This may be the strangest display by a tenured academic ever caught on camera—and if you know higher ed, you know that's a very high bar to clear:
Here's the scoop out of Michigan:
A Ferris State University faculty member has been placed on administrative leave after he reportedly went on a profanity-laced rant about the coronavirus pandemic during a class lecture video that was posted online.
Barry Mehler, a history professor in Ferris State's humanities department, called his students "vectors of disease" and blamed the university for holding in-person classes amid the COVID-19 crisis during an introductory video posted to his YouTube account on Jan. 9, 2022.
"No liberty (expletive) of an administrator is going to tell me how to teach my class, because I'm a (expletive) tenured professor, so if you want to complain to your dean, (expletive) you," Mehler said in the video. "Go ahead. I'm retiring at the end of this year and I couldn't give a flying (expletive) any longer. You people are just vectors of disease to me, and I don't want to be anywhere near you."
Here's the video itself.
We consulted our I.T. department and determined that Not the Bee lacks the bandwidth to deploy a large-enough LANGUAGE WARNING for this video—we'd need about nine petabytes just to render the text alone.
Anyway, you've been duly warned:
Now, COVID hysteria is actually kind of common after two years of nonstop global coronavirus panic, so it's not the craziest thing in the world to see nowadays. No, arguably the most surprising part of Professor Mehler's rant was how he claims to assign grades:
"None of you (expletive) are good enough to earn an A in my class, so I randomly assign grades before the first day of class," Mehler said in the video. "I don't want to know (expletive) about you. I don't even want to know your name. I just look at the number and I assign a grade. That is how predestination works. And don't come (expletive) complaining to me, take your complaints to God. He ordained this system, not me."
That's, ummmm...
Seriously, there's not a whole ton of things that can get a tenured professor canned from his job, but "I just randomly assign grades before class even begins" is probably one of them. If true, it's a scandal that could easily have huge ramifications not just for the professor but for the university itself.
Well, if nothing else, Professor Mehler should be happy that he'll probably never have to teach another roomful of "disease vector" students again!
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