Professor get hypothetical! Hypothetical!

Robert M. O'Neil waxes irrelevant in Change Magazine: "Limits of Freedom: The Ward Churchill Case." O'Neil explores the question of what sort of speech would warrant firing a professor at a public university and concludes boringly that:

the administration would bear the heavy burden of persuading a committee of faculty peers that such statements did indeed constitute cause for dismissal from the faculty, if not from an administrative position, because they related "directly and substantially" to the accused scholar's "fitness in his professional capacity as a teacher or researcher."

I don't care. O'Neil points out a couple of times that this has nothing to do with the Churchill case as it, you know, actually happened, since everybody except maybe Bill Owens said Wart shouldn't be fired for his asshole statements--and, of course, he wasn't.

Update: Aw, shit. The kindly yet odd-smelling JWP of Pirate Ballerina points out in an e-mail that this is an old article:

Posted this to your "scholar" post, but I think the two links caused it to disappear into moderation hell:
While reading O'Neil's essay, I had a strange sense of déjà vu, so I glanced at the pub date: September/October 2006. Then I checked PB, and sure enough, I'd commented on the essay back in September '06 (http://www.pirateballerina.com/blog/entry.php?id=466). And the next day, PB posted Diana Deeley's commentary on same (http://www.pirateballerina.com/blog/entry.php?id=467).

Maybe I should allege a beatdown to distract attention! Yeah, that's the ticket!