A couple of recent news items from America's institutions of higher learning:
Item One: Drake University, a $35,000 per year private school in Des Moines, Iowa, that bills itself as providing a "thriving intellectual environment," is set to host David Ray Griffin as a speaker on April 23. Griffin will explain to Drake's students why 9/11 was not an attack led by a group of murderous radical Islamist thugs but was instead "an inside job led by Dick Cheney." I'm not joking.
Item Two: On Friday we learned about the story of Professor Ricardo Dominguez at UC San Diego. Dominguez, who is said to be a "scholar in the emerging field of electronic civil disobedience," led an "online sit in" protest on the President of the University of California's web site. In somewhat less flowery, 1960's parlance, he had 400 students launch something resembling a DOS attack that crashed the President's web site for an hour and a half. This is, the story noted, a violation of the University's rules and quite possibly a criminal act:
Joe Nalven, who worked as a private attorney in the 1990s and represented a UCSD professor facing dismissal, said he believes the university has a case against Dominguez.
“If he has done the things I've read that he's claimed, I would say it's actionable,” said Nalven, who lectures at San Diego City College. “There are limits to academic freedom.”
Tenured professors enjoy a certain level of academic freedom but have to comply with campus policies. UCSD's faculty code of conduct says unacceptable conduct includes “intentional disruption of functions or activities sponsored or authorized by the university,” and “unauthorized use of university resources or facilities on a significant scale for … political reasons.”
For his part, Professor Dominguez has come up with a somewhat bemusing defense: “A new form of art is not a crime,” he said to cheers from his fellow protesters.
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