I dunno. I think I'd like to see more information or a pattern of action before I pass judgment on Emmanuel College. It sounds like the professor may have used a "shock jock" approach to the situation, which has school campuses all over the country paralyzed with fear.

During a week of Los Angeles rioting, police departments all over the country were uptight. My son decided to set up his band in a parking garage in downtown Sacramento, and drew an audience of a couple hundred. Police showed up in riot gear, and blockaded the garage. Somebody in the audience threw a bottle (or bottles) at the cops, and it could have become a serious incident. I think was pretty dumb for my kid to provoke the cops during a week like that, but my kid liked ot provoke cops. Now he's a little older, and maybe not quite so provocative (I hope).

And I think it may have been pretty dumb for the professor to speak of a mass killing in a provocative manner so soon after it happened. Did the college overreact by firing the professor? I don't know. If the school has shown a pattern of repressing free speech, then I'd be likely to think this incident might also be an indication of repression.

The fact that the school is Catholic isn't enough to pass judgment on it for repression, either. As pointed out above, conservative Ave Maria Pizza University in Florida is repressive about everything, and Notre Dame put on The Vagina Monologues (but not without controversy). So, it's a mix.

A Catholic high school in Sacramento fired a teacher last year because she had volunteered for Planned Parenthood before she worked at the high school. Was that a repressive action on the part of the high school? Well, it sounds like it would be, but what actually happened was that a repressive bishop forced the firing because he saw it as an opportunity to grandstand on the abortion issue - and the plucky nuns who run the high school got at least some of their self-esteem back by banishing the right-wingers who had ratted on the teacher.

Before passing judgment on Emmanuel College, or on the professor it fired, I'd like to know more.

-Joe Offer-