At the University of Southern Illinois at Carbondale, award-winning history professor Jonathan Bean has become the center of an impassioned controversy over the limits of academic freedom and the politics of balanced pedagogy. InsideHigherEd.com has the details:

...in the last two weeks, he has found himself under attack in his department --with many of his history colleagues questioning his judgment for distributing an optional handout about the "Zebra Killings," a series of murders of white people in San Francisco in the 1970s. His dean also told his teaching assistants that they didn't need to finish up the semester working with him, and she called off discussion sections of his course for a week so TA's would not have to work while considering their options.

Students and professors at the university are trading harsh accusations about insensitivity and censorship, talking about possible lawsuits, and assessing the damage. Shirley Clay Scott, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, sent a memo to faculty members warning that they could "easily self-destruct if we do not exercise restraint and reason."

Support for Bean appears strong on the campus, at least outside of his department and his dean's office, and several national groups that defend professors who get in trouble for their views have offered to help him.

Bean is receiving strong support from the campus paper, The Daily Egyptian, whose writers have expressed both support for professors' right to teach controversial material and faith in students' ability to differentiate among bogus and credible ideas. The staff editorial, "Feeling the Chill," is well worth reading--among other things, it suggests that the students at Carbondale have a stronger grasp of the principles of liberal education than many of their professors and certainly of their dean.

UPDATE: Ralph Luker has more.

AND ANOTHER 5/2: Writing for the Boston Globe, Cathy Young says Bean is the victim of a "witch-hunt", and accuses SIUC of engaging in "left-wing McCarthyism."

AND ANOTHER 5/5: The facts of the case as well as the issues it raises are being debated at Big Muddy IMC, Hiram Hover, and Cliopatria.

I had to read this several times to understand. So the dean is angry at this professor for a handout that, as far as I can tell, objectively reports a series of murders that occurred in San Francisco? So basically, the dean is angry that existence exists?

I think protests against the principle of identity really aren't going to obtain the results that Dean Scott would like.

It seems that reporting a series of actual events should not be such a thing of contention, but then I suppose revisionists wouldn't care for the outcome which in the case of the Bean document seemed to indicate to me that perhaps hate from any party is equally as repulsive.

Please check the links on this piece: both go to the same article in FrontPageMagazine.com.

So one may not examine factual reports about events in the past or observations?

The pendulum has swung and now the secular humanist liberal PC crowd is doing the Gallileo persecutions.

The reading was not optional and if you only report one side of the story then you will never know what exactly happened. He put the handouts in his TA's mailbox and sent an email to them the morning of providing some possible questions related to the article. The article was not condensed, he took out a whole paragraph which had links to other websites that in any sane person's opinion would be considered racist. He has also smeared his two TA's names because they recognized his academic dishonesty. He has given their names and their race to a number of white supremacist organizations. They are being tarnished for their race and for standing up for what was right. So please ask for the whole story before you get pieces of information from the professor or from other websites who don't know the truth.

Don't Know,

It's hard to judge the validity of what you are saying if you don't provide any sources for your statements. Would you care to do so.

"He has given their names and their race to a number of white supremacist organizations. They are being tarnished for their race and for standing up for what was right."

I am intimately knowledgeable about this incident and this is an outright lie. Better keep your posts anonymous to avoid what is known as libel.