One of the (many) reasons I left academic medicine. I suck at keeping my opinions to myself.
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The supreme court has managed to eviscerate public corruption law.
In theory, each representative and each senator can choose whatever standard they think appropriate-- and if they choose unjustly, the ballot box awaits. They are not obligated to follow McDonnell --or any first amendment caselaw, for that matter, and the supreme court cannot overrule them.
(Don’t get your hopes up.)
However, Rasmussen can sue for any number of reasons, including breach of contract. And each court is obligated to follow existing first amendment caselaw.
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If the university terminated Rasmusen, he would undoubtedly sue, probably with the backing of deep-pocketed conservatives. Anything the university does to otherwise deal with him is cheap by comparison.
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He’s a racist, sexist, homophobic prick. Don’t take his class. If you have to face him in grad school, protest to the administration and get a lawyer involved. Keep on him. Grind him up. Make it as slow and as painful as possible. Make staying more painful than leaving.
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A professor of this age would normally be at the tail end of his career. In many respects, he’s probably done subtle but nonetheless serious damage to the academic careers of quite a number of people.
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…the First Amendment.
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I live in Bloomington and feel it’s important to point out that this story is taking shape against the backdrop of a months-long debacle involving white separatists with a booth at the city farmers market. It’s been eye-opening for a lot of us to see the city refuse to take action to remove these people or even take action against armed militia members who showed up to “protect” the farmers from anti-fa. Bloomington has always been a white town, with a long and deep streak of Middle American conservatism, but for 30-40 years, that conservatism was at least balanced by a creative/bohemian community that leaned strongly to the left. As this city has become more expensive – the last 10 years have seen a great deal of development downtown, all of which have been high-priced apartments and lofts – it’s begun to feel a lot less like a lefty utopia and a whole lot more like the rest of the United States: sharply divided between the well-heeled and those who are barely making it from one paycheck to the next, and between those who still believe in tolerance, compassion, and justice and the Trumpers, who have always been here, but feel much more comfortable coming out into the light. I honestly don’t know what the future holds for this city, which I have always felt was an example for the rest of this benighted state.
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This is a footnote from one of his economics papers
- It should be understood that “Husband” in this model means “the spouse who is tempted by adultery,” not “the male spouse”. The conventional wisdom has it that men are more tempted than women, however, and this seems to be true in the 39 Fairfax County, Virginia cases examined in Allen & Brinig (1998). I am well aware that in most times and cultures, adultery law has treated men and women asymmetrically. The reasons why (evolutionary biology? the relative unimportance of adultery with prostitutes? the greater danger of violence from angry men?) are well worth exploring, which could be done using the framework of the present article. If in some cultures women do not mind the kind of adultery by husbands that occurs, then asymmetric laws would be efficient; if the laws simply ignore wives’ harm from adultery, they are inefficient. I judged it best to focus on the United States here."
Is the “Law and Economics” subdiscipline dominated by a certain type of man? When Richard Posner, for example, writes on the economics of sex, is he writing from the perspective of a man who believes he will not be challenged by feminists who haven’t yet discovered this particular clique?
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I just wonder if, with a class of all white dudes, he doesn’t engage in grade inflation.
Different funds - the sports budget is always an inviolable pool of money that can’t get used for anything else. Which just makes it more perverse when academic programs get starved of funds, as you end up with underpaid part-time, non-tenured staff increasingly making up the faculty (to “save money”) and even mediocre teams having millions spent on them.
Yeah, that’s true; I was assuming they’d set things up so that the alternate teachers were real replacements: i.e. that they’d have sufficient alternative classes to potentially fit everyone enrolled to take that class, and schedule all the classes at the same time, but just classroom space issues alone may not allow that. So I suppose they may not be real alternatives.
You’d need to have enough sections such that anyone who felt that teacher was creating a hostile learning environment could fit into another class. Which would be something between most and all students. Which potentially could amount to paying him to not teach classes.
Yeah, I was being too narrow in thinking about “costs” - there are a lot of costs not being borne by the school at all.
Yeah, there’s something to that - it’s not like he’s alone in being a reactionary idiot, but others are more careful about how they express it and have no controls put on them, so if one suspects another teacher is similar to him, he might be the safer choice.
I wonder if his advising duties are getting fobbed off onto other faculty members…
Yeah, especially, as others have pointed out, it’s other teachers who end up bearing many of those costs, not the school.
No doubt. And he’s not alone in that. I’ve heard so many stories from women in academia, about teachers who were openly worse than this in classes. No one did anything to try to mitigate the damage they were/are doing.
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Only for the ones who smirk approvingly when he makes snide asides about uppity women and undeserving people of color.
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Are you looking to pick a fight here? I suppose you’d argue that a “stick 'em up” mugger should mount a first amendment defense? Get out of here with that nonsense.
That is not what I mean.
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Trump was elected; Rasmusen was hired.
If he’s grading blind, he’d not be able to single someone out for agreeable smirking. But if that describes everyone in his class…
I don’t think I knew much about any of my university professors before I enrolled in their classes, it was mostly just a matter of finding matches for my course requirements. Of course that was also before internet infamy via social media was a thing.
Also if I am understanding this right there is at least one additional section of every class this Professor teaches, but that doesn’t mean that every student will be guaranteed a slot in the other section before it fills up.
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Welcome aboard, Comrade; and you are correct, the 2nd Amendment is an answer to nothing.
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The problem with eugenics is the eugenecists never seem to weed out any of the dumbasses. And by dumbasses, I mean those suggesting the cleansing! As this relates to the OP, the university is doing the correct thing, not the typical thing. Box him into a corner and let him hang his own self. The pitchforks and torches approach has, so far, not thinned the ranks of supremacists. Perhaps more sunlight will.
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America the Beautiful Perverse. 
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Yeah, I didn’t know anything about my professors before taking a class for the most part (occasionally there would be some student talk), but that was pre-web. In this case, it’s also national news, so it’d be hard to avoid.
Yeah, that’s the problem - if they don’t provide sufficient alternative classes to meet all the demand, they’re still potentially forcing students to take his class. Even with blind grading, it puts students into a hostile learning environment.
Self-cleansing eugenicists? Hmmm…
My undergrad university had no sports teams at all. Or rather, they had them (and a good one or two), but they were entirely self-funded - the university wasn’t spending money on them. That seemed like a great system. In grad school, the department I was in struggled to get funding (and had to look outside the school for it), whereas the football team, which was mediocre (it’s not like anyone was moving on to the pros from there) and whose games were poorly attended, was rolling in money, with grossly overpaid coaches, huge amounts spent on sports facilities, etc. The justification, apparently, was that alums gave money because of the sports teams, which is utterly perverse. (I’m hoping it was a generational thing, though, and as soon as the boomer alums die off, so will the sports programs. If only that was true for the rest of the country.)
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My university had lots of sports teams. Rugby, fencing, squash, tennis, netball, basketball, cricket, ultimate frisbee, etc etc etc.
The only people who cared about them or watched them play were (a) the players, and sometimes (b) their boyfriends/girlfriends. If they made the grand final or something, then perhaps their parents might show up to watch as well.
This is as it should be. If university sports are anything other than a casual hobby pursued for recreation and fitness, something is seriously wrong. It’s an educational institution, not an entertainment industry.
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