Professor Forced Out for Citing George Washington:

A tenured college professor is set to be fired for simply sending out an e-mail to colleagues containing George Washington’s "Thanksgiving Day Proclamation of 1789.”

Already professor Walter Kehowski at Glendale Community College in Arizona has been placed on forced administrative leave and the schoolÂ’s chief has recommended his termination.

I can relate to this story. In the days after 9/11, I made the naive mistake of forwarding Gordon Sinclair's "The Americans" to my grad school email list. Yeah, not such a good idea on a college campus. While I didn't have a job to lose over it, I sure did bring the heat. One student went off-her-rocker mad, saying I was a racist and disrespectful for sending such garbage around. I was lucky that a couple of other students came to my defense. And, as I've written about before, my favorite professor took me aside and taught me a valuable lesson: "The last place it's OK to be American is in an American university."

What in the hell have we come to when quoting George Washington is now considered "'hostile' and 'derogatory'”?

Posted by: Sarah at 05:54 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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