The Florida Atlantic University professor who believes Sandy Hook was a hoax, with the parents of the dead children diabolically pretending to be parents of dead children, has lost his legal effort to get reinstated into his tenured job at that most pathetic of American universities.
He tried to make it a free speech case, but FAU successfully argued that it fired him because he doesn’t fill out required forms.
Jurors were first asked to decide whether Tracy’s blog posts were “a motivating factor” in the university’s decision to fire the professor from his 11-year tenured position. If they answered that question yes, they were to decide if the school would have terminated Tracy if he hadn’t publicized his conspiracy theories.
Since they answered no to the first question, they didn’t have to answer the second one. By deciding that Tracy’s blogs weren’t a “motivating factor” for university officials, they apparently accepted FAU’s claims that Tracy was fired for failing to fill out a mandatory form reporting his outside activity to his bosses.
You and I know why this veteran conspiracy theorist didn’t fill out those forms, right? Because the forms came directly from the Office of Aliens Trying to Fuck With My Head and Damned If I’m Going to Give Them the Keys to my Precious Bodily Fluids.
So it’s all over except for this. Why is FAU, a vile school that tenures the vile, allowed to exist?
December 12th, 2017 at 1:19PM
so Lane Kiffin has a place to coach…
December 12th, 2017 at 1:34PM
John: yes: a marriage made in heaven.
December 13th, 2017 at 7:57AM
While I completely agree with the outcome of the trial, the reality of the case is very different. Of course the university actually fired him because of his actions against the victims of the shootings. Tenure rules being what they are however made it impossible to fire him for that. Academic freedom demanded that he prove the shooting was all a hoax. Paper work not filed is a fireable offense. This is very similar to the firing of the Dean of the Divinity School at Harvard (some one I knew and respected). He was caught with a hard drive full of porn (legal porn adult women). The president of Harvard decided it was unseemly to have a Divinity School dean with a porn addiction. So he removed him for misuse of a university owned computer. As Alan Dershowitz pointed out they would not have fired him if he had been caught playing solitaire for hours on the computer. In his case, however, he was not removed from his professorship just no longer dean.
December 13th, 2017 at 10:03AM
Bruce: Yes. Recall the similar case of Ward Churchill. Of course the university fired him because of his disgusting post-9/11 comments; but they had to find something else (in his case, plagiarism) in order to get rid of him. I agree these cases make a free speech advocate uneasy. It would be more honest, in cases of faculty moral degenerates, to try using the ‘moral turpitude’ clause. But basically I have no sympathy for most of the schools who find themselves in these quandaries: mindless political correctness hires, or just absolute indifference to who they scoop up off the street to teach courses (I suspect this was the case at FAU – they even tenured the dude), is often to blame.
As to the Harvard dean – how dumb to put it on your university computer!! For that alone he deserved at least a demotion to altar boy.
December 13th, 2017 at 2:44PM
James Tracy may, or may not, be a vile human being. But I’ve yet to read anything that claims he phonied up research. He was fired because he was a jerk. Which brings up the curious case of Pamela Ronald, a Ph.d geneticist at UC Davis. She’s long been a proponent of GMO plants and crops. Where she’s analogous with Jim is that she’s been a complete jackhole toward her opponents, including fellow scientists. Unlike James Tracy, she was given a public platform to spew, imo, vulgarities that rival whatever it is Tracy stated.
But there’s a problem for ol’ Pammy. See, she’s had three of her scientific papers retracted, due to, ahem, poor research techniques. The woman did it three times, and when confronted with initially with her fraud, she stayed in Pam Mode and attacked the other scientists, European, if memory serves, for their supposedly poor research. Only after repeated attempts for her to clarify the anomalies did she finally retract her work. Again, not once, but three times.
One can bring up the question of how did peer review so badly fail, but leaving that aside, James Tracy got fired for being a jerk. Pamela Ronald has been a jerk and a lousy scientist. One is no longer employed, the other still has her lab. Uh huh…..
December 13th, 2017 at 5:26PM
I was at a meeting of the Texas Council of Faculty senates once, and they had a lawyer-type get up and tell us how they always will get ya: Forms. In this case, his example was travel forms. If they want you, and if your work is at least good enough to have gotten through Post Tenure Review, or your issue is having been controversial, or mouthed off to an administrator, here is what they do: They go through your travel forms. Because there is always something wrong in the travel forms, and it’s as easy to imply malicious intent as to imply an honest error.
In all honesty, that’s not at all reassuring.
December 13th, 2017 at 5:54PM
dcat: There’s something very Yes Minister about it all… Sir Humphrey Appleby lives…
December 15th, 2017 at 6:14PM
God, I love Yes Minister/Yes Prime Minister.
December 15th, 2017 at 8:08PM
dcat: There was a time when our lives revolved around it…