How to Hypothetically Lose Your Lucrative Job at Widener

For those lucky enough to be unfamiliar with law school hypotheticals, they're made-up fact patterns designed to aid the attempt at Socratic teaching. Often they involve deans and long-tenured faculty in a patently-ridiculous way that only long-tenured faculty and students whose sense of humor has been buried with their creativity and their sex lives find amusing.

But apparently a professor at Widener has taken things a bit too far.

The dean of Widener’s law school has been shot several times, but the wounds are only hypothetical.

Criminal law professor Lawrence Connell used the shooting scenario in classroom hypotheticals. Now his job is on the line after students complained that the scenarios were violent, racist and sexist, Delaware Online reports. The school’s dean, Linda Ammons, is a black woman.

Unfortunately, ABA Journal doesn't provide a transcript, so it's hard to judge. It's entirely possible that after 26 years of teaching, the guy just snapped and decided to passively-aggressively make his bitchy boss a murderer or drug dealer every day in class. It's also possible that the students are just whiny little maggots. I'd believe either and anything in between.

All I know is that in my own criminal law class, our elderly professors dealt drugs regularly. It's, I imagine, fairly standard fare. After all, you're paying places like Widener that 35k a year to teach law, not provide entirely-politically-correct entertainment. If you want that, jack the price to 45k-50k. My only curiosity is if they complained the professor first or if they went straight to the administration. I'm also wondering if it was just students bitter about their grade, since the class appears to be last semester's upper-level criminal investigation course.

But even if this guy is completely innocent and wasn't making overtly racist and sexist comments in class, I have to ridicule this response:

According to the [Delaware Online], “the controversial classroom imagery has left the associate professor fighting to keep his job of 26 years and alleging Widener violated his right to academic freedom.”

Academic freedom!?!? In using a private party's name in felonious conduct hypotheticals? Academic freedom is about research and letting scientists and intellectuals answer what questions they feel are worth asking. In no way does what name you use in a hypothetical affect what is being taught or how it is being taught. If you viewed this as an academic freedom, wouldn't professors would have a loophole against libel and slander? What would stop a professor from starting every class with "Female Dean X, who is a cheap crack-smoking, herpes-infested extortionist slut..." Although that's obviously excessive, there are scenarios where this type of conduct would clearly be slander (e.g., every hypothetical begins, "[Prof. x], who rumor has it bought his BMW with money he gained from cheating on his taxes...").

Talk about a sympathy killer. There's also an allegation that he's being purged for being conservative on a liberal faculty, which is the same excuse every Republican on faculty death row has used for 30 years. It also was the second time while reading the short article that I thought "this is the same type of bullshit that happens every month or so at some liberal arts college."

If any Widener students are out there reading, I'd love to know if you have specific examples (rather than bland, neutered summaries) of what the professor's hypotheticals were.