A while ago, I posted a video documenting the bizarre experience of Keith John Sampson, a student-employee at IUPUI, who found himself accused of “racial harassment” and “extremely poor judgment” for “openly” reading a history book in his free time. Following Sampson’s story, and others like it, readers have asked a not unreasonable question: Why does no-one get fired for this?

The FIRE blog reports that firings do happen following dubious accusations, though not in ways one might wish and not to those one might expect. 

Professor Thomas Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out – at a sexual harassment training seminar – that the school’s sexual harassment policy contained no protection for the falsely accused. Two days later, in a Kafkaesque irony, Thibeault was fired by the college president for sexual harassment without notice, without knowing his accuser or the charges against him, and without a hearing. […]

Thibeault’s ordeal started shortly after August 5, 2009 when, during a faculty training session regarding the college’s sexual harassment policy, he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, “What provision is there in the sexual harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?” Vice President for Legal Affairs Mary Smith, who was conducting the session, replied that there was no such provision to protect the accused, so Thibeault responded that “the policy itself is flawed.”

Thibeault’s account of the exchange can be read here. The following extract may be of interest, echoing as it does an assumption we’ve encountered before – specifically, that injured feelings, or claims of such, should override facts, logic and normal proprieties:

Mary Smith was explaining the sexual harassment policy and was emphasising that faculty had to report suspicions of sexual harassment by any faculty member to the college administration. She was stating that the feelings of the offended were proof of the offensive nature of the behaviour.

And thus, presumably, proof of grounds for disciplinary action, even dismissal. And why not? After all, claims of being offended never, ever hinge on the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the supposedly aggrieved party. And no-one would ever exploit the pretence of being hurt, even when it offers unilateral leverage and a license to get even with someone they just don’t like.  

This morning I received a suggestion for an irregular series of posts: “Classic Sentences from the Guardian.” Methinks the idea has legs and readers are welcome to submit examples for our collective betterment. To set the ball rolling, here’s one by Lucy Siegle, a BBC contributor and one half of the Guardian and Observer advice column Ask Leo & Lucy, where the finer points of eco-conscious ethics are pondered and explored:

According to a study by Royal Holloway and Bedford University, hedgehogs have the poorest road skills.

As readers will doubtless be intrigued, the statement is taken from an article posing a question that weighs all too heavily on the mind of the modern consumer,

Is roadkill a viable meat source?

Which itself ought to win some kind of prize. For those seeking context, here’s another morsel:

[C]arrion appeals to those who hate waste and, as one prolific UK roadkill consumer puts it, out of 40 carcasses found here, 20 will be edible.

Even readers who don’t regard themselves as prolific roadkill consumers will nonetheless agree – those are pretty good odds.

Leo and Lucy’s other ethical ruminations include the menace posed by salad consumption, guitars made from yoghurt pots, the resoling of worn-out trainers and the ecological downside of biodegradable sky lanterns.

Update: More sentences of note. 

Germaine Greer shares her thoughts on the impending demise of Big Brother:

Let’s hope the final series has the Man himself dragged out of his hiding place, arraigned by the housemates who are the worse for the experience, and sentenced to condign punishment for perverting the nation’s taste. That I would watch.

Yes, of course, viewers must be the victims of unseen forces they cannot possibly comprehend. At least viewers of popular, commercial television. Viewers of, say, David Starkey programmes, not so much. But viewers of Big Brother? Their tastes have been perverted. Endemol and Channel 4 evidently took something of a risk by spending vast amounts of time and money on a programme for which no popular appetite could conceivably exist – not until the public had been suitably duped and perverted. And presumably Germaine knows this because she knows what popular taste ought to be. I’m sure there’s an irony in there somewhere.

Big Brother was one of those shows, as Friends was in its day, that young people watched in order to find out how to be themselves.

Did they, really? Is that what young people do? How does Germaine know this? Alas, she doesn’t say. She does, however, tell us:

Unfortunately what they learnt from Big Brother was that a girl who is plain or assertive is to be avoided. Any female who fails to hide the fact that she is more intelligent than the people around her is to be reviled. The feistiest girls are tossed out of the house, one by one, until only the meek are left. Of nine Big Brother winners, only three have been female, and that includes Nadia Almada (who had undergone gender reassignment only eight months before). Women get a far rougher ride from both housemates and viewers than do gay men, however waspish and over the top. Big Brother leaves us with a lasting impression that British misogyny is crueller and more pervasive than British homophobia.

This being the Guardian, nothing must divert Germaine from the obligatory victimhood hierarchy – it’s practically contractual – even if this requires some wild extrapolation. (Had the majority of winners been female, this could no doubt be construed as the result of some lascivious patriarchal gaze… and thus more damning evidence of pervasive oppression.) But wait a minute. Isn’t the Big Brother audience – and particularly the voting audience – disproportionately gay and disproportionately female? What then of the alleged homophobia and misogyny? And doesn’t the win by the plain, feisty and assertive Nadia Almada – in one of the series’ most rapturous and popular final nights – suggest something other than bigotry and hatred?

Despite Ms Greer’s own truncated appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, which she described as a “fascist prison,” and despite her grumblings about the series’ morally corrupting effects on those she considers “weaker than [herself],” the Guardian columnist saw fit to make subsequent paid appearances on Big Brother’s Little Brother and Big Brother’s Big Mouth.

Here’s Ms Greer in happier times.

Counting Cats in Zanzibar highlights the work of Professor Sabri Abd Al-Rauf and the importance of a fragrant bride:

The mother [of the bridegroom] and other female relatives may look at the bride’s hair and neck, and may smell her private parts… But the groom is forbidden to look at any part of her except her face and hands.

The video of Professor Al-Rauf being interviewed has an endearingly demented quality, as these things often do. But it’s probably worth noting that the professor previously appeared on Saudi Arabia’s Iqra TV, explaining to viewers the finer points of wife-beating. Specifically, that, “beating [one’s wife] doesn’t mean beatings with a rod or beatings that draw blood… The beatings are intended to instil fear… declaring that [the husband] isn’t satisfied with this wife.”

The Quackometer takes issue with the Society of Homeopaths:

The result of this careful study was that the homeopathic treatment was no better than a placebo. But the homeopath authors do not conclude that homeopathy did not work; they speculate the tablets had not been stored properly or that the wrong combination of sugar pills was made. At no point do they propose as a possibility that homeopathy can have absolutely no effect on a third-world child with [diarrhoea]. 

And Deogolwulf spies a contender for Greatest Comment Ever by a Guardian reader.

While I was at the coast yesterday, the Guardian’s Peter Jones addressed a matter of pressing import:

My girlfriend and I were watching TV at home when the advert for comparethemarket.com appeared on our screen. I had seen the ad before and not thought anything of it. However on this occasion, my girlfriend, who is Ukrainian, turned to me and said: “I don’t like this advert; it is very offensive to me.” I mentioned it to a friend who said his Latvian lodger also found it offensive.

The gravity of a claim to be offended should of course be measured by the rush to air it in the face of widespread bewilderment. It’s the modern way. In fairness, Mr Jones does go on to explain why the agency in question, VCCP, is propagating “racism”: 

The advertisement centres on the word “market” – a word that eastern Europeans/Russians pronounce “meerkat” – using talking CGI-animated meerkats. The sole point of this… is to highlight the idea that east Europeans cannot pronounce the word market properly when they speak English.

Wait a minute. Do Latvians, Poles and Slovaks really pronounce “market” as “meerkat”? Romanians too, and Ukrainians, and Russians? This is news, at least to me. Still, it’s good to see a Guardian contributor making such bold assumptions in the name of anti-racism. And aren’t meerkats – actual meerkats, not imaginary talking ones in smoking jackets – found primarily in Africa? The plot thickens.

It struck me how racist it was to parody what is now a significant part of the British population in this way… It is also the case that as so many people from eastern Europe were so new to the country that they would not want to be seen to be causing trouble. It then dawned on me that this ad was targeting a sector of the population who would be unlikely to fight back.

Ah. It’s targeted oppression, see? A watertight case. The fiends.

I once attempted an affectionate parody of a friend’s Brummie accent. No doubt that confirms my barely-latent hatred of all people from or around Birmingham. And viewers in Iceland, Russia and Scandinavia are doubtless still fuming at the explicitly racist horrors of “Beware the Judderman.”