All Posts Tagged With: "university"

A Temple professor of Military history said of DeJohn, veterans are “mentally imbalanced” because we are “trained to kill,” quite an unusual attitude for a professor of military history.

Christian DeJohn, a former Temple graduate student and sergeant in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard, won a lawsuit against the University so-called ‘speech code’ when the 3^rd District Court of Appeals ruled it unconstitutional.

DeJohn said he was refused a graduate degree based on his political views. He said he received anti-war e-mails from Temple faculty while deployed in Bosnia during 2002, when he asked that the emails be stopped that led to political disputes with his graduate advisers and those disputes, he said, led to his being denied his graduate degree and other retaliation and degradation, for instance:

The University denied wrong doing saying, “His academic performance just wasn’t good enough, It had nothing to do with his First Amendment rights and had everything to do with Temple professors’ academic freedom to grade a student’s poorly written, poorly constructed … thesis.”

The Court agreed defended Temple University upholding the university’s academic freedom to evaluate his performance as a student. Those claims were not part of the Third Circuit appeal. But, it found for DeJohn awarding him one dollar damages on his original complaints.

FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and ADF (Alliance Defense Fund) won the case for DeJohn challenging the constitutionality of a sexual harassment policy that, in part, penalized “expressive, visual or physical conduct … (that) has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual’s work, educational performance or status, or … has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating, hostile or offensive environment.” DeJohn claimed that because of the code, he felt unable to freely express his views about the role of women in the military. That ran him afoul of University professors and advisers.

His was a pyrrhic victory leaving him absent a time consuming and costly graduate degree. Temple has changed its so-called “speech code” –I wonder about its hypocrisy.

“Hypocrisy” is kind of a strange word. It’s made up of two Greek words, “hypo,” meaning “under,” and “krisis,” which has to do with judging or condemning. The word came to mean “answerer.” The puzzle is how those two basic words got together to mean that and then eventually “one who plays a part, pretends” (Webster’s Unabridged). In the ancient Greek theater, it was probably Aeschylus who added a second actor. He was known as the “hypocrites” because he answered the protagonist. In doing so, he wore a mask, and that is undoubtedly where our idea of the hypocrite as one who is one thing and pretends to be another comes from. The words spoken by that second actor are not his, nor are they words he might be expected to speak in the marketplace. They are the words of Aeschylus, Sophocles or some other dramatist. Our modern hypocrite is a person who pronounces words from behind a mask, words that do not at all reflect what that person truly is or believes.

A minister who claims to represent the God of the Bible, who is described as a God of love, and then spews out venomous hatred, is a prime example. Also, I remember a championship basketball player at a university where I taught who spoke at a junior high school and urged the children there not to take drugs. Two weeks later he was arrested for dealing drugs. That is also a perfect example. The politician who sits down with his or her handlers to ask what stance will influence the most people favorably, regardless of his or her personal views, is also a hypocrite, as is one who pretends to agonize over the poor and downtrodden but lives the life of an elitist.

Our word “person” also comes from Classical Greek theater and, somewhat ironically, means “mask.” In fact, in dealing with prominent figures in politics, sports or entertainment, we sometimes ask, “Who is the person behind the mask?” The opposite of hypocrisy is something called integrity. The person who possesses and practices it is one who is an integral whole, whose appearance and internal reality are of a piece.