The Chronicle of Higher Education today has an article entitled "A Weblog Starts a Fire," about the weblog of Indiana University Professor Eric Rasmusen.
Since the Chronicle is subscription-only, here are the lead paragraphs, which summarize the gist of the story:
The trouble began when Professor Eric B. Rasmusen wrote that hiring a homosexual man as a schoolteacher was akin to putting the fox in the chicken coop."Male homosexuals, at least, like boys and are generally promiscuous," he wrote on his Weblog, which is resides on the Indiana University at Bloomington's Web site. "They should not be given the opportunity to satisfy their desires."
Students and staff members complained about his comments, asking that they be removed from the Web site. Some even suggested that he should be fired. Mr. Rasmusen, a professor of business economics in Indiana's Kelley School of Business, agreed to remove his blog from the university's server while officials reviewed the complaints. But it returned a day later, after university lawyers concluded that it did not violate any policy.
Apparently this issue has already been discussed over on The Volokh Conspiracy (where it had its initial beginnings, it seems), and Crooked Timber, though it somehow slipped under my radar at the time.
(Please do not start a flame war in my comments about this, at least not without first reading through the analyses and comments at the two sites mentioned above.)
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Just found Daniel Drezner's post on this topic. Also worth reading.
