Update [2005-12-11 21:47:33 by Steven D]: This post is was intended as hyperbole. Just to be clear I don’t expect anyone to boycott the State of Kansas. Though if you intend to attend the University of Kansas I’d certainly think long and hard about what other options are available to you. Steven D
I’m serious. Boycott the whole damn state.
Why? Because of THIS:
LAWRENCE, Kansas (AP) — A college professor who drew sharp criticism for comments deriding Christian fundamentalists over “intelligent design” said he was forced out as chairman of the university’s religious studies department.
Paul Mirecki, who remains a professor at the University of Kansas, said he had no choice when he signed the resignation letter, typed on stationary from the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
“The University penalized me and denied me my Constitutionally protected right to speak and express my mind,” he said in a written statement Friday for the Lawrence Journal-World. He said his career had been ruined and his speaking engagements canceled.
. . . The controversy began with a course Mirecki planned to teach called “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.” The class was proposed after the Kansas Board of Education decided to include more criticism of evolution in its school science standards.
The class was canceled last week after e-mails surfaced in which Mirecki mocked religious conservatives as “fundies” and said a course describing intelligent design as mythology would be a “nice slap in their big fat face.” He has apologized for those comments.
On Monday, Mirecki was treated at a Lawrence hospital for head injuries after he said he was beaten by two men on a country road. He said the men referred to the creationism course. Law enforcement officials were investigating.
Make sure you go to the CNN web page for this story so you can see a picture of Professor Mirecki with the black eyes he was given by the two Fundie “storm troopers” who assaulted him.
And regarding the investigation of his attack by Lawrence law enforcement, Mirecki had this to say:
He said he was not pleased with the sheriff’s investigation because he had been “treated more like a criminal than a victim.”
He said he was interviewed by officers several times, “once for five hours straight. They keep asking me the same things over and over. They seized my car; they entered my office and seized my computer. They said they need them for their investigation but it didn’t make any sense to me.”
Sounds to me like the Sheriff’s office is acting like Mirecki did something wrong. Why else would they seize his car and his computer? If so, it sounds like they are basically treating Professor Mirecki as a pariah. It doesn’t surprise me that some are already claiming he fabricated his attack.
I’m a Christian (bracing for the jeers), but I’m secure enough in my faith that someone else questioning it doesn’t bug me too much.
Perhaps they’re afraid that a clear examination of the basis of their faith will reveal the gross inconsistancies between what they believe and what Jesus taught…and how modern science and medicine have revealed truths about the human condition that were not available to the very human authors of the Bible. Maybe they’ll even have to admit that homosexuals are not the spawn of the Devil, that life begins somewhat after the sperm and the egg shake hands, and that Jesus would probably not be happy with the mega-churches and their emphasis on style over substance…
Agreed. If critics can make you doubt your faith so easily that you must do whatever it takes to silence them, then what sort of faith did you have in the first place?
One thing’s for sure, it wasn’t one preached by Jesus, who told us to love our enbemies and turn the other cheek. These fundamentalist “christians” are nothing more than fascists wearing crosses and fake piety in my book.
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No jeers here, Cali Scribe !
I’m not so sure we can call fundies Christians, anyway. It seems like so many people calling themselves that don’t really want to take the time to finds out what Christ actually taught.
They don’t turn the other cheek. They don’t love others as they would love themselves… these people definitely would never consider meekly going into the Roman lion’s dens. They are Christians minus the Christ. They are ..ians.. i guess 🙂
I remember when I read the story about Professor Mirecki’s outspokenness in opposition to the inclusion of ID/Creationism in the school curriculum that I suspected hemight be headed for serious career trouble. After the news he’d been beaten up, I was sure of it.
Time to challenge the whole thing in court and sue these deluded fascists up one side and down the other.
What happened to Paul Mirecki was horrible, terrible. And the state of Kansas is filled with people like me who believe that.
I don’t know what, exactly you mean by saying “Boycott the whole damn state.” Are you saying I should move? That I shouldn’t work for a Public Library because it’s in Kansas?
What do you mean?
I was using hyberpole. I don’t really expect anyone to boycott the state of kansas.
I’ll add an update so that is clear.
Lawrence has long been a slightly countercultural bastion in an otherwise conservative state. William S. Burroughs lived there for the last several decades of his life, for God’s sake.
And KU is a good school. I don’t know anything about their religion department, but they have an excellent history department, a fine German department, and a lot of other good programs.
I do wonder how the larger academic community at Lawrence is responding to all this.
From slighty afar (Norman, OK), here’s my take on all this. Offering the course was a very clever (if brave) move. Making the e-mailed comments about “fundies” was incredibly stupid, and would have gotten him in trouble whether or not he had tried to offer the course. People in leadership positions in public universities need to show a certain amount of respect, or at least tolerance, for divergent points of view. This is perhaps especially true of a religious studies chair’s attitude toward other religious groups. There’s nothing wrong with challenging false beliefs on the merits (the course would have done this, presumably), but namecalling of the sort that showed up in the e-mail really is improper. Moreover, it served to discredit a perfectly reasonable course.
A few hours down I-35 in Norman (home to the University of Oklahoma), we’re going through our own, much quieter, little ID controversy. A local wingnut state senator began to make noises about introducing a bill in the state legislature that would mandate the teaching of ID in our public schools. In general, Oklahoma is even more conservative than Kansas. And certainly Norman is more conservative than Lawrence. But the result of this ID trial balloon being floated in the press was a firestorm of criticism of ID from the people of Norman. Reports are that the state senator is backing off his plan.
Much more quietly, behind the scenes, people in the OU administration had been trying furiously to stop the bill from being introduced. OU has worked for a couple decades to become an ever more serious research university. And nobody here wants Oklahoma to become like Kansas. University administrations are well aware that messy public fights over ID make recruitment of serious scholars, especially serious scientists, much more difficult. Without giving too much credit to KU’s administrators, my guess is that they’re not simply doing the bidding of the wingnuts of the state. However, one of the driving principles of most university administration is the desire to avoid controversy at all costs. And, with the e-mails, Mirecki unfortunately managed to make himself a problem, too.
A pretty awful story all around.
it was made public. He made a very gracious, very public apology.
He STILL was a) forced to withdraw his course; b) beaten on a deserted roadside; c) forced to resign his chair.
How many times have much more prominent public figures said things that were ten times as outrageous? They don’t even APOLOGIZE, they just say that they misspoke or they blame the messenger for taking the remark out of context.
This guy is being all but swiftboated over remarks that were meant for a very small and self-selected group of readers. It’s as if my water-cooler joke were tape recorded and then played back on the PA system. That treatment alone is wrong.
I’m sick of hearing supposed liberals shaft this guy for his remarks. Free speech, when unwise, carries costs, to be sure, but these costs shouldn’t include one’s physical safety. And a tenured academic shouldn’t lose his career over his exercise of free speech, either. I’m disgusted by the way the KU administration has handled this matter. I wouldn’t take a job there for anything, and prior to this incident I would have considered it strongly as most of my family lives in Kansas.
The three things that happened to him are not even roughly equivalent:
So, my bottom line is that Mirecki did absolutely nothing wrong in offering the course. To the extent that anything was “payback” for that, it’s outrageous. Sending the e-mail was both wrong and stupid. Clearly he should not lose his career over this…but he isn’t losing his career. Whether the university’s response to this e-mail is proportional or not depends on knowing a lot of details that I just haven’t heard yet. I would follow the lead of local faculty concerned with academic freedom (hence my deferring to KU’s AAUP). Such faculty, however, need our support not our contempt (“Boycott Kansas!”). KU is a serious place and to the extent that Mirecki’s removal as chair — or the course’s cancellation — are threats to its seriousness, these threats should be actively opposed, not treated as somehow par for the course in a red state. And finally nothing in any way justifies the beating or the police reaction.
I’ve been following this since Mirecki first announced the class. I was encouraged by that but things have gone steadily downhill. Hopefully this will at least serve as a clear demonstration of the potential of the fundies.
maddening. if i recall correctly, though, wasn’t there some talk about the fundagelicals threatening KU’s funding? i.e., KU can’t afford mirecki’s principled stance. not that that makes this any less deplorable…
If all it takes is a couple of small-town state legislators to threaten a university’s funding for a large research university to sit, heel, and stay, then I’d have to say that public higher education is already as good as dead.
Universities exist to fight the good fight for truth and the pursuit of knowledge. Failing that, let’s call them the neoliberal profit factories of minor-league athletes that they are fast becoming, and stop pretending that they either provide educations or produce knowledge.
Time to stop ignoring Kansas. We turned Montana on the state level, let’s turn Kansas.
I have never subscribed to blanket statements about regions, no matter how red. No “screw the South” or (in too broad a sense) “What’s wrong with Kansas” view for me. Sure, some areas are more conservative than others, but really, different kinds of people live everywhere and I don’t subscribe to writing off any area as “too” red or “too” anything. Assholes and cool people live everywhere.
But right now, I do wonder WHAT IS WRONG WITH KANSAS. The new attacks on evolution, leading to the physical attack on an anti-Intelligent Design professor followed by the forced resignation of that SAME professor as chair of the religious studies Dept. It is INSANE.
I am pissed. The right wing attacks on science are becoming insane! And we have to fight back and fight back on their turf. In the name of Professor Mirecki of the University of Kansas, I declare war on the right wing extremists of Kansas. THis is not a war against Kansas in general or even conservatives in Kansas. But on the extremists. Here are ideas of how we can fight:
Donate in Mirecki’s honor to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. This started on Daily Kos, but I think it is time to make it a bigger movement. Americans United is one of the biggest groups fighting the breakdown of the wall our Founding Fathers set up between Church and State.
Donate to the National Center for Science Education, the number one group defending the teaching of evolution in our schools. This group fills the shoes of “Darwin’s Bulldog” today and the assault, both physical and professional, against Mirecki shows how much we need a Huxley today.
Support the Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party of Kansas. Let’s give progressives in Kansas the political power to be heard.
Help out the People for the American Way of Kansas. PFAW is one of the formost groups fighting right wing extremism in general. I am glad they are in Kansas fighting on the front lines against extremism.
Help Act Blue Activate Kansas bringing the state party the resources to do in Kansas what populist Democrats did in Montana. This Act Blue strategy of focusing on each state on the state level is a great grassroots part of Dean’s 50 state strategy. Let’s make sure Kansas is on the list.
And then there is the ultimate in grassroots: Support Democracy for America, Kansas. Again, I am so glad to see that DFA, like PFAW, is in Kansas. It is dumb to leave any state out of our strategy and Kansas needs to be one of our front line battlegrounds.
Take the fight to the heart of the Right Wing extremists. Take the fight to Kansas. In the name of Professor Mirecki, we can turn Kansas blue the same way we turned Montana blue.