With regard to my post, “Professorial Criminality,” Jack Kemp (not the politician) comments in The American Thinker:
The state of Missouri wants to run background checks on college professors at its…university campuses. Some pompous professors are outraged about not being considered above the law…
I recall one time in the 1990s, black groups were angry that New York City wanted to fingerprint welfare recipients. They disliked the assumption of criminal background. At that time, I called former Mayor Ed Koch’s radio program and got on the air to say that when I programmed computers at a bank, they took my fingerprints and sent them to the FBI. And I was white, Jewish and a college grad. In fact, his screener told me moments before that he had been fingerprinted as a requirement of becoming a New York City public school teacher. I also said on the air that the bank also made me take a drug test….
In an email Kemp adds:
…it seems that the professors want to institutionalize a utopian socialist system where one is free to do anything one wants and not be bothered by “bourgeois ethics.” To carry the idea that “all morality is relative and therefore meaningless” to its logical conclusion, one has to live in a world where you are not fingerprinted in order to become a professor/instructor. This makes it possible for any past criminal convictions to be hidden. However, this utopian, adolescent…fantasy runs into some problems:
1) Parents – and society – want to protect their children from criminals.
2) The university wants to protect itself from lawsuits, as well as crimes on campus, such as rape, theft and assault. Wouldn’t a university want to know if their new Information Technology instructor is a convicted computer embezzler? Is it an act of McCarthyism to inquire about their past criminal record (or past honest record) by using fingerprint matching with a national criminal database? I don’t think so.