This guy is the opposite of what academia is supposed to be about (inquiry based on evidence). As the saying goes, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. Hard to believe he’s getting paid with tax dollars. And he claims the Sandy families are the ones harassing him! What a creep.
Florida Atlantic University professor making a career out of calling the Sandy Hook shootings a hoax
Conspiracy theorists were saying the same thing after the Boston Marathon bombing.
Not to mention those saying 9/11 was an inside job of the US government and the Israeli government, with all this ‘proof’ it could not have been the planes that caused the towers to collapse, etc. Surprised there aren’t any college professors claiming that the moon landing was faked, there is another classic one.
These people make me sick. They’re profiting off the paranoia of a group of people and stabbing a rusty needle into the hearts of hurting families.
All these conspiracy theorists are crackpots, but I find one being allowed to hold a professorship at a well-regarded public university to be much more egregious. You generally expect them to be living in a cave or someone’s basement, not “educating” students by teaching communications classes which are the opposite of communication.
Disgusting. Then again, there’s that tenured professor at Northwestern (Butz) who’s a famous Holocaust denier. He doesn’t teach Holocaust denialism in his classes (I think he’s an engineering professor), so there’s nothing that can be done about him.
Does tenure mean you can teach lies?
Here is a link to a site debunking the likes of Tracy and Sandy Hook deniers.
http://sandyhookanalysis.blogspot.com/2014/07/sandy-hook-hoax-claims-debunked.html
So, yes Prof. Tracy, the EMTs did go in to assess the viability of victims. They found “horrific injuries” and very few survivors among the classrooms targeted.
I continue to maintain that if we were shown the bloody carnage in the aftermath of Sandy Hook, Aurora and San Bernardino as the first responders saw it, the assault weapons that were used would be outlawed in a heartbeat. But we don’t. We just read that people were “shot” and buy into the notion that guns are guns and it wouldn’t matter what type of gun was used.
After Sandy Hook, the gun debate was easily derailed as usual by the insistence that only going after the mental health system in this country would make a difference. (And same again with James Holmes in Aurora who used the same Smith and Wesson assault rifle as Farook and Malik used.)
But maybe San Bernardino will open some eyes. It’s now clear that these incredibly efficient killing tools are readily available to radicals and terrorists and it’s not just an issue of mental health. I have no idea how many more people have to be slaughtered for Congress to make some effort to restrict the sale of these particular guns.
He’s on a very short leash. He can only use university servers for materials related to his EE classes. He knows enough not to talk about it in class and there has been no evidence that he has been biased against Jewish students. He’s supposedly a decent EE prof. His office is in a sub-basement. His Holocaust denial wasn’t “out there” til he got tenure. He’s pretty persona non grata there. I agree it’s an embarrassment.
^Wow yeah. Egregiously, it sounds like the FAU guy teaches it in class.
With tenure, while that grants academic freedom supposedly, professors are all supposed to have some sort of factual basis for what they claim. For example, could a tenured professor of biology teach that evolution didn’t happen, that life came to be on earth when God created it and so forth, and keep his/her job? While I understand the reason for tenure protections (for example, take something like economics, where it can be hard to sift out fact from fancy, where a lot of what is done is based basically on opinion and unlike science may not be able to be proved, for example the debates between supply side economics and Keynesian economists), but what about, for example, if a professor of psychology teaches their students that reparative therapy to ‘cure’ gays is valid, when the rest of the profession and the courts have ruled it is junk, that there is no evidence it actually works and so forth. It is one thing for a teacher to give their opinion, for example if a history professor said they personally believed Kennedy’s assasination was a conspiracy involving the CIA, but that the accepted view is that Oswald acted alone, that shouldn’t be a problem because he is saying that is his opinion,not fact…but where is that line? For me, when there are clearly facts backing up what the truth is (ie the Holocaust, 9/11, the Newtown shooting, evolution) then a teacher trying to teach something as ‘fact’ that clearly can be proven wrong should not have protections.
I agree. Again, as the statement goes, you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.
Presumably yes at Liberty University:
http://www.liberty.edu/index.cfm?pid=26290
http://www.liberty.edu/academics/arts-sciences/creation/
Some people are just nuts.
While not nearly as egregious as the FAU Prof in OP, there are a few longtime tenured Profs who spend most or in some cases the entire class discussing irrelevant topics having little/nothing to do with the topics supposed to be discussed in the course concerned.
For instance, back in the '70s my former supervisor had an electrical engineering Prof in a required core course who spent practically the entire semester discussing his political campaign to run for local political office in some nearby upstate town.
Situation was so bad students had to teach the entire semester’s worth of material to themselves through the textbook and if possible, supplement that by crashing other extremely overcrowded sections of the core electrical engineering course taught by other Profs. There were also complaints against this Prof going back several years before my former supervisor took his course. Unfortunately, the fact his Prof was a tenured senior Prof nearing retirement and a former department chair with some universitywide influence meant he was practically untouchable.
Unless the college can and have the institutional will to ding him for failing to teach the topics he’s supposed to cover in the course or for a substantiated pattern of retaliating against students who expressed disagreement with his views, I’m not sure the college could do much without turning him into a martyr for the Sandy Hook Conspiracy theorists or free speech advocates considering FAU is a public institution.
He teaches a class on conspiracy so most likely he does discuss this in class.
I think he is a loon but FAU apparently believes these types of subjects are worthy of exposing their students to.
Examples like this test one’s support of academic freedom. It’s the abuse of the freedom by idiots like this that lets us know if we’re serious about that kind of freedom.
http://www.fau.edu/scms/tracy.php indicates that his courses are:
COM 4930: Culture of Conspiracy
MMC 1540: American Media, Society, Tech
MMC 6645: Public Opinion Modernity
What is a university’s recourse if a tenured professor goes off the rails on their teaching? Let’s say a tenured chemistry professor spends all his class time ranting about his ex-wife. How far does a professor have to go before the university can accuse him of the misconduct of not teaching his subject?
^That’s a good question. I don’t think that academic freedom IS unlimited; plainly there is a point where valid teaching no longer occurs. So a biology teacher teaching creationism, a holocaust denying history teacher, or this guy, if he’s teaching Sandy Hook didn’t occur, seem to be no longer validly teaching. Not sure how that’s dealt with in academia.
I think it would depend on whether it was a major research university or an LAC. The job description at an LAC is to teach. So I think an off-the-rails tenured prof at, say, Swarthmore, would not fare very well. On the other hand, a big-name prof at a big research uni who is bringing in a lot of research dollars, well, the institution might be more tolerant of his “teaching.”
I once had a prof (at an Ivy) who spent half of each class session telling us about how she and her fiancee decided to use the rhythm method of “birth control,” and that it really, truly is scientifically proven to work.