Academic Freedom, for Some: The Hounding of Dr. Howell

Chuck Donovan / July 13, 2010

Officials at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana have sparked controversy over their decision not to extend the hiring of Adjunct Professor Kenneth Howell, a highly rated instructor who has taught electives at the university since 2001 on the history and tenets of Catholicism. Howell’s apparent “offense” is that he accurately rendered those teachings in an e-mail distributed to students in one of his classes.

According to a local newspaper, the trouble began when a friend of an unidentified student sent the chairman of IU’s Religion Department a copy of an e-mail Howell wrote to students in his Introduction to Catholicism class. The e-mail contained a detailed explication by Howell of the idea of “natural moral law” and utilitarianism as applied to the Catholic understanding of the morality of homosexual acts. Howell intended his e-mail, he wrote, to assist students in addressing a “question on the final exam about utilitarianism.” (more…)