Fired for Myth Telling

Adjunct instructor Steven Bitterman was fired for suggesting a Bible story could be read as a myth:

Steven Bitterman was on his way to teach a course in Western civilization at Southwestern Community College last fall when his car slipped off the road. By the time he got back on the road, Mr. Bitterman's clothes were muddy, so he returned home to clean up. That's where he got a telephone call from one of the college's vice presidents, saying he had been fired.

Three students, the vice president told Mr. Bitterman, were offended because he had told his class that people could more easily appreciate the biblical story of Adam and Eve if they considered it a myth.

"She said the students and their parents had threatened to sue the school, and sue me, and she said: 'We don't want that to happen, do we?'" said Mr. Bitterman, who had been an adjunct professor at the Iowa college since 2001. "She told me I was supposed to teach history, not religion, and that my services would no longer be needed."

What a horrible and chilling condition for freedom of thought on American campuses!

Myths are powerful memes that provide people values, morality and social consciousness by testing innate knowing against shared, established, learning.

This horrible firing reminds us why Universities are Forever; Students are For Four Years. 

It is shameful how quickly Southwestern Community College gave in to student terrorists trying to shut down conversation and the examination and the discussion of the contexts that frame us.  The bullies won.  The school folded and fired -- all to its ultimate intellectual undoing.