“You know, I don’t care if you teach reading and it’s in the bible. It’s what we used to do. I’m a little skeptical quite honestly of professors from universities and their phobia on religion.” – Glenn Beck speaking to David Touretzky.
Touretzky’s gripe with Scientology is a personal grudge because he was involved in copyright infringement many years ago and was forced to take the material down. He may be an intelligent professor when it comes to studing rat brains (which is what he does at Carnegie Mellon University), but socially, he is very childish and as pay back he goes on TV and rants about Scientology. He is abusing his position at Carnegie Mellon University and all his anti-Scientology activities are factually being paid with government grants because that’s how he gets paid.
Touretzky uses Carnegie Mellon University facilities to conduct his smear campaigns, but the University policy concerning usage of their facilities for non-academic purposes are very interesting.
Under Standards of Faculty Conduct, a Carnegie Mellon University faculty member “joins a community committed to … respect for the dignity of others.”
Furthermore:
“[t]he welfare, indeed the survival of the academic community rests on the willing consent given by its members to the principles that guide their conduct.” It also says, in addressing the right of its members “to organize and join political associations, to convene and conduct public meetings, and to advocate and publicize their views by verbal means and by public demonstration,” that CMU “is entitled to expect from them that they maintain and affirm a continuing concern for the interests of the university as a whole.”
Among “sanctionable violations of these standards of faculty conduct” are included “misuse of authority to harass, intimidate, or defame others.”
Dismissal or sanctions both require a finding of:
1. substantial neglect of duties;
…
3. moral turpitude;
4. violation of the criminal law that places the institution or members of the university community in jeopardy;
5. persistent and willful violation of standards of faculty conduct [according to the “Standards of faculty conduct”].
The policy on computer use specifically provides loss of access to computers as a separate solution for computer violations from discipline. Carnegie Mellon University Computing Policy addresses “the university’s expectations of acceptable behavior on the part of computer system users at Carnegie Mellon by providing guidelines for appropriate use of computing and related communication systems and examples of inappropriate use.” It further states that:
“These standards of acceptable behavior also extend beyond the campus community and into the Internet. Just as it is unacceptable to violate others’ rights to privacy, property and resources within Carnegie Mellon, it is also unacceptable to violate those rights on systems that are not at Carnegie Mellon but are accessible through Carnegie Mellon’s connection to the Internet.”
It was found that even some students at Carnegie Mellon University are not happy with David Touretzky as it can be seen from the website these students have created about their professor.