Air Force E-mail Controversy
Kirstein initially gained notoriety in a nationally publicized academic freedom case when an e-mail surfaced revealing that he made vitriolic comments to a United States Air Force Academy cadet in late October 2002. His e-mail was in response to a cadet's e-mail request to promote an academic forum on "America's Challenges in an Unstable World: Balancing Security with Liberty" at the United States Air Force Academy. Kirstein refused to support the forum due to his opposition to war and "your aggressive baby killing tactics of collateral damage." Kirstein's e-mail also compared the cadet to the Washington snipers. The cadet, the Air Force Academy, St. Xavier University and Kirstein exchanged apologies.
As a result of these controversial events involving academic freedom and free speech, he was suspended from teaching at St. Xavier University with just three weeks remaining in the semester. He received a written reprimand that was expunged three years later from his file. While on sabbatical the following semester, he underwent an unscheduled post-tenure review. On October 27, 2012 at the American Association of University Professors Shared Governance Conference in Washington, DC, he presented a paper, "Ten Years On: The Kirstein Suspension Case, Shared Governance and Academic Freedom." He spoke Saturday, November 3 at North Park University on his case and its enduring relevance ten years after.
Read more about this topic: Peter N. Kirstein
Famous quotes containing the words air, force and/or controversy:
“Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“In the capsule biography by which most of the people knew one another, I was understood to be an Air Force pilot whose family was wealthy and lived in the East, and I even added the detail that I had a broken marriage and drank to get over it.... I sometimes believed what I said and tried to take the cure in the very real sun of Desert DOr with its cactus, its mountain, and the bright green foliage of its love and its money.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)
“Ours was a highly activist administration, with a lot of controversy involved ... but Im not sure that it would be inconsistent with my own political nature to do it differently if I had it to do all over again.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)