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Saturday, July 13, 2024
A Serious Issue, Unseriously Reported
As Paul Caron notes, Inside Higher Education has an article suggesting that Columbia law professor Katherine Franke faces potential dismissal by her university. If she were dismissed or seriously disciplined for the statements that apparently are the focus here, statements that I find rather silly, that would be a cause for serious alarm and objection. Whatever one thinks of what she said, it is not proper cause for academic dismissal. Those who are concerned to protect academic freedom should watch vigilantly.
That said, may I note that the article is so poor that it cannot possibly count as a serious and reliable account. (It is also dismally written. I don't know whether the fault is the reporter's or the editors'. Wherever the fault lies, something went very wrong for the lede to be relegated to the thirteenth paragraph.) Despite a mild genuflection toward the idea of seeking comment elsewhere, it is essentially a single-source story, that source being Prof. Franke, and it mostly simply retails her own arguments and complaints. The idea that she may be fired--something that should not happen, based on what is presented here, and that I would of course oppose--is based wholly on this statement: "The university did send a copy of its Office of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action policies, which include termination as one of multiple possible sanctions for alleged discrimination and harassment. Franke says her lawyer has told her she has a 50-50 chance of being fired." I am not sure I would take a list of sanctions that includes dismissal as strong evidence of what will actually happen, and I am disinclined to give much weight to a second-hand report of a lawyer's probability estimate.
At the risk of tiresome repetition, I would oppose such an outcome. But neither this story, nor a story published--on the very the same day--by The Intercept, which is better written and better done but otherwise mostly identical in its substance and sourcing, should yet be taken as serious indicators of what is to come. I was not a journalist for very long, although I was glad to learn a few journalism skills at the university at which Prof. Franke teaches. But from that perspective, and especially given their overlap, both stories seem closer to transcription or to a PR campaign than to serious independent journalism.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on July 13, 2024 at 02:36 PM in Paul Horwitz | Permalink
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