The New York Times Ethicist, Randy Cohen, asks whether Texas Tech was right to create a crony-mandated professorship for disgraced former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who will be teaching one course for $100,000.
Well, it’s a real brain twister, but Cohen comes up with the correct answer: No.
The only argument his defenders have is that it’s valuable for students to listen to someone who’s been there, at the heart of history, etc. Cohen responds that there’s a difference between people who happen to have been around when things were happening, and scholars able to reflect on those things:
A better way of studying Gonzales’s “direct hands-on involvement” in Washington would be for him to deliver a series of public lectures that students could subsequently analyze under the tutelage of actual scholars, who would earn in a year what Gonzales would be paid for one hypothetical hour of nostalgic palaver… Tech is paying him a lot of money to do a job for which he is unsuited. It was improper for the school to offer and indecorous for Gonzales to accept.
April 30th, 2010 at 11:50AM
[…] substantive embarrassments its students could make a fuss about. They pay Alberto Gonzales $100,000 to teach one course a year. They gave millions of dollars to Mike Leach, and, now that […]
February 28th, 2012 at 4:25PM
[…] Texas Tech hired disgraced Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – paid him $100,000 to teach one course. […]
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[…] Tech craves pain, whether from Alberto Gonzales or its, er, hit parade of coaches. When the players eventually leave or revolt, or when the […]
June 14th, 2015 at 1:09PM
[…] Provincial? What other university in America would give a disgraced former attorney general/crony $100,000 a year to teach one course? […]