There are two different versions of the resignation of Professor Paul Mirecki from his position as department chair of the Religious Studies Department at the Kansas University.

One paints the resignation as voluntary.

KU spokeswoman Lynn Bretz, in an e-mail to the Journal-World, said Mirecki met with Romzek on Dec. 6 to discuss the departmentÂ’s recommendation that he resign from the chairmanÂ’s post. After the talk, Mirecki concluded he should submit a resignation, she said.

“At a computer in Strong Hall, away from his departmental office in Smith Hall, Professor Mirecki composed and typed the letter himself, with no one else in the room,” Bretz wrote. “He pushed the print command button, sending the letter to a printer in another room, next to a secretary’s desk. The letter was printed on the letterhead at hand. Professor Mirecki retrieved the printed letter from the secretary, signed it in front of the secretary and left it there. … In addition, Professor Mirecki had told at least one KU administrator on Dec. 5, following the departmental faculty meeting that day, that he felt the need to step down as chair.”

The other, put forth by Mirecki and his lawyer, is a bit different.

In a fiery statement to the Journal-World on Friday, Mirecki said he had “no choice about signing the resignation” and he pointed out the resignation letter was typed on stationery from the office of Barbara Romzek, interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

MireckiÂ’s attorney, David J. Brown, said the issue was a frequent matter of dispute in labor situations.

“If you’re forced to sign a resignation letter, have you voluntarily resigned or have you been fired?” Brown said. “If he’d typed his own resignation letter, it would probably have been on his stationery.”

* * *

“It’s not how he described things to me,” Brown said. “The point he made was very clear that the dean and another administrator made it clear to him that he had to resign.”

In the end, I do not see the differences as significant. The important thin is that Mirecki is out of a position in which he could no longer be effective. His colleagues in the department told him that they wanted him out, presumably because the controversy rendered him tainted goods that would harm the department.

I’ve offered an analogy other places in the blogosphere in comment sections. Imagine that a professor was chairman of the Department of Ethnic Studies at a major university and had a major gripe with the direction that the civil rights establishment was headed. Imagine that he submitted a letter to a semi-public internet forum in which he said he was going to offer a course demolishing the mythology of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement as a “slap in the face” to the “darkies” (or some other slur), and that the letter made it into the press. How long could this professor effectively continue to serve as department chair? How long, in fact, would he be likely to last as a member of the department at all, given his apparent hostility towards a major segment of those about whom he was teaching?

That is precisely the situation in which Mirecki finds himself – caught out in the open as hostile to a major segment of Christianity, using his position to push a hostile agenda, and using bigoted slurs to lash out at those he clearly despises. Personally, I have no problem with dealing with creation stories as mythology in a class – my Old Testament professors did as much when I was in the seminary.

What I see as problematic is the unprofessional agenda-driven nature of the proposal, which he intended to use to discredit the beliefs in a one-sided manner so as to denigrate those who hold them. That is simply unacceptable – and is ample reason for Mirecki’s departure, whether it was voluntary or not. Indeed, I would hope that such unprofessional behavior would be grounds for dismissal.

Posted by: Greg at 02:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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