Last summer, I devoted considerable space to the case of John Bonnell, the Macomb Community College English professor whose occasional use of profanity in the classroom has made him the target of a sustained administrative witch hunt at his school (read the entries and related links in order here, here, here, here, and here). Bonnell has been suspended without pay from teaching several times since 1998, when a fragile woman student filed a complaint against him for using profane language in class. Over the years, as Bonnell refused to alter his pedagogy, eloquently defended his rights, and publicly protested the school administration's treatment of him, Macomb Community College has decided that Bonnell is a serial sexual harasser whose classroom constitutes the proverbial "hostile environment." Since 1998, they have disciplined him and counseled him, suspended him and threatened him, tracked his speech and punished him for it, despite the fact that the school is a public institution obligated to uphold the First Amendment. They have also forbidden him to discuss the details of his situation, warning him that if he attempts to defend himself publicly, they will consider him to be in violation of the complainants' confidentiality. In the dim and distorted vision of the MCC administration, John Bonnell's right to speak up on his own behalf is trumped by the rights of his accusers never to be challenged; even if he conceals their identities, they claim, Bonnell will be guilty of "retaliating" against them if he makes the basic facts of their accusations known.

All the while, the MCC faculty union has looked on, unwilling to defend one of their ranks despite the chilling and abusive nature of the MCC administration's pursuit of Bonnell. By its silence, the union upholds the school's spurious and overbroad rule that says professors can be disciplined for speech that is not germane to class content. How "germanity" is to be defined, and how Bonnell's allegedly harassing speech could be found to be "not germane" when no adminstrators saw his class for themselves, when many students testify that Bonnell's speech was always germane, and when only a few, anonymous complaints form the basis for their determination, are not questions that trouble a faculty union that appears to be more interested in accruing moral capital than it does in defending a man who is being punished for saying "fuck" in class.

Bonnell's most recent suspension without pay came last summer. It was occasioned by a complaint filed last spring by a woman student taking one of his courses. It seems Bonnell wounded this delicate feminine flower when he explained to his class how sexual innuendo works in a Joyce story. She was shocked; she was appalled; she could not see what this pornographic content was doing in the chaste and upright atmosphere of a college English course; she decided to join the small and bitter ranks of former students who claim to have been "degraded," "humiliated," "sexually violated," stalked (via nightmares--as if we can control what we do in other people's dreams), and "verbally raped" by Bonnell. She filed a complaint; Bonnell was duly punished with the usual combination of public humiliation and economic deprivation. No matter that in casting Bonnell as a predator and pursuing his reputation and livelihood as aggressively as she did, this student's frivolous and narcissistic attack might itself be described as harassment (not to mention defamation). It was Bonnell who bears and the responsibility for being falsely accused, and it is Bonnell who is now living out the legacy of this most recent chapter in his hellish history as Macomb Community College's favorite dirty old scapegoat.

Last August, Bonnell received a memo advising him that his return to the classroom this fall could well be his last. He was warned against offending students (as if any teacher who pushes students to think and who gives honest feedback can avoid that), he was forbidden to use language that the school does not consider to be germane to his course content (though he was not advised how the school defined "germane"), and he was informed that at any point, without notice, his classroom might be visited and evaluated by an administrator (though he was not told whether visiting evaluating administrators would make themselves known when and if they did appear). "In view of your recent public declarations that you will not change your behavior, the College will monitor your classroom performance via periodic administrative visitations and interviewing of students
beginning with your return to teaching in the Fall 2003 term," the document said. The memo also extends an "offer" to "train" Bonnell--at the college's expense--"in the subjects of sex harassment and/or diversity." The thrust of the memo--if I may use such a loaded, potentially wounding, hostile environment-inducing term--was that Bonnell's job is on the line. Bonnell will be fired if one more student takes offense--real or imagined, legitimate or not--and his thirty-seven year career teaching English at Macomb will be over. I quote from the memo's final lines:

In view of the progressive disciplinary actions taken against you and the unsuccessful attempts to counsel you, I must inform you that the College will not tolerate any further violation of its policy against sex harassment or its policy against the use of profane, obscene or vulgar language that is not germane to course content as measured by professional standards (both of these policies were incorporated into the College policy prohibiting unlawful harassment in March, 2003). Nor will the College tolerate any future digressions into sexual topics that are offensive to a reasonable person and unjustifiable as measured by professional standards. A future transgression of any of these standards will result in a recommendation that your employment be terminated.

How do you function under conditions such as these? How can a teacher teach when he cannot--must not--let himself become totally absorbed by class discussion, but must instead monitor and second-guess himself, watch his every word, think before he speaks of every possible way that every student sitting in the room might, if he or she were inclined, misconstrue, misunderstand, or twist the professor's words? I asked Professor Bonnell, and he responded at eloquent length. I'll post his response in installments, starting tomorrow.