may have overstepped the boundaries of its evaluation, I find it pertinent to note that Dr. Jones has been romantically linked to countless women of questionable character, an attribute very unbecoming of a Marshall College professor.
Fools. Bureaucratic fools.
