Get this.
Purdue graduate student Paul Deignan posts (under his real name) critical comments on a thread about Samuel Alito that appear on a fairly popular feminist blog, BitchPhD.
Sample of Deignan’s comments:
This is a federalism issue, not the overbroad characterization you give it. All the state needs to enact laws to allow the suit. You seem to think that state constitutions and the 11th amendment can be ignored–that is activist.
Should I bother with the rest of your unexamined talking points? I don’t think it would be worth the effort–I’d be putting in more effort and thought than you are willing to invest yourself.
So, critical, disagreeing, but hardly what I’d call rude or obnoxious. Right? Nevertheless, most of the site’s regular readers don’t like him or his comments. They respond with criticism of their own. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Discourse is good.
But one of them… Wallace Hettle, who (I am not kidding) signs himself "Actual Professor" (and indeed he turns out to be a professor in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Northern Iowa) decides to take action.
This "actual professor" claims to have taken the step of contacting Deignan’s thesis advisors to complain that Deignan is "libelous" and "threatening."
Let me repeat this slowly…
Because he didn’t like the writings that a graduate student, whom he doesn’t know, posted on a blog belonging to someone else, whom he also doesn’t know, he’s trying to intervene in the grad student’s actual, real life.
I am pretty optimistic that Deignan’s thesis advisors — who are engineering professors, one would presume — will find the episode merely annoying or amusing or both.
The engineering academy is not as… shall we say… receptive to this kind of ridiculous posturing. If you’re an incompetent whiner, it shows. Painfully fast.
Two other things about Hettle’s commentary that are, at least, amusing to me:
1. These are the grounds he gives for saying that Deignan’s comments are "threatening:" "The willingness of prolifers such as Paul Hill to use violence to advance their agenda."
That’s right: "given that" pro-lifers such as Paul Hill are willing to use violence, supporters of Judge Alito’s dissent (in a case about the FMLA and the Eleventh and Fourteenth Amendments!) such as Paul Deignan are threatening and libelous!
There must be a connection… let’s see… I’ve got it! He feels threatened by people named Paul!
2. (and this is the one that made me laugh out loud) Hettle intimates that Paul’s future is in jeopardy because:
… as I can testify, assistant profs are in a highly accountable, indeed vulnerable position. If PD finishes his diss. and gets a real job, (a big if), and continues his obsessive behavior, he won’t last long as an academic.
If he gets a "real job" he won’t last long as an "academic?"
News flash here: Daignan studies mechanical engineering.
No offense to engineering professors, but I think Daignan’s idea of a "real job" might be a leetle bit different from the concept held by "Actual Professor" Hettle, who sounds like he suffers from an inferiority complex. At minimum he is displaying astonishing naivete.
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