This is why #slatepitch is a thing (for facile and lazy contrarianism). It ignores the MU admin claim (p 14 of the Holz letter) that the 2008 and 2011 incidents show that McAdams has established a pattern of provoking harassment of female students.
1) These pieces should always let McAdams speak for himself regarding the 2011 incident, in which he prints the name and email address of an MU undergraduate woman, phones her at home, and then prints how to find her phone number.
2) This piece neglects Abbate's own take, including her claims as to McAdams' deliberate word choices designed to inflame her harassers.
3) The piece is lazy; it doesn't cite the very relevant piece by Peter Kirstein at Academe.
4) Or the equally relevant piece by Ira Allen at Academe.
My take:
1) I think we can and should separate a) civil society / professional discussion (in which we should exercise appropriate critical reasoning, neither too credulous nor too skeptical, but for which the term "due process" is misapplied); and the following, for all of which some notion of "due process" is essential: b) institutional proceedings, in which the AAUP guidelines for due process can be a model; c) civil proceedings and d) criminal proceedings, each of which have their own standards of proof and process.
2) I don’t know the provisions of the MU process (which now begins in earnest), but I hope it includes the possibility of outside counsel, AAUP observation / participation, and other such actions, so that it will provide a rigorous testing of the administration’s claims and proposed penalty.
3) It seems to me that what MU's procedure will have to do is decide whether McAdams's claims to "academic freedom" are appropriate, or whether they are misused as an excuse for harassment (or whatever technical term the MU administration will seek to use). I take it everyone agrees AF does not excuse harassment (or whatever term is appropriate here), so the question is whether McAdams's actions fall inside or outside the scope of AF protection, that is, whether they constitute harassment (or the term MU wants to use).
Hi John,
I think your take is a nice outline of the situation. I've found it frustrating, as I follow/read various online contributions to the discussion of this case, that so many commentators make the following moves:
1) Register their distaste for McAdams' actions
2) Assert that these actions ought to be condemned by the professional community
3) Assert that there ought to be due process by MU in dealing with McAdams
4) Proceed to speculate about whether or not due process has been (and/or will be) followed
What seems missing is real and sustained outrage over McAdams' actions. I agree with you that the professional community ought to be concerned about due process but we should also remember that we are on the outside looking in (especially now, with Holz's letter being, to some extent, the beginning of the official proceedings). There are certainly issues that we have only partial knowledge of (due to confidentiality, etc.) but what we do have full knowledge of are McAdams' public actions.
Why the rush to wring our hands over a possible violation of "academic freedom" or a possible future violation of academic due process rather than to give a clear and unambiguous condemnation of actions that are in violation of commonsense norms of professional conduct (of a mentor or even a colleague)? In other words, I wish there were more people saying: this is ugly, unprofessional behavior that we as a community reject and we hope that it is resolved in a clear and equitable way by the relevant institutional parties.
The amount of energy being spent to parse "academic freedom" and to fret over due process rather than firmly rejecting McAdams' actions - and, perhaps even offering some expression of sympathy for the awful ordeal that Abbate continues to endure - must be (I worry) a disturbing testament of the priorities of the scholarly community to anyone suffering similar harassment.
Posted by: Russ Ford | February 11, 2015 at 12:27 PM