Kansas professor beaten. Or was he.....?

[JLam]

[FONT=&quot]Let's get something out of the way first. Anyone who has read my posts here knows that I'm about as anti-fundie/anti Intelligent Design as they come.

But I'm also a skeptic, and that requires me to look at all the evidence before making up my mind about something. If something doesn't pass my sniff test, I have to question it.

You might remember the story about the [/FONT][FONT=&quot]Kansas[/FONT][FONT=&quot] professor who was allegedly beaten after stirring up a controversy. He had been scheduled to teach a course about ID, Creationism, and other religious mythologies, until he sent an email to some friends about the course, in which he disparaged religious fundamentalists.

To refresh your memory, this topic was discussed on the forum here several times. Here, and here. The story got lots of media attention.

I admit I swallowed the story whole. I kind of felt a bit vindicated, thinking to myself "See, it's the Christians who are crazy, not me."

Then I read this piece by Michelle Malkin. (Now, before anyone says "Oh, well, it's Michelle Malkin, so it can't be trusted," hear me out. Yes, she's got a right-wing political stance, and I disagree with her on a GREAT many issues, but I have read her stuff for a long time, and she is not an irrational firebreather. She is capable of looking at an issue objectively, and many times she's criticized her fellow right-wingers when she thinks they're wrong.)

Here are a few quotes, but you should read the whole thing.

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Last week, Mirecki claimed he was beaten by two mysterious white men on a rural highway. He says the unidentified assailants, in a pickup that tailgated him in rural Douglas County, Kansas, targeted him for his views while he was "taking a long, pre-dawn drive in the country to clear his mind," according to the student newspaper. Mirecki says he pulled over to the side of the road to let the men pass. He then said he got out of his vehicle. The alleged attackers got out of their truck and beat "the hell" out of him, reportedly using a "metal object," Mirecki said last week before abruptly clamming up about the attack and sequestering himself in his house.

News of the beating aligned perfectly with the mainstream media's template of Christian fundamentalists as right-wing vigilantes. Mirecki's liberal supporters on the Internet swallowed the story whole. The Wichita Eagle told those with questions about Mirecki's account to "give it a rest." A Kansas City Star columnist called allegations of a manufactured hate crime a "cheap shot."

Why?

Mirecki can't remember where the incident took place, according to local law enforcement, and has offered only the vaguest of suspect descriptions. There are conflicting accounts about Mirecki's physical appearance the day of the attack. While a faculty colleague claimed that "big swollen spots" had "transformed" Mirecki's face, Jesse Plous and Tiffany Jeffers, two of Mirecki's students, told the campus newspaper they didn't notice bruises or scratches when they met for his class six hours after the alleged attack] Lindsay Mayer, another student in the class, "said injuries weren't extremely noticeable." Mirecki did not mention the alleged beating in class.

Now, a week after the alleged attack with the alleged assailants still at large, Mirecki is poised to take both his university and the local sheriff's office to court for their insufficient support and investigation. The fundies! Academia! The cops! They're all in on it!

After university officials announced that Mirecki had voluntarily resigned as chair of the religion department, the professor came out of his shell to blast the school for forcing him to step down. The university stands by its account. Mirecki has complained that law enforcement officials have seized his car and computer, and doesn't like the direction of the probe. "If I have to sue, I will," he told the Lawrence Journal-World.

None of this smells right.

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She's right. This doesn't smell right.

Ask yourself this. If this had been a fundie who was claiming to have been beaten by atheists, would you be looking at it differently?

I don't know what happened to this professor. Maybe he was beaten. Maybe he wasn't. But skeptical people should be skeptical all the time, always demanding evidence, always investigating, and never accepting anything at face value.

The issue here is that there's no corroborating evidence that he was beaten. And there are other factors here. The man obviously has contempt for fundies (as do I, but that's beside the point), he was irked that his email got out and he was forced to cancel the class, and it's not totally out of the realm of possibility that this was a publicity stunt. It's not as if it's without precedent, as Malkin points out:

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Last year, Claremont McKenna College professor Kerri Dunn was sentenced to prison after she staged an anti-Semitic hate crime against herself. Earlier this year, a lesbian student at Mt. Tamalpais High School in Marin County, Calif., faked several anti-gay incidents to garner attention and sympathy. Leah Miller, a black student at San Francisco State University, admitted to scratching "NIGG" on a dorm room door and writing herself a note with the same epithet. Jaime Alexander Saide, a Northwestern University student, admitted making up anti-Hispanic threats against himself after the school rallied around him with "Stop the Hate" marches.

All I'm saying is that we need to approach this situation with the same critical eye we use when a psychic claims to solve a crime or some guy claims that a UFO landed in his backyard.

What do you think?
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[WildCat]

That story does smell funny, and Mirecki clearly has an agenda to push as revealed by those mindless emails that got his course cancelled. Extremists hurt the cause whatever it is.

 

[Skeptic]

What is odd is that he voluntarily resigned a chair--that is, a tenured position--and he claims that he was forced to resign. The whole point of tenure is that one cannot be forced to resign it except in extreme circumstances. Disagreements with administration don't count--the whole point of tenure is that you cannot be fired just because the new dean doesn't like you. Usually, the only ways one can be forced to leave a tenured position is to commit a felony (or the university closing down).

This smells really funny. When someone voluntarily leaves a tenured position, this is either out of protest, or because they have a better offer from elsewhere, or that it is an informal plea-bargaining: the university won't press charges against him for sleeping with the underage student if he will "voluntarily" leave. But in that case, the (ex-)professor usually doesn't go around claiming he was "forced" out.

So I don't know. We need to get to the bottom of this, that's for damn sure.

 

[TobiasTheViking]

That story does smell funny, and Mirecki clearly has an agenda to push as revealed by those mindless emails that got his course cancelled. Extremists hurt the cause whatever it is.

"When you become obsessed with the enemy you become the enemy"

 

[Manny]

What is odd is that he voluntarily resigned a chair--that is, a tenured position--and he claims that he was forced to resign. The whole point of tenure is that one cannot be forced to resign it except in extreme circumstances.

I'm not sure that's true of department chairs -- My admittedly fuzzy memory is that that position can get pretty political and a no-confidence vote (or more likely, non-vote) from fellow faculty can indeed put substantial pressure on someone to step down from that position. To be sure, he'd still be a tenured professor with the same pay, same expectation of workload, etc.

But even if true, that doesn't stop this whole thing from smelling like 3-day old crab shells.

 

[Tony]

I think his story is pretty simple to verify actually. He says some dudes beat the hell out of him. Does he have the injuries of someone who got the hell beat out of them?

 

[NoZed Avenger]

A pic is floating around the web -- if it is correct, it is . . .odd.

Perfectly symmetrical black eyes -- that look much like a football player's eyeblack (i.e., just a smudge at the top of each cheek), plus a half-dollar sized bruise on the upper arm.

Two guys, one with a piece of metal. Yet no defensive wounds, no scratches, no marks on the face or neck and apparently none on the hands.

I dunno. Reserving judgment, but the whole thing does sound odd. I'll try to find a link to the pic.

 

[NoZed Avenger]

here is a shot from one of the papers (I think):

http://www2.ljworld.com/photos/2005/dec/10/70615/


I dunno. Maybe.

 

[luchog]

here is a shot from one of the papers (I think):

http://www2.ljworld.com/photos/2005/dec/10/70615/


I dunno. Maybe.

No way.

The marks around his eyes are somewhat typical for someone who's had a pair of narrow-lensed, heavy framed glasses (nothing like the ones in his pocket in the photo) driven stright back into their face, but there's none of the bruising on the nose or bridge that would be consistent with that sort of trauma; and the angle would be kind of odd to only get that damage and one around the rest of the eye. Plus, there is none of the other facial trauma that would typically result, no cuts from broken glass or plastic (and to get that pattern of bruises, the glasses would have to have broken at least at the bridge (speaking from experience).

The bruise on his arm is pretty minor, particularly for the sort of beating he claimed to have gotten; and is weeks old, well into the healing process.

If he got the beating he claimed, that photo was taken long afterwards, and the damage around his eyes had to have been far worse than it looks now -- except that there's none of the yellowing typical for healing bruises. In fact, the tissue looks far too normal for that to be anything but makeup.

 

[Dr Adequate]

If he got the beating he claimed...

Let's look at what he did claim:

He said the men beat him about the upper body with their fists, and he said he thinks they struck him with a metal object. He was treated and released at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.

“I’m mostly shaken up, and I got some bruises and sore spots,” he said.

Here

This does not seem to me inconsistent with the injuries depicted in the photograph.

About those bruises:

For what it’s worth, I showed Mirecki’s photo to my fiance, who’s a dentist with a fair degree of trauma experience. She saw the bruising as perfectly consistent with facial trauma. The pattern of bruising is dictated not by the precise areas of trauma, but by the planes along which blood tends to drain following injury - the pattern on Mirecki’s face is consistent with nasal trauma. She even dragged out a textbook, Fractures of the Facial Skeleton, which states that in nasal trauma it “is usual for there to be bilateral circumorbital ecchymosis” (i.e. bruising under both eyes), but visible damage to the nose itself is not always present.

Here

 

[fishbob]

The bruise on his arm is pretty minor, particularly for the sort of beating he claimed to have gotten; and is weeks old, well into the healing process.

FWIW - I have a bruise on my bicep that looks somewhat like the one on his arm. I got mine on Sunday.

 

[Art Vandelay]

All I'm saying is that we need to approach this situation with the same critical eye we use when a psychic claims to solve a crime or some guy claims that a UFO landed in his backyard.

We shouldn't swallow the story whole, but to compare it to psychics, or aliens, or people rising from the dead is invalid. We already know that white men exist, as do rural highways, pickups, and metal objects. The only question is whether his story involving these elements is true. On the other hand, we do not know whether psychics, aliens, or resurrections exist, and in fact there is good evidence that they do not, so it is quite reasonable to be more suspicious of these claims. The idea that all assertions are equally credible sounds like a skeptical idea on the surface, but it's really just a nihilistic rejection of reationality.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Different people bruise differently. My sweetie gets a bruise like the one on that guy's arm if she bumps into something accidentally, and she won't even notice it at the time.

Whereas I sometimes get serious bruises from stand-up martial arts, and it's rare for them to appear as more than a small, circular brown mark. Even the ones that really hurt at the time and continue to hurt for days don't look like much on me, and I am very fair skinned.

As for the lack of major facial injuries and defence injuries, that to my mind is entirely consistent with a university professor who isn't a fighter getting pummeled by people who want to inflict pain without leaving too many marks. Schoolyard bullies use body shots because facial hits leave marks that get them into trouble, and noncombatants under pressure tend to turtle up and get hit without blocking very effectively.

He could be lying but I don't see any particular reason to think so at this stage. Provisionally, I think this is just fundie mudslinging.

 

[corplinx]

Let's back up and look at this the way we would any other claim.

A man claims that two men in a pickup truck stalked him at 6:20 in the morning. He claims he pulled over and got out of his car (wtf?). He claims the men beat him up and may have used a metal object.

On the surface that story sounds fishy.

Has Malecki provided any evidence that he was actually assaulted or that the people who did so were in fact "vengeful fundies"?