FoxNews is running an article about a University of Illinois professor who was fired after expressing Catholic views of natural law regarding sexuality in e-mails related to a class he was teaching on Catholic Morality.
While the article indicates that "The professor, Ken Howell of Champaign, said his firing violates his
academic freedom," it should also be noted that he was an adjunct professor.
That means he didn't have tenure nor was he tenure track. This, of course, means that his job was never particularly secure to begin with. It also shows what people are talking about when they say tenure protects academic freedom. Had he been a tenured professor he might have a case that this violates some freedom. Adjuncts, however, are slaves to the system. They are cheap labor to fill in for classes that graduate students can't teach yet.
The fact that he was an adjunct for nine years might also be a count against him. Unless he is doing some really amazing work in his field or in some field (or unless he is married to a tenured professor), the school most likely had little reason to keep him around. Indeed, adjuncts can have something of a shelf-life, and a new crop of younger, fresher faces who failed to land tenure-track jobs are always looking to bump off the old adjuncts.
I'm not even entirely sure what the article means by his being "fired." Did they strip him of his classes mid-semester, or have they just not decided to rehire him for the fall? I don't see why any school would be under a contractual obligation to rehire an adjunct.
If I were the chair of his department and facing a lawsuit, I would just
turn around and say that he was no longer needed or that I had to make
budget cuts in our worsening economy.
Apparently, he was also the director of their Newman center, but lost his position after he could no longer teach at the school. I don't quite get the logic there, but, oh well.
I'm also not sure why the University of Illinois was running classes on Catholic Morality in the first place.
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