Rosalyn Kahn, the Citrus College adjunct speech professor who was recently caught giving students extra credit for writing anti-war letters to President Bush and for writing pro-adjunct professor letters to their local senator, has been put on paid leave. Last week, FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) busted Kahn; Citrus College admins have since distanced themselves from her actions, apologizing to her students, writing to President Bush and said senator rescinding the letters Kahn solicited, and promising to "sanction" Kahn. There was some debate on Critical Mass and JoanneJacobs.com about whether Kahn should be fired. No one, however, suggested that she be punished with vacation time. Clearly the disciplinary imagination of the American public is far less advanced than that of academic administrators. O brave new world of higher ed, that has such sweet sanctions in it.

MSNBC interiewed a representative of FIRE (Holversen [sp?]) and the President of Citrus last night. It was very interesting. It should be pointed out that FIRE spoke very highly of the President for taking immediate steps to review the situation, acknowledging openly and candidly that a signficant error in judgment had been made and then immediatley remedying the situation. When the issue of paid leave arose, the President stated that the College respected the adjunct's due process rights and did not wish to terminate her or withhold pay until it completed the investigation and gave her an opportunity to respond. FIRE responded that they support due process rights as fervently as they do free speech rights and supported (or at least did not attack) Citrus' interim measures. I would like to add that the FIRE representative made quite a good impression. He was (as one would expect) both well spoken and gracious. He made his points well and did it without attacking the character of the school, the personality of the President or otherwise engage in ad hominem attacks. To me -that is how one sways public opinion and the only thing that leaves me with some optimism for the future is the fact that the ideolgouse of the left instinctively get ugly and go for the jugular - when a little charm and wit would win the day. (And yes, the same could be said for Michael Savage, Pat Buchanan, and Ann Coulter, for whom mean-spirited nastiness is the order of the day.) Good job FIRE.

A fair point about due process rights. If the paid leave lasts longer than about 2 weeks, though, my opinion of Citrus College will turn to vinegar again...

The silly woman should obviously be given her walking papers. She's almost as damn dumb as Bush--and that's saying something.

I agree with David. Citrus should give "Professor" Kahn a couple of weeks to come up with one really good reason why she shouldn't be FIREd. If she can't, they should act quickly and put her out of our misery.

Her leave might well be spent in Iraq, after the fighting is over, helping count chemical and biological weapons. Reality therapy, if you will.

I think you are being too hard on the college. Paid leave is actually a powerful legal tool. Because Citrus College is a state run institution, Kahn is a state employee and therefore has a substantial degree of employment protection. If they dismissed her, she would have grounds for legal action against the college (wouldn't it be neat if she got lots of damages for her behavior?), so the college is obliged to follow due process. If they put her on unpaid leave, she would again have a legal claim that she was effectively being starved into a settlement. Paid leave means the college has effectively declared her guilt without saying so. She no longer exists on their website.
The legal system protecting state employees in California may be wrong, but given that system, Citrus College is almost certainly right in putting her on paid leave. The issue is protection of state employees, not academics. (And I don't believe I am saying something nice about academics.)

Norman:

Until now I thought you were a sentient being. Then the "dumb Bush" canard.

Prez Bush is making a living taking fools like you to the cleaners. Every time I hear somebody repeat that rhetoric, I know that another fool has had his clock cleaned by Mr. Bush.

The president is a very clever man. I suggest that you continue to underestimate him. You'll continue to lose.

Now that I know what your agenda is, I will view your further posts with that in mind.

By the way, I attend a black Baptist Church. My pastor handled this just the right way. Although he is clearly a democrat, the pastor had this to say about Prez Bush: "Let's pray for the man to make the right decision."

I say, amen.

Dear Stephen:

I was counting the minutes until someone rose to the defense of the current cretinocracy. You do not dissappoint. You deploy a curious definition of cleverness in that you apply the term to a guy who within a year and a half has converted most of the civilized world from heartfelt solidarity and intense sympathy with the US to a strong sense that US "leadership" is at least as murderous and a helluva lot more dangerous than Osama (or Sadaam).

NL

NL:

Perhaps, you prefer a fellatiocracy.

How heartfelt could that solidarity really be if it could fade so quickly. Do you really believe that Bush is as murderous as Osamma or Hussein? Saddam, literally, had the blood and brains of his victims splashed on his face as he shot, beat and stabbed them personnally. And Osama, admitted he was behind 9-11. So, please give us a break. Or do you think we are also cretins? We certainly aren't as smart as you, now then are we, after all you've had articles published!

The complaint against Prez Bush is that he is really a man. Norman, I gather that you are one of those who think that this is criminal or laughable.

We're enemies, that's true, and you will be on the losing side.

So, you're a feminist, which means you are a Marxist, which means that under all the fine verbiage you are a Stalinist.

America has had to go it alone through two World Wars, and it may have to do it again.

This is not the Vietnam war, Norman. Try to come to grips with the current reality, although whether you do or not is of relatively little importance.

This space is too small to fully discuss your silliness, but I will tell you that deposing Mr. Bush will not end this war. The real issue is this. Arab and Asian men will not cut their balls off voluntarily, as white American men have done. Nor, for that matter, will black American men. I have more respect every day for black men for refusing to castrate themselves.

You are an irrelevant critter, Norman, lost in the past and without a clue as to what is really going on. And you think that you belong to the annointed. That is the real joke!

I take your assessment of your own importance at face value. Nonetheless, you deserve a brief response. First, I'd rather have a Chief Magistrate who cops a blowjob once in a while than a kleptomaniac who blithely cashes in on insider trading and steals elections with the help of crooked judges whose close relatives are on his payroll. If you object to this characterization, go find another universe to live in, one that is more accessible to your limited powers of penetration.

Further; does anyone, at this point, seriously contend that Bush is chiefly interested in disarming Iraq? On the contrary, it has been horrified by the spectacle of the inspections teams doggedly and systematically dismantling such "weapons of mass distruction" as the Iraqi's still have; the fact that the inspectors have already effectively neutralized the Iraqui military to a great extent incenses Wolfowitz & Co., as the rationales for an attack get thinner and thinner. Be assured that if the British resolution passes the Security Council, and if every last demand is complied with, Bush will still do his war dance and send in the cannon fodder. What, pray tell, is your estimate of "collateral damage" in an attack on Baghdad?

A year ago, I rather enthusiastically supported direct action against Iraq; but I had the common sense, as I insist, to think that if it were possible to gut the Iraqui weapons programs without direct military action, or if it turned out that those programs were much feebler than I expected, then war would be both immoral and stupid.

It was Bush et al themselves who converted me to an irenic position on this issue. They lie to goddam much, and they do it stupidly. The only real upshot of an invasion, as I see it, is that every tinpot state in the world will acquire its own damn "doomsday device" as a hedge against a similar fate. These days, you don't need an 80-megaton cobalt bomb; a few vials of appropriate microorganisms will do just fine, and every day they're becoming easier and easier to acquire, even for a dirt-poor government.

Read Garwin's book.

The amiable Stephen gasses forth once more.

He is, by his own admission, a communicant of a Black Baptist church. The race is irrelevant, but the doctrine is not. It follows, with high probability that Stephen is a scientific ignoramus, unless, by some quaint chance, he challenges the doctrine of such churches on the question of evolution. If not, he is every bit as pig-ignorant as the most obnoxious of postmodernists.

Finis.

NL

One of the more interesting aspects of the diversity crowd is their apparent tearful concern for black people.

Black people, in my experience, are overwhelmingly religious. I've lived in black communities in Chicago, San Francisco and New York. I often encounter my liberal friends carrying on about their supposed concern about blacks. This is almost always juxtaposed by a belief that those who are sincerely religious and believe in a living God are ignorant, supersitious and backward.

And you are wrong. I am not a communicant. Haven't joined the congregation yet. Was born Catholic.

And laughably wrong. I work in a high level technical field. In fact, I work on research on building a functioning Holodeck. I am a programmer, designer, technician supreme.

The notion that religious faith is based on ignorance is once of the most hideous of the Stalinist lies.

You are a Stalinist to the core, aren't you, Norman? Dreaming of launching your own Gulag?

Ah, the very intellectual NL shows his true intention. He just wants to call people who disagree with him names. Oooh, I feel so chastised, I feel so inadequate. Unfortunately, since my powers of penetration are so meager, I don't have the vaguest idea how to move to another universe. Pehaps you could give me directions.

Ansewr me this, oh knowledeable one, who has murdered more people Saddam or Bush? And what more stupid lie could possibly have ever been uttered by a US President than, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman?"

By the way, I did not vote for Bush. I did vote for Clinton twice. I voted for Gore. I am not a member of the Republican Party (nor the Democrats). But I still know that Saddam Hussein must be stopped before he succeeds in his evil plans.

Love the nobody important moniker. That certainly does describe what white hetero men have become in the political equation.

I voted for Clinton not once, but twice. Just like you I feel betrayed.

The reason I feel betrayed is not because he had sex in the Oval Office. Hell, John Kennedy already did that.

The reason is that he and his wife were leaders of the political movement that made great causes out of sexual harassment and sexual indiscretions. Literally thousands of men lost their jobs and their reputations as a result. Many men went to jail.

And the Clintons want an out for themselves. That's the problem. It's a serious problem that shows that the sexual harassment and domestic violence campaigns were subterfuges designed to conceal their real intent. The Democrats, we discovered, were only against sexual harassment when it wasn't one of their guys. And the feminists also showed their true colors, Clinton gave them things, so they wanted him to remain in office.

Okay, I am going to bring this conversation down a notch (sorry Erin) because I would like to use the anonymity of this board to tell the world what really pissed me off about Bill Clinton's Oval Office oral sex life. Lewinsky testified that she provided oral service to Bill on numerous ocassions but Bill never let her 'complete' the task. Instead, Bill would let Monica go 99 out of 100 yards and then Bill would complete the act himself in an Oval Office sink. It appears that Bill did this so he could deny plausibly [sic] that he had sex with that woman because the sex act was not completed by that woman. How sick is that. My god man, a willing sex partner, like a brain, is a terrible thing to waste. It really annoyed me - and yes there may be a bit of jealousy at play here - because if through some twist of fate I find an intern throwing herself at me and begging me to let her go the whole 9 yards - you can be damn sure that I will not take matters into my own hand. What a waste of gratuitous, promiscuous sex! That is where he lost me. Okay, that's off my chest. Back to campus awareness.

Comments like white American men having "cut off their balls," and the movements to fight domestic violence and sexual harrassment being "subterfuges" designed to conceal, I guess, the vast feminist conspiracy...all suggest to me that Stephen has some issues with women.

Sure, some of the people involved in those movements are hypocrites (e.g., the NOW crowd that supported Clinton), and there are double-standards (e.g., women getting away with assaulting husbands who aren't physically strong enough to defend themselves). But I get the impression that Stephen isn't too upset about men beating the tar out of their wives, or women getting sexually assaulted in the workplace, as long as no man has to go to jail or lose his job for it. Then there'd be a true victim!

Oh, btw, Stephen, since you define yourself as a religious conservative, I assume you're pro-life. So, perhaps, you'd be OK with husbands going to jail for beating pregnant wives and inducing miscarriages...but if the woman wasn't pregnant at the time, obviously the nagging beeyotch deserved what she got?

Sorry if this argument pushes anyone's anti-PC buttons, but I've had friends who were assaulted, physically and sexually, by their significant others, and to hear their ordeals trivialized by implication like this makes me see red. People like Stephen need to remember to take off their tin-foil hats before they turn the microwave on, not after.

"If your'e anti-feminist your'e anti-woman" are you trying to peddle that crap my advice would be to grow a brain the world cannot be entirely defined by your narrow existance.