In an attempt to understand the thinking of UNLV officials with regard to possible disciplinary actions against Professor Hoppe for statements he made in his class about homosexuals having "high time preference", EconomicsDaily.com attempted to reach the president of UNLV and various UNLV regents. UNLV President Carol Harter did not return our phone calls and a number of regents stated they could not comment on the situation at this time. However, Regent Linda C. Howard, while stating she could not comment specifically on the Hoppe situation until she had more facts, did provide some insights into her thinking with regard to academic freedom and what she described as "protected groups."
She first told EconomicsDaily.com, when told that Hoppe said homosexuals tend to have high time preference, "Yeah, they say that about blacks also." When asked if she felt that some blacks might have higher time preference, Howard, who is black, said "No." She said she was not afraid to be controversial and that certain groups need to be protected. "If homosexuals are not defined as a protected group by federal law, they should be."
When asked if she believed in academic freedom, she said not for those attacking "protected groups."She then explained that in 2001 before the Campus Student Environment Committee at UNLV she complained about an accounting professor who had a spread sheet up on a screen and when moving the cursor to another section of the screen he said of the cursor, "You drag this little black guy over here.""That took the cake" she said. "This was highly offensive, especially given that it was during the trial of the men accused of dragging the black man, Charles Byrd, in Texas." She said of her complaint, "They didn't get rid of him right away, but they eventually did."
"Professors have to be careful what they say," Howard concluded.
Note that she admits that the administration was trying to "get rid of," and ultimately succeeded in removing, an accounting professor who made what might fairly be considered to be an innocuous if insensitive remark.
Read the original here.
3 comments:
And for those of you who think that defenses of academic freedom come only from the left, there are a number of conservative academics (including several who know and dislike Hoppe personally, for good reason) who are vigorously defending his rights.
You can draw a line through a single data point in any direction. Two data points make a line, but rarely does that line actually describe reality. Between badly conceived speech codes and anti-liberal monitoring projects, I think there's plenty of disgust to go around.
Valid point, one that I never disputed.
Why is it that I keep objecting to things you write, and you keep agreeing with my points? Is it that I'm missing your point? Or are you having too much fun scoring partisan points to be careful about what you write when you can always correct in comments?
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