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'Harassment' charges dropped against AZ prof who sent Thanksgiving e-mail

A tenured math professor at an Arizona community college will not be fired after being threatened with termination for sending college employees a link to a conservative website.



The Maricopa County Community College District has reportedly reached a settlement with Walter Kehowski, a professor at Glendale Community College who was placed on administrative leave for sending an e-mail linking to former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan's website and a transcript of a Thanksgiving proclamation by George Washington. Kehowski transmitted the e-mail using the district's "announcements" listserv the day before Thanksgiving 2006.

Over the next few weeks, five employees filed harassment charges against Kehowski, claiming his message was "hostile" and "derogatory" because it linked to Buchanan's website, which contains anti-illegal immigration sentiment.

Greg Lukianoff is president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which called on the college to drop the charges against Kehowski. Lukianoff says sending out a proclamation from the first U.S. president does not constitute "harassment." In a letter to the district's chancellor, FIRE explained that for workplace expression to meet that standard, it had to be "severe or persuasive enough to create an objectively hostile or abusive work environment."

"They also tried to make the argument that ... the University restricts the use of the announcement website to only things that have to do with the university business," says Lukianoff, who notes that is not the case. "As we demonstrated, people had sent out in the recent past ... e-mails advocating buying goats for Ugandan orphans and about the health benefits of bananas. This is not generally a site that is used strictly for university business."

Lukianoff calls the settlement "a crucial victory for freedom of expression and fundamental fairness" in an environment that is often unfriendly to speech not considered politically correct.

"Speech that wouldn't cause an average American to bat an eye can get you in serious trouble on college campuses," the FIRE leader explains. "If you have the wrong opinion about immigration, Affirmative Action, admission standards, grade inflation, it doesn't matter -- if it's considered an un-PC opinion, you can get in trouble.

According to Lukianoff, the single-most common tool that universities use to punish opinions they do not like is harassment. "We see this over and over and over again," he says. "Hopefully, this settlement will remind other universities that abusing harassment policies to bully students and professors who engage in unpopular expression will not stand."

Lukianoff notes last year a University of Central Florida student was brought up on harassment charges for calling a student government candidate "a jerk and a fool."