Former SMU adjunct Elaine Liner--better known as the "Phantom Professor"--may have lost her job because of her tell-all campus blog. But now she could be looking at a movie deal.

Maybe they can do a movie on Ward Churchill too. Perhaps we are entering a new era of "Professors Gone Wild" on the silver screen?

I had more sympathy until I read that she's 51! Old enough to know a whole lot better and old enough to be quite a bit more generous. Her jealousy of her students' affluence and youth seems weird.

It would be ironic if she were to make more out of a single movie deal than she would have by working out the rest of her time teaching.

What the heck would the plot of a movie be? "Prof. starts tell-all diary, gets fired, gets lots of publicity. The End."

One side issue is that the local alternative paper she works for, the Dallas Observer (which is quite well written and has real news), ran a major, front page story about the drug and fake ID factory being run out of one of the SMU dorms.

That seems to have been more of a factor than most of the talked about ones in her case -- especially as she was blogging about the topic and seems to have been seen as the instigator of the story (though it is now believed to have originated in UT Dallas -- for which, SMU did a story about their dorms and the privatized contractor who quit doing maintenance and let them start rotting).

Interesting mess, all in all, one that would have been best ignored from a damage control/publicity angle.