{"id":730,"date":"2006-11-02T12:25:02","date_gmt":"2006-11-02T12:25:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=730"},"modified":"2006-11-02T12:25:02","modified_gmt":"2006-11-02T12:25:02","slug":"its_always_the_cool_teachers_w","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2006\/11\/02\/its_always_the_cool_teachers_w\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Always the Cool Teachers Who Get the Shaft"},"content":{"rendered":"

My favorite college instructor was a leftover hippie who lived on a sailboat on the Great Salt Lake. He was an anachronism in the conservative climate of the late ’80s, but he was cool and I learned a great deal from him about philosophy and life and how to approach new ideas. Last I heard, he’d been forced into an early retirement and had moved his boat to Puget Sound, a victim of interdepartmental politics and changing notions of what constitutes a good teacher.<\/p>\n

Now I hear that another professor for whom I have some fondness has been denied tenure. The reasons cited in the denial letter (which is published in its entirety here<\/a>) sound almost like the sort of “guilt by association” nonsense of the McCarthy era:<\/p>\n

Far more times than I would care to mention, the name “Indiana Jones” (the adopted title Dr. Jones insists on being called) has appeared in governmental reports linking him to the Nazi Party, black-market antiquities dealers, underground cults, human sacrifice, Indian child slave labor, and the Chinese mafia. There are a plethora of international criminal charges against Dr. Jones, which include but are not limited to: bringing unregistered weapons into and out of the country; property damage; desecration of national and historical landmarks; impersonating officials; arson; grand theft (automobiles, motorcycles, aircraft, and watercraft in just a one week span last year); excavating without a permit; countless antiquities violations; public endangerment; voluntary and involuntary manslaughter; and, allegedly, murder.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dr. Jones’s interpersonal skills and relationships are no better. By Dr. Jones’s own admission, he has repeatedly employed an underage Asian boy as a driver and “personal assistant” during his Far East travels. I will refrain from making any insinuations as to the nature of this relationship, but my intuition insists that it is not a healthy one, nor one to be encouraged. Though the committee may have overstepped the boundaries of its evaluation, I find it pertinent to note that Dr. Jones has been romantically linked to countless women of questionable character, an attribute very unbecoming of a Marshall College professor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fools. Bureaucratic fools.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My favorite college instructor was a leftover hippie who lived on a sailboat on the Great Salt Lake. He was an anachronism in the conservative climate of the late ’80s, but he was cool and I learned a great deal from him about philosophy and life and how to approach new ideas. Last I heard, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-730","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=730"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/730\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=730"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=730"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=730"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}