Texas Tech doesn’t need any more bad news. They’ve already got Mike Leach, Alberto Gonzales, and the Tornado of Ideas sculpture. Plus really drunk nasty tailgaters.
On the other hand, given all its trouble, the school is clearly becoming seasoned in the ways of disaster management. It has, for instance, taken down the web page of Rod Hicks, who has an endowed chair in the health sciences center, very quickly indeed.
It’s now trying to track Rod down, but although “TTUHSC asked Dr. Hicks to come home from Austin yesterday, … instead of coming home when planned he took a different flight. Our sources say the university was unable to locate him Friday.”
The Hicks embarrassment is very postmodern, very high-tech, very much about cutting-edge universities and faculties making use of the latest online teaching equipment.
KCBD reports:
… [Hicks] was instructing students this week from Austin via teleconference. We’re told that when the class ended, he left the video feed open. This is when students on the other side of the feed saw Hicks surfing for sexual material.
… We’ve learned through an open records request that Hicks was removed Thursday from his professorship of the endowed chair.
As of Friday afternoon, federal records do not show criminal charges of any kind but it is our understanding he may face civil and administrative penalties…
So he’s teaching via tv from Austin because whatever… Something better than his classroom in Lubbock is in Austin… It’s a summer class and maybe he’s summering in Austin… All he has to do is interrupt his surfing for an hour or so a couple of times a week to teach this class…
But that’s just the problem! When all of life is switching among screens (Hicks got his PhD online from Capella), it’s easy to forget that sometimes you’re not alone…