This Is How Universities Kill Their Reputations

I'm sure everybody has heard the name - or at least the inspiring story - of Dr. David Protess, a professor of journalism at Northwestern who started the Innocence Project and helped exonerate people who had been wrongly convicted and often even placed on death row for the crimes they'd never committed. Now Northwestern University where Protess works demonstrated that it has no respect even for scholars of his stature. As a result of some vague rumors of somebody's possible wrongdoing of some unknown kind, the university decided to prevent Protess from teaching his trademark course on investigative journalism:

A Northwestern University journalism professor whose investigations of wrongful convictions were cited when Illinois recently banned the death penalty has been sidelined amid allegations that some of his students may have violated the law.In a one-sentence e-mail, the university notified David Protess, the director of the Innocence Project, that he will not be teaching his investigative journalism class this spring. That course, which Protess created 12 years ago and has taught ever since, has resulted in the exoneration of 12 prisoners, including five on death row.

Good investigative journalists are hard to find as it is. Nobody wants to go to the trouble of conducting actual investigations. Why make the effort when you can simply sell uninformed, badly written opinion pieces on subjects you know nothing about? The majority of American print journalists do exactly that. So Northwestern decided to add to the pool of students who aren't getting educated on how to be good journalists by preventing Protess from teaching his class. 

It's scandalous that some nobody of an administrator has the gall of notifying a famous professor in a one-sentence e-mail that he will be prevented from teaching a course he wants to teach. While we are sitting here terrified of telling college administrators that their job is to shut up and do what we tell them, they become more convinced of their own importance with every passing day. For how much longer will we allow them to entertain the illusion that they matter? These ignorant, useless creatures need to be prevented from playing any role in the education process apart of making sure that we have enough paper in our printers.


P.S. Thank you, J., for sending me this link!