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The University of Delaware is cutting ties with a part-time professor who provoked a controversial firestorm for saying North Korea detainee Otto Warmbier "deserved" to die.
The Newark school said it will not re-hire Katherine Dettwyler, the adjunct faculty member who blasted the 22-year-old student as "young, white, rich, clueless" in a since-deleted Facebook post Tuesday.
The school's statement (pdf):
The comments of Katherine Dettwyler do not reflect the values or position of the University of Delaware. We condemn any and all messages that endorse hatred and convey insensitivity toward a tragic event such as the one that Otto Warmbier and his family suffered.
The University of Delaware values respect and civility and we are committed to global education and study abroad; therefore, we find these comments particularly distressing and inconsistent with our values. Our sympathies are with the Warmbier family.
Also at; CBS News.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 28 2017, @07:31PM
Yes, those darn guys pushing things like the internet that's now allowing you to communicate to me - instantly - when we could very well be half way around the world from one another. Undoubtedly Tim Berners-Lee just pushed out these technologies for the wealth, women, and wine. If you're not aware of the story there. He is the developer behind most of the fundamental technology behind the world wide web today. He knew it had enormous potential and actually intentionally avoided patenting anything to ensure its growth and potential gain for society. He even developed the first web browser, and gave it away for free.
The people that really push our society forward are the Einsteins, of past and present. Politicians and peddlers get credit for as much but in reality they do little more than draw invisible lines and declare laws that are obsoleted and forgotten even within the timespan of a single individual. Indeed if society was directed by the King Whoever the Whatevers, we'd still be small tribes going at each other with pointy sticks and rocks with huge swaths of the entire world's population being wiped out in the process of such.
And before you make a lazy analogy to replacing sticks and rocks with machine guns and missiles, realize how absurd it is. Today we have 7 billion people with deaths from war direct and indirect in the hundreds of thousands. That's on the order of 1/10,000 people dying because of war per year. That is something that would be completely inconceivable in times past. We have these weapons which could kill vastly more effectively, yet we are more reluctant than ever to use them. It's so easy to forget all of this because we tend to naturally focus on the negatives in our view of society. "Boy we sure live in a time of unbelievably peace and harmony." seems incredulous at best when you turn on some sensationalistic cable news network, yet it is true in every single quantifiable way.
Or think about things like education. We live in a world where educational opportunity is completely unprecedented. Not even thousands of years ago, information was considered some private luxury only the indoctrinated, wealthy, and powerful were allowed access to. It was something to be hoarded and hidden away. Now you have the opportunity to learn practically anything all at the tip of your fingers. And this possibility and potential is expanding exponentially. This is all absolutely incredible, and you could go on and on. Yes, people that seek power will tend to be those that obtain power. And they tend to make up the worst of us. Fortunately, while their whims can be harmful in the short run - ultimately, they are irrelevant. And we are entering and era, technologically and socially, where things such as decentralized governance are beginning to become a possibility if not an inevitability. I could go on and on, but really - quantify things and the world starts to look far different than we think it does. It's so easy to get lost in the moment, yet the moment is irrelevant.