Zaruba firing an issue of employee conduct

Benjamin F. Alexander

8 March 2010

This is not a free speech or “political correctness” issue; it is a professional ethics and employee conduct issue.  Professionals on the job have never been free to say anything they liked, and employers of professionals most certainly do have the right to impose standards of conduct that include speech.

In that context, I would suggest that given that a professional employee made a serious judgment error, given that he did so with no intent to insult anybody or assert racial superiority, given that he recognized the inappropriateness of what he had said and voluntarily apologized, I would hope that, in the spirit of good supervisory ethics, the administration would take the whole picture into account: the employee’s total record of service, the actual or potential harm done by the incident and the likelihood of recurrence.  By that standard, it seems to me that Allen Zaruba should have been reprimanded, not just summarily fired.

If I believed that the man had acted with racist intent, or if I perceived him as intending to use insensitive language to his classes as an ongoing practice, I would not be writing this letter.  My work as an academic historian brings me in close touch with the destructiveness of racism and the power of certain words to intensify its effects, and as an educator I would not condone racist behavior in the classroom for one tenth of a second.

But when I examine the Allen Zaruba incident, I find myself disagreeing with his dismissal: not on grounds of free speech, but on grounds of fair treatment of professional employees with good track records who slip up.

This letter was published in The Towerlight (8 March 2010), pp. 4–5.

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