The case of John Bonnell, the Macomb Community College English professor whose penchant for using sexually explicit language in class has landed him on the wrong end of an administrative witch hunt, has drawn plenty of response from readers. Those responses are as varied and divergent as one might expect on an issue as controversial and cloudy as this one. Academic freedom does have limits, though we are not particularly well equipped to specify what they are or how they should be defined. Harassment claims have their limits too, particularly those based on the notion of "hostile environment." But we are not always well able to decide at what point one person's expression becomes another's harassment. Add to that the defining problem in Bonnell's case: that he is caught in a classic he said/she said situation in which the administration and a small number of unnamed students say he is not teaching English and is instead using his classroom as a forum for imposing his sexual fantasies and general prurience on a captive audience, while Bonnell and a large number of named students claim he teaches responsibly and well, and that his use of profanity is always germane to the concerns of the course. No one knows for sure what happens in John Bonnell's classroom, except those who have been there. But because the MCC administration has chosen to give unquestioning credit to the allegations of some students, there is now a pressing need to find a fair and reasonable way to judge the situation. Here are some representative reader reactions.

Kimberly Swygert, college teacher and author of the testing blog Number 2 Pencil, posted a paean to the teaching prowess of offbeat, brilliant professors, while a reader wrote to me privately, stressing how distracting offbeat and offtopic professors can sometimes be:

I'm a First Amendment freak, and almost an absolutist. ÝHowever, I'm not sure this case is as cut and dried as you've made it out to be. ÝI do object to the image of the student as captive and needing protection from scary men saying "fuck." ÝHowever, I had a law professor who peppered his classes with stories about his personal sexual life. ÝThe first few times it was entertaining. ÝThe last fifty or so times all I could think was "And I'm paying $20,000 a year to hear about this schmuck's penis?" ÝI tuned it out and tried to learn about Wills, Trusts, and Estates anyway. ÝI never felt "harrassed." ÝI felt cheated.

Some readers have written to me to say that they think I am wrong to defend Bonnell because it is obvious to them that Bonnell is not doing his job--they cite as evidence the fact that he teaches composition courses as literature courses (though this is very commonly done), and that his course appears to be very loosely structured. Here's one such note:

A complicated case, which I think boils down to this: does academic freedom give a professor the right to teach and say whatever he pleases? Does academic freedom really give him the right to walk into his class and yell F****?

What troubles me is spelled out pretty well in one of the early student letters. Here's the key passage: "To begin with, the class was English 122-a composition class. However, the class was taught like a literature course in which we read stories and interpreted them. Unlike the regular composition courses, this course had no requirements for length of papers, organization of papers, or due dates of papers . . . ."

The flap about profanity seems to be obscuring the troubling issue of what he's actually supposed to be teaching. And if you drill down through this, it is at bottom the same thing that troubled the appeals court.ÝÝ

The fact that some students, or a good many, respond positively is hardly surprising. Students hardly embrace comp courses, it's not very stimulating to have to submit to a system of schedules and deadlines, and we'd all rather talk about Joyce than about writing. The positive student input, while not meaningless, is largely irrelevant to the basic issues.

I don't see much difference between this guy's case and a case I inherited from my predecessor when I took over as chair and discovered we had a comp teacher who, by the end of the semester, had not yet returned any student work with a grade on it (or at all, for that matter). Was I surprised when he claimed that criticizing his teaching methods violated his academic freedom? No.Ý

If Bonnell really is more interested in talking about his sex life than literature and writing, then that should be ascertained by the school via a careful and fair investigation of his effectiveness as a teacher. Such assessment should not be shortchanged or evaded altogether by heavyhanded applications of an overbroad harassment policy, and such an assessment should not focus fetishistically on Bonnell's techniques, but should rather center on their results.

One additional angle: Captain Yips posted a thoughtful note observing that Bonnell appears to have been abandoned by the MCC faculty union and that he might thus have a legitimate legal gripe with the union as well as the college administration. The good captain followed up his post with a fascinating letter to me detailing the results of his perusal of the 2001 court decision in Bonnell's 1999 suit against the school:

1) Prof. Bonnell says in his 1999 affidavit that most of the instances of crudity that were the original object of complaint were in response to student questions or comments. If this is so, someone, Bonnell or his attorneys, has done a poor job of defense. Bonnell's practice, it seems, is to give credit for class participation, and to run a pretty free wheeling class. These choices are easily within the very wide limits of academic freedom outlined by the Court of Appeals. If a student, so participating, initiates a discussion of sexual matters, Bonnell can't really be damned for replying. If he chooses to respond in demotic rather than formal English, well, that is his choice. Even under MCC's speech rubric, his speech is protected if he is responding to a student's question, so long as he is in fact answering the question. I am bewildered that this defense was not employed. Maybe a Volokh could explain this choice, but I can't.
2) Bonnell mentions that the average age of his students is 26. If this is true, the case becomes hazier. If MCC serves mostly older students, the relationship between teacher and student is a little different than with 18 year olds.
3) One of the class discussions was begun because a cartoon with sexual content was on the wall of the classroom, one normally used by another department. It's very reasonable to argue that MCC is selectively enforcing its policy, making a target of Bonnell under the cover of its language policy.

On the other hand, as the Court of Appeals points out, MCC has responsibilities arising out of its obligations to maintain an unoffensive environment. I believe (and I haven't had time to look this up) that the "offensive environment" idea was in the legislation. The EEOC's regulation does nothing to define "offensive environment": it merely proscribes "such conduct (that) has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance or creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment." The EEOC also imposes upon the employer a boatload of responsibilities: "Prevention is the best tool for the elimination of sexual harassment. An employer should take all steps necessary to prevent sexual harassment from occurring, such as affirmatively raising the subject, expressing strong disapproval, developing appropriate sanctions, informing employees of their right to raise and how to raise the issue of harassment under title VII, and developing methods to sensitize all concerned." (hey, I make my living splitting bureaucratic hairs. It's useful, sometimes) An "offensive environment" can be anything at all; it takes no imagination whatsoever to come up with ludicrous (or to lampoon the misspelling of one of Bonnell's complainers, lewdicrous) examples. I think an argument might also be made that MCC's policy unnecessarily broadens the "offensive environment" notion. The prospect of a complaint of religious discrimination for teaching Superinflation or superstring theory looms. While the Supreme Court really fights off most First Amendment restrictions, the "offensive environment" rubric becomes a backdoor to voluntary censorship. A great many of The Canterbury Tales have sexual content: do we omit those? Le Morte d'Arthur revolves around adultery; no Arthurian literature at all? Hamlet: out. Romeo and Juliet: out. We'll be left with The Wind in the Willows, and I am not too sure about that. Bad law leads to bad behavior.

Without a fly-cam on the classroom wall, it's probably impossible to cleave this hair. I think that if we have a case of the free wheeling class, with participation by students greatly encouraged, where Prof. Bonnell is reacting to statements or questions by students, then his speech, demotic or formal, is protected. If Bonnell initiates off-topic sexual discussions or reminisces, then students and MCC may have reason to complain. The bulk of the evidence to date suggests the former is true, and that MCC is overzealously protecting its otherwise legitimate interests.