(UPDATE ADDED)

Normally I wouldn’t respond to so poor an argument as this one, but it turns out that the group Free Exchange on Campus counts some major players among its member organizations, including the ACLU. So here goes.

A few days back Candace and I blogged about an article noting the trend of ex-cons becoming criminology professors under the argument that they’re particularly knowledgeable. In addition, several universities have former terrorists on their faculties. I actually said the article went too far in analogizing criminal criminologists to pedophiles in day-care centers, but such nuances escape Chris Goff of FEOC. (Conservatives all think alike and make the exact same arguments, so why bother reading them before linking, right?)

He writes:

There’s a few things here that really bug me. First is the idea that if someone has spent time in the clink, they obviously have nothing to contribute to society, in which case we should be throwing out Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as so much claptrap from convicts.
Secondly, bright people do stupid things, and some of those stupid things have legal consequences. However, after paying their debt to society, going on to receive sterling credentials from top-flight institutions (Professor Dohrn, for example, received her law degree from the University of Chicago), and serving with distinction at their respective institutions, folks like Penn, de Russy, and VerBruggen still want to punish them, poo-pooing their very real contributions with a disdainful sneer and whispered, “Convict!” Rather than engaging with their ideas, this crowd finds it easier to smear them.

First of all, neither Candace nor I said that no one who’s ever served any time should be allowed to teach, much less that they have “nothing to contribute to society.” Rather, the argument was that a criminal past should factor into the equation as a negative if anything. It’s not an extra qualification for an academic position.

I would add, while we’re on the subject, that the degree of criminal activity matters. Terrorism a la Dohrn, former Weathermen leader, ought to be a major factor, a much bigger one than small-time criminality and civil disobedience would be. Particularly if one continues to endorse those acts as an academic, as Dohrn’s also-a-professor husband has.

Many in the legal profession agree; Dohrn was denied admittance to the New York bar in 1985, and when a New York Times profile happened to run on 9/11, drawing attention to her current status, a few of her school’s alumni asked for donations back. Also, the timeline is wrong – Dohrn received her U of C law degree before her terrorism activities, so she didn’t “go on” to redeem herself. Intelligence and criminality are two different continua.

UPDATE: It’s come to my attention through Chris’s response that my original attribution of the post was incorrect; I read their initials-to-names translator too hastily, my apologies. (Though contrary to what he implies, only his initials, not his full name, are on the post itself.) The name in the post now is the correct one.

The rest of the post has some interesting history-rewriting though. At first, he summarized my argument as anyone who’s ever done time “obviously [has] nothing to contribute to society,” but now claims his “initial characterization” was “a person with a criminal record should continue to be punished, if anything.” (The latter is correct — if you take someone’s criminal record into consideration at all, it shouldn’t help them. Depending on the position and the severity/nature of the record, sometimes it’s not necessary to take it into consideration at all; thus, if anything.)

And then there’s this:

What’s more, what evidence is there that one’s ex-con status is an “extra qualification” for an academic position? In the case of a “criminal criminologist,” it might have an indirect impact on one’s hiring, insofar as one’s experience within the penal system affects the scholarship produced in a manner that advances the field in important directions. But is there any evidence that suggests that the professors and trustee named in Penn’s article were hired because of their criminal pasts?

So there’s no evidence that anyone treats a criminal record as an extra qualification. But he thinks to some degree “one’s experience within the penal system affects the scholarship produced in a manner that advances the field in important directions” — an extra qualification.

Also, I’ll freely admit the article I was commenting on did not document the universities’ internal hiring discussions. If such documentation ever becomes public, I’ll be glad to concede the article proclaimed a problem where there was none, if that indeed is the case. But my argument will remain that criminal records shouldn’t be an extra qualification.