{"id":10452,"date":"2010-07-12T05:24:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-12T12:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10452"},"modified":"2010-07-12T05:24:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-12T12:24:00","slug":"i-have-no-idea-if-ken-howell-should-have-been-fired-or-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=10452","title":{"rendered":"I Have No Idea If Ken Howell Should Have Been Fired Or Not"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Crossposted on “Alas<\/a>” and on “TADA<\/a>.”]<\/em><\/p>\n

An adjunct professor who<\/a> taught courses on Catholicism at the University of Illinois has lost his teaching job there, and he claims it is a violation of his academic freedom.<\/p>\n

Kenneth Howell was told after the spring semester ended that he would no longer be teaching in the UI’s Department of Religion. The decision came after a student complained about a discussion of homosexuality in the class in which Howell taught that the Catholic Church believes homosexual acts are morally wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One thing that makes this story interesting is that we can actually read the email<\/a> Howell sent his class, which prompted the complaint (which we can also read<\/a>).<\/p>\n

My initial reaction, upon reading this story, was to think the U of I was wrong to fire Howell (technically, Howell wasn’t fired — he was just not asked to return).<\/p>\n

After all, the Catholic Church does <\/em>believe homosexual acts are wrong. A professor should be able to describe the Church’s arguments in a course about Catholicism. And Howell sounds very agreeable when he says things like this:<\/p>\n

Howell said he was presenting the idea that the Catholic moral teachings are based on natural moral law, and the Catholic understanding of what that means.<\/p>\n

“My responsibility on teaching a class on Catholicism is to teach what the Catholic Church teaches,” Howell said. “I have always made it very, very clear to my students they are never required to believe what I’m teaching and they’ll never be judged on that.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s an obvious free speech value in professors being able to state controversial and disliked opinions without being fired. And, as well, an educational value in students encountering a variety of views, including views that I hope most students disagree with.<\/p>\n

So Howell’s firing was unjustified, right?<\/p>\n

I’m not sure.<\/p>\n

1) We don’t actually know that Howell was fired (or not asked back) because <\/em>of the student complaint. That one event follows another doesn’t prove that one event caused <\/em>the other.<\/p>\n

2) Howell’s account is disputed. Howell claims to run a classroom in which students are encouraged to disagree with Howell’s own views. On the other hand, the letter of complaint claimed Howell “would preach (not teach) his ideology to the class …the teacher allowed little room for any opposition to Catholic dogma.” If<\/em> that claim is true, then U of I is entirely justified in not asking Howell to return.<\/p>\n

Of course, I have no idea if the claim is true or not.<\/p>\n

3) Judging from the one example of his teaching we can see — the email — Howell is arrogant, hypocritical, ignorant, and a bad teacher. As PZ says<\/a>, “I think it entirely reasonable to boot Kenneth Howell out of UI because he’s not very bright and doesn’t meet the intellectual standards I expect of UI professors.”<\/p>\n

In his email, Howell wrote:<\/p>\n

Unless you have done extensive research into homosexuality and are cognizant of the history of moral thought, you are not ready to make judgments about moral truth in this matter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In context, it’s clear that Howell considers himself to be someone who is ready to make judgments, based on what I can only assume he considers to be his own “extensive research into homosexuality.” Which is laughable, because Howell also wrote:<\/p>\n

To the best of my knowledge, in a sexual relationship between two men, one of them tends to act as the “woman” while the other acts as the “man.” In this scenario, homosexual men have been known to engage in certain types of actions for which their bodies are not fitted. I don’t want to be too graphic so I won’t go into details but a physician has told me that these acts are deleterious to the health of one or possibly both of the men. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Howell is plainly an ignoramus. But worse: He’s the kind of arrogant know-nothing who believes <\/em>he knows a lot, and presents myths to students as if they were facts. And he presents a terrible example of scholarship for students to emulate (i.e., “a physician has told me” — now there’s<\/em> a valid academic source!).<\/p>\n

If this email is a fair representation of Howell’s abilities as a teacher, then it’s likely that his students become more <\/em>ignorant, and worse <\/em>scholars, because they took his class. Frankly, if that’s why Howell was let go, then the only thing I’d ask is “what took them so long?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Crossposted on “Alas” and on “TADA.”] An adjunct professor who taught courses on Catholicism at the University of Illinois has lost his teaching job there, and he claims it is a violation of his academic freedom. Kenneth Howell was told … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[135,26,91,115,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crossposted-on-tada","category-education","category-free-speech-censorship-copyright-law-etc","category-homophobic-zaninessmore-lgbtq-issues","category-in-the-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}