Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Professor Receives Death Threats & Loses Her Adjunct Position After Complaining About Christian Crosses


It’s a widely-known fact that adjuncts are generally hired on a semester-by-semester basis. This essentially means that colleges and universities are free to let these part-time employees go at any time they so choose. But Sissy Bradford, an ex-professor at Texas A&M University at San Antonio is speaking out about her employer’s decision not to ask her back following a controversy over Christian crosses on campus.
Inside Higher Ed has more about the controversy and the events that comprise it:
In the fall, Sissy Bradford took a public stand — unpopular with many in San Antonio — about separation of church and state. She was briefly in the news and her view prevailed. Since then, she has received e-mail threats because of her stance. This month, she told the story of those threats to the alt-weekly in San Antonio, which ran an article about them. And the day the article came out, Texas A&M University at San Antonio told her that she would not be teaching in the fall, despite her having previously been assigned four courses.
Bradford teaches criminology at the university; she has strong student evaluations (which she shared with Inside Higher Ed) and she has been honored for her teaching. She became a public figure when she complained about crosses that had been installed on a tower that was part of the entrance to the campus. The crosses were put there by a developer, not the university, but Bradford maintained that they were inappropriate for the entrance to a public university campus. Americans United for Separation of Church and State backed her — and after that organization sent a series of letters to San Antonio and university officials, the developer removed the crosses. That was in November.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you do a bit of investigating you will find out a few things.

1. She was never qualified to teach Criminology courses. (Her resume proves this; she really should have locked that up.)

2. The University is not accredited.

3. They applied for accreditation and were required to have more tenured (PhD's) than adjuncts. (Masters degrees)

4. Her "legal" team consists of a playwriter, art historian and photographer.

5. The "emailed threats" were 1 letter that was a hostile religious rant and one that called her an ***hole. The "mailed threat" was a CHristmas card/ It wasn't enough to meet the threshold requirements to press charges. Police can only do so much but if the D.A. doesn't want to press charges, its over.

6 Everyone forgot about her after December.

7. if she had a real lawyer, they would have been handling all of the media to ensure that she doesn't say things like "I am the only professor who requires her students to memorize parts of the bible..", then being declared an atheist, then claiming that it was because she was Jewish that she was fired.

8. I feel like the deeper I dig into this the more I was fooled by some elaborate con artist.