A MCKINNEY / BELLESILES CONNECTION? Well, only in the most tenuous sense. But Bellesiles is certainly being treated with kid gloves compared to this guy, who does have a McKinney connection of sorts. The link comes from Martin Grace, a professor at Georgia State University, who argues that Emory has a general governance problem:

Emory has a history of making bad decisions about tenured faculty. The decision to fire tenured faculty might the correct one for the institution and they may have legal grounds to do so, but they appear to do it often without even a level of minimal due process. There have been a number of cases of recent note and I have linked an article from the Emory newspaper that talks about a particular case. However, as one reads further we see that Ms. McKinney (and her dad) got involved in the case. She is a lame duck now, but she still fight for the “little guy” if she so desires.

Perhaps the reticence of Emory to “firing” a tenure faculty member and actually contemplating paying him off is because of the lack of understanding about what is permissible faculty behavior and what is not _and_ Emory’s previous attempts at termination were met with litigation and alleged million dollar pay-offs . . . They may think it may be cheaper just to pay Bellesiles off now.

The senior administrators there have always called the shots and they have

done it rather poorly in the past. Why expect anything different today?

PS. I have no connection to Emory other than that I live in the

neighborhood. I know a couple of people who work there now and some who

used to work there.

Interesting. As I said earlier, we’ll just have to see what develops.