[harshreality]

> Neither UTMB nor Texas A&M would confirm what Alonzo said that prompted such a reaction, and UTMB students interviewed by the Tribune recalled a vague reference to Patrick’s office but nothing specific.

Without knowing what was allegedly said, this is difficult to judge, although I would certainly be inclined to side with the professor given what's been reported so far.

Professors should be given wide latitude to discuss matters of academic interest, and the opioid crisis and political decisions contributing to it certainly qualify.

On the other hand, if she made a snide comment about the TX Lt. Governor without grounding it in policy, that's not good. However, professors are only human, and I don't think it would be fair or reasonable to impose disciplinary action for isolated cases. It might potentially be worthy of disciplinary action in some cases, though... IF it was that kind of comment, and IF it was more than an isolated case.

Why? Because while private individuals are free to talk about anything they want, professors are supposed to be maintaining an environment of thoughtful academic discourse, and certain kinds of biased comments do not, therefore disciplinary (not legal) action might at some point be warranted. Far fetched? It's not as if it's unheard of for professors who disagree with politicians to go on fact-free political rants these days.

[kbenson]

Ultimately Texas A&M allowed Alonzo to keep her job after an internal investigation could not confirm any wrongdoing.

It's really not that hard to judge at all. They found no wrongdoing, and refust to even release what the purported problematic statements were. Their refusal to do so, and how that affects how you view the situation and whether it was warranted are exactly why it's problematic to behave like this in the first place and should be condemned.

Accusations should include some level of evidence. Public accusations should include some level of public evidence, otherwise what's the difference between slander or libel? If I called up your local police department and told them that harshreality is a pedophile, I wouldn't expect them to take any action other than to possibly quietly investigate if they thought it was credible, and if I supplied evidence, I'd expect them to verify that evidence before and public announcements or arrests, as I suspect you would and anyone would when accused of a heinous crime. To do otherwise is to allow the public to be swayed by innuendo rather than fact.

We should not condone behavior such as this.

[harshreality]

Every investigation of a professor, which fails to result in any official disciplinary action, should be equally condemned? How are universities supposed to investigate allegations then? Allegations are made all the time without administrations making the allegations public. They routinely take "protective" actions like limiting professors' non-critical duties during investigations. Do you condemn all those actions, too?

This is not a criminal investigation. Organizations, even public ones, have wide latitude in how they handle internal investigations as long as they're not making overt public accusations before verifying them.

I'm not saying these kinds of investigations are good. The investigation itself is a punishment. However, administrations have a lot of discretion in future actions, discretion which they can exercise against a professor, without recourse, even when there's no policy violation to cite and punish them for. It's impossible to avoid unofficial punishments, and a punishing investigation process is just another one of those.

I'm also not saying that suspension was a reasonable action to take during this investigation. It sounds extreme for any investigation of comments made by a professor. But I don't know what the allegation was and nobody else is saying what it was. The fact that nobody else is willing to remember on the record what the professor might have said doesn't mean she didn't say anything worth investigating.

[kbenson]

> Every investigation of a professor, which fails to result in any official disciplinary action, should be equally condemned?

Every publicly announced investigation or action that did not include information about the evidence that caused it to be announced that then failed to result in disciplinary action and then refuses to explain what evidence they acted on should be condemned.

> ... Do you condemn all those actions, too?

I think my above clarification of your misunderstanding of my position should address all those questions sufficiently as to my position on them.

Now, all that said, I think I might have conflated UTMB and A&M's actions slightly. I thought A&M announced their investigation and suspension publicly, while it's UTMB that was public in their condemnation of the visiting and speaking professor, and I thought A&M had been more public, when I'm not sure they were in further review.

I think UTMB's actions should be condemned unilaterally. They sent out an email stating they did not afgree with the professor and that they were formally censuring her with no evidence as to why, and still have refused to indicate why.

I think A&M's conduct was not great, but at least somewhat defensible. They took an announcement of formal censure with zero evidence, and then when they followed up and could not get not get UTMB to cooperate with more info suspended her pending additional investigation. They had evidence, in that UTMB's formal censure was itself "evidence" in their eyes, but not great evidence given there were no concrete details other than that. I suspect, as the article alludes, that the environment of petitioning for funding had something to do with their knee-jerk reaction.

That said, I see no reasonable justification for UTMB's actions, where they publicly and formally censured the professor with no evidence given then or since.

[joenathanone]

>Without knowing what was allegedly said, this is difficult to judge.

You have the opposite reaction than what should be called for, if no one could even remember what was said then there is zero chance what was said was inappropriate.

[rsynnott]

> On the other hand, if she made a snide comment about the TX Lt. Governor without grounding it in policy, that's not good.

How does this particular form of Lese Majeste work? Is it all elected politicians? Just those in the ruling party? Of the state, or federal too? If the Lt Governor's policies are in conflict with the federal government's policies, must she sing the praises of both him and Biden? If he loses the next election, must she turn on a dime and denounce him? If Dear Leader makes a policy u-turn, must all lecture recordings and publications praising the old, wrongthink policy be destroyed?

As I mentioned elsewhere, all very Soviet. They should get some old Russian academics who were around for de-Stalinisation in to give training on how to navigate these awkward matters.

[claytongulick]

All in all, it seems like this was a situation where the process worked.

- She said some stuff as a visiting speaker she probably shouldn't have in that context, or at least was taken wrong by some folks in the audience.

- Attendees complained

- She was formally censured by the hosting university that knew what the comments were

- Due to the censure, her employer investigated

- She was cleared, life went on

- Newspapers decided it was a great chance to twist events into an evil right-wing speech suppression story.

News at 11.

[bloaf]

This is not an accurate characterization.

- She made factual statements about policy impacts on overdose deaths.

- A politician's relative who was in attendance reported it to the political party backing those policies.

- The politicians successfully signaled to those at the university that criticizing their policies will be inconvenient at least, and a realistic threat to your career.

* Edit, for emphasis:

Your characterization would be like saying that it is fine that you're driving drunk since your car's auto-breaking feature is working and preventing you from hitting pedestrians.

[claytongulick]

We have absolutely no idea what comments she was censured for, they aren't saying. They certainly didn't claim she was censured for factual discussion about opioid crisis, as you've implied (and the reporter, without evidence, also implied).

UTMB is a prestigious institution. Issuing a statement of censure is a pretty big deal.

Occam's razor would suggest that it wasn't done arbitrarily.

Objectively looking at the known facts without a political bias, it seems to me that the most likely scenario is that she made some inappropriate comments, got censured, but no one wants to embarrass her further or risk liability by repeating hearsay.

People make mistakes.

We don't have any facts that would support the narrative that the government encouraged the censure or the investigation in any way.

I'm not sure why there's so much passion around insisting that particular narrative when there are limited known facts.

Of course I'd change my opinion if more information comes to light.

Would you?

[bloaf]

>and the reporter, without evidence, also implied

This is not an accurate characterization. The author reviewed the speaker's slides, interviewed students in the lecture, and consulted with her professional network; the reporter's investigation yielded no evidence of censure-worthy content or propensity for political rants.

> We don't have any facts that would support the narrative that the government encouraged the censure or the investigation in any way.

This is not an accurate characterization. The reporter has provided information from the university's spokespeople that Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham was the one who first contacted the university's governmental relations office as well as Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Patrick then contacted the chair of the University of Texas System’s board.

The board responded to Patrick, within 2 hours of the end of the lecture, quote: "Joy Alonzo has been placed on administrative leave pending investigation re firing her. shud [sic] be finished by end of week."

> Of course I'd change my opinion if more information comes to light.

You're not even engaging with the facts as they stand.

Occam's razor would suggest this isn't done arbitrarily. The simplest explanation for the set of facts before us is that the one student complained to mommy, who complained to the school in conjunction with Patrick. The school immediately kowtowed to this political pressure and made motions to punish the person they complained about, without any diligence whatsoever. Now that everyone is complaining, they aren't releasing the details of their censure because there aren't any.

[kbenson]

> She was formally censured by the hosting university that knew what the comments were

She was formally censured by that institution with no evidence supplied, and that institution continues to refuse to provide any evidence of what she's censured for.

Without that evidence, why should we view this as anything other than a political hit job from the Governor? It's indistinguishable from that without evidence of what they're censuring for and with the evidence of student attendees that the statements they think might be the cause are fairly benign and based on facts and/or assessment by a per-eminent professional in that field without evidence to the contrary.

Is it the newspapers twisting it into a right wing suppression of speech story, or is it really just a right wing suppression of speech story that the newspapers are doing their job bringing to the public's attention?