“DePaul deserved to be hit harder, but this story is more of a human interest profile of [Thomas] Klocek,” says Richard Baehr today in The American Thinker about Ron Grossman’s Chi Trib Tempo piece “I’m not the ideal poster boy,” about the DePaul adjunct teacher who was suspended and asked to apologize to Palestinian-supporter students for objecting to their anti-Israel display at a student-activity fair and is suing DePaul.
Baehr wonders if DePaul and some of its trustees had a hand in neutralizing — or neutering — the story, which is possible. More to the point, Baehr says the story ignores highly prejudicial comments about Klocek by a dean, who “slandered Tom as a bigot and . . . accepted the students’ side of the dispute before hearing from Tom, and subsequently cut off his health insurance, and prohibited him from praying in the DePaul chapel.”
In Grossman’s careful “he said/she said fashion” which Baehr implies did not do justice to the student-fair confrontation, Grossman could have used that zesty stuff about the dean (it seems to me), assuming the sources held up under his (cross) examination. That he-said-she-said business is how it’s done, of course. But Grossman does seem to have done the human-interest part to the detriment of the conflict part. So it would seem, anyhow, to those who had already read about the DePaul political climate in American Thinker — “Ward Churchill speaks,” “The Growing Threat to Israel,” and “DePaul’s Jihad Against Academic Freedom” — as it surrounds and pertains directly to Klocek.
It’s hot stuff and quite prejudicial against DePaul, but detailed and coherent and worth quoting, which I will do here but not now, because it’s time for Pajamas Media wannabes to go to bed.
Blithe Spirit 