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Sunday, October 16, 2005
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A website that’s there but shouldn’t be. A website that’s not there but should be. The website that’s there but shouldn’t be belongs to Western Oregon University professor Gary Welander (we met him earlier at University Diaries, here). Although convicted years ago of sexual abuse, and although forced to settle big money on one of his university students because of similar abuse, he has been able to hold onto his job at WOU because, for reasons unknown, the place tenured him. The best the university could come up with by way of punishment was a one-semester suspension. His colleagues were so appalled he’d be back on board, everything hunky-dory, teaching two courses the next semester, that they wrote a letter to the university president begging him to reconsider. That president left, and the new interim president said okay, he won’t teach. Instead, he gave Welander a new job, at full salary, “tracking the academic eligibility of student-athletes .” Although Professor Welander has now been prevailed upon to retire, his chatty WOU website continues to tout his expertise in “Personalizing [the] Classroom Climate.” The invaluable Robert KC Johnson, at Cliopatria, describes the “dispositional” bullying of students at Washington State University by the school’s education faculty (for background on the testing of education students for the right disposition, go here). UD is particularly impressed by one WSU ed professor, who urged the ouster of a dispositionally non-conforming student, a mature man who is the father of four mixed-race children. He is, she wrote in official correspondence, a “white supremacist,” with “emotional problems that are manifested in his racist beliefs.” She goes on to note that the student is a hunter and sometimes wears a hunting cap to class. However, he “never made any personally threatening comments to me.” This chick is some dispositional Stakhanovite. She roots out racists and gun nuts whom the rest of us might miss. UD wants to know more of her. Johnson links to her website. But when UD raced over there, emptiness was all she found. *** Update: John Leo weighs in on the Swan case and disposition mandates. |