Paying the piper

 (In which Sportsball World once again cannot hold the Blob. You know the protocol: Read on, or take your hall pass and skedaddle.)

So I see my alma mater will have to fork over a quarter million dollars to fired employee Suzanne Swierc, and I say, too effing bad. Ball State University should have to pay her a quarter mill. In fact, if it were up to this alum (Class of '77, thank you very much), Ball U. would be paying a lot more.

It got off cheap, in my estimation. So pay the piper and don't bitch, ya lint brains.

I say this because the current administration showed no stones and less integrity in dismissing Swierc last September, simply because she chose to lay a little truth on everyone about right-wing martyr Charlie Kirk. The deification of Mr. Kirk was well underway by then, and Swierc was deemed not properly genuflective (to totally make up a word).  

She wasn't nasty. She didn't "celebrate" his death, as the more fevered of her detractors btried to claim. She simply pointed out that Saint Charlie occasionally said some pretty hurtful things about certain people who'd never done him any harm, and sometimes one reaps what one sows when you do that.

Now, not a word of that was untrue. But Ball State's administration went into cringe mode anyway, apparently afraid governor Mike Braun and attorney general Todd Rokita would come after them with pitchforks and torches. So Swierc was canned for reasoning that smelled worse than any cow pasture in Indiana.

Or as the Blob put it last September:

In its official release the University said it went strictly by official guidelines, which state that a public institution can justify a dismissal by applying a two-part test to determine whether or not an employee's speech disrupts the workplace. The release went on to say the University determined Swierc's post did exactly that.

"... Our administration evaluated the impact of the significant disruption to the University's mission and operations and the effect of the post on her ability to perform her work in her leadership position," the release said, in a masterwork of handbook-speak.

And to which the Blob says this: Oh, balls.

Tell me how, precisely, Swierc's post was a "significant disruption" of her ability to (what did she do again?) promote and advocate health issues. Tell me how, again precisely, a post entirely unrelated to her job made it difficult for her to do that job. Explain yourselves -- or to put it in more educational terms: Show me your work.

Indeed. Or, better yet, be honest about it: Say you were a-feared of the Guv and Sanctimony Todd, and decided to cave instead of doing what higher ed is supposed to do.

Which is, stand up for the truth-tellers. Because seeking truth is supposed to be a university's core mission, is it not?

Any university worth the name, that is.