Finally found the article.
Apparently the dean has decided that there will be no punishment. Here is
another interesting note:
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In a Saturday Globe story reporting the hoax confession, UMass spokesman
John Hoey said the university had no plans to discipline the unidentified
student because the deception had nothing to do with his studies.
That prompted Barrow, who had no involvement in the episode, to write a
sharply worded e-mail message to Hoey.
.........................
Another professor in the policy studies department, Philip H. Melanson, said
he left the political science department, housed in the same building as the
history department, because of the ''oppressiveness of what I would call the
reigning ideology."
''It's left, it's PC, and it's got a vision of world peace stuck somewhere
in there," said Melanson, who has taught at UMass for 33 years and
specializes in research on political assassination and intelligence
agencies.
But Melanson said that no one involved in the episode should be punished,
since it apparently had no bearing on class work.
............................
Barrow said further in an e-mail to the Globe that the professors' apparent
lack of skepticism came as little surprise to him because they are a
''dogmatic and zealous group of politically correct but chic
anti-Americans."
..............................
However, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, the two history
professors who relayed the student's assertion to the Standard-Times and
other reporters, denied that their political views colored their teaching or
any action they took in the episode.
Williams, an associate professor of Islamic history, said he prides himself
for having middle-of-the road political views and said Barrow's description
of the professors was ''incendiary language" befitting someone who ''seems
to me to be unstable."
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I would say that there is a lot of politics and purple prose here, but the
University wisely kept out of this. After all, professors are given tenure
so that they can be free to voice unpopular views, even foolish or wrong
ones. As long as there is no outright libel or deliberate deception on the
part of the professors, they are free to be foolish. Now of course, don't
fool around with the dept. chair's wife. I know of a case where that
resulted in dismissal, but incompetent, negligent teaching did not.