Professor is spared

The Island Now

 Common sense has won out at the United States Merchant Marine Academy in Kings Point. The academy has decided not to fire Professor Gregory F. Sullivan who faced dismissal for an insensitive joke.

 The professor’s career was on the line for a one-sentence joke. Before turning the lights out to show his class a documentary he told them: “If someone with orange hair appears in the corner of the room, run for the exit.”

 It was a reference to the man who shot up a theater in Colorado killing 12 people, including the father of one of his students. Sullivan said he didn’t know of the connection and he apologized immediately.

 The tenured professor was immediately suspended and the academy’s academic dean decided without a hearing that he should be fired for violating the school’s prohibition against “notoriously disgraceful conduct.”

Fortunately that didn’t happen. Instead he will be suspended for 45 days – a serious punishment in itself. In a statement the school said, its decision “was made after careful review of all information collected as part of the process required under the federal policy governing academy faculty and staff.

“The academy’s first priority is the well-being of its students and it will continue to work with the entire campus community to ensure its ability to train and educate the nation’s future merchant mariners.”

Let’s get real. If not for the fact that one of his students was related to a victim of the massacre, this would have been a harmless joke. It didn’t approach “notoriously disgraceful conduct.”

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