Wednesday, December 13, 2006

X Ring

St. Francis Xavier University has come down in the world since the Church ran it, as evidenced by the extra-curricular activities of one Professor Shiraz Dossa:

Shiraz Dossa, who has taught political science at St. F.X. since 1988, was scheduled to discuss "Liberalism, Holocaust and war against Muslims" on Monday at the Adelaide Institute’s two-day forum in Tehran called Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision.

"He is not representing St. F.X., obviously," Allan Gates, a university spokesman, said in an interview Tuesday. "He’s there as an individual.

"His views or opinions are his own."

Mr. Dossa is listed in an online program for the conference as being affiliated with the University of Toronto, where he was a teaching fellow for two years and "succeeded, accidentally, in earning both an MA and PhD," according to a section about him on the St. F.X. website.

Mr. Gates said he wasn’t aware of Mr. Dossa having any history of controversy while teaching at the university. St. F.X. officials didn’t know the professor was attending the conference in Iran this week until the political science department was contacted Tuesday, Mr. Gates said.

....

Several people claiming to be Mr. Dossa’s students have posted their opinions of his classes online at ratemyprofessors.com.

"We were supposed to study Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and the like but instead we watched the Daily Show and listened to him rail against all his various hatreds," one person wrote about a History of Political Thought course.

"Funny how he lives and collects a generous salary in the part of the world he ridicules for a living."

Another complained about Mr. Dossa’s tendency to mark hard.

"‘Dr. Dossa (he’s very proud of his PhD) rants all day about George Bush," the poster also wrote. "I still do not know anything about political science. The exams and paper topics are ridiculous. There is no textbook."


An anti-American, anti-Semitic, leftist nutjob of dubious achievement safely ensconced in a tenured political science professorship? I never heard of the like!

In any event, tenure should be no protection for Dr. Dossa. He is not contributing to the sum of useful human knowledge by attending this conference; indeed, he is subtracting from it. He disgraces his profession's best traditions by attending a so-called symposium that is little more than an academic Nuremburg rally.

Even the looniest of moonbat gatherings can be said, in some strange way, to be furthering the advancement of human knowledge (if only of psychopathology). This one does not. Fire him and let him peddle his trash in Tehran.

Source: Halifax Chronicle-Herald

1 comment:

Frank Cybulski said...

Surpressing free speech only lets him win. Letting a professor go because of their political beliefs only reinforces that wrongly-held sense of alienation. I'm a political science minor at X, I know the university and the prof better than you do.

I didn't take his class; I took another prof's. If students don't like professors, they can generally switch out of their class. And from the opinions of students I know who are or have been in his classes, he's not as bad as your nitpicked comments seem to show.

Firing him for his beliefs would be just as bad as firing a right-wing professor for his. You can't pick and choose free speech.

Oh, and this http://www.stfx.ca/macleans/ would seem to rebutt your "has gone down in the world" comments. Just because there's one far-left professor doesn't mean the university is crap.