Via Jonathan Turley, I learned of a case where Teresa Buchanan, a professor at Louisiana State University who teaches early childhood education and trains elementary school teachers, was fired for sexual harassment.

What was interesting in her case was what the university administration considered to constitute sexual harassment.

An LSU associate professor has been fired for using curse words and for telling the occasional sexually-themed joke to undergraduate students, creating what university administrators describe as a “hostile learning environment” that amounted to sexual harassment.

A faculty committee that reviewed her case gave a few “notable” examples: Saying “F*** no” repeatedly in the presence of students, using a slang term for vagina that implies cowardice and telling a joke that the quality of sex gets worse the longer a relationship lasts.

What is unusual about this case is that the Chancellor of the university fired her even though a disciplinary committee decided that she should not be dismissed but that instead she be censured and told to refrain from such behavior in the future, which seems to me to be the most appropriate response for a first time offense. Buchanan is planning to sue the university for wrongful dismissal and is being supported by the American Association of University Professors.

Buchanan was fired even though a committee of five faculty members that presided over an 11-hour dismissal review hearing held on March 9 recommended that she keep her job.

While the committee found that her adult language and humor violated university policies that protect students and employees from sexual harassment, it found no evidence Buchanan’s comments were “systematically directed at any individual.”

The committee recommended she be censured and agree to quit using “potentially offensive language and jokes” that some found offensive.

I am not sure about the legal issues of what exactly constitutes sexual harassment and if her behavior met the standard and the punishment justified the offense.

But while I feel that she should not have been fired, I must admit that I am puzzled by this kind of professorial behavior. When I enter a classroom, I am acutely aware that I am in a position of authority over the students and that this requires me to be mindful that I treat them with the utmost respect and courtesy. While I do not shy away from controversial topics and even language if it is relevant, I feel that I have to model professional behavior and thus Buchanan’s behavior would be unthinkable to me.

But I know that while somewhat rare, some professors do use such language. A colleague told me recently that a student had casually used profanity in class and when he questioned him about it later, the student said that other professors used it in class too and he had thought it was acceptable.

This is a tricky issue. Looked at one way, words are just words, so what’s the harm in using them? After all, college classrooms are places where adults congregate. But some words, such as racist, sexist, or homophobic slurs, can deliver major emotional blows.

My feeling is that students in a classroom are essentially captives and cannot easily walk away from an environment that they find hostile or offensive. Thus the normal freedoms of speech that exist outside the classroom have to be constrained and avoiding the gratuitous use of language that can upset people seems to me to be a simple step to take. I prefer to model that restraint rather than impose rules and punishments and so far it has worked. I have never had to deal with these kinds of issues even though my syllabi do not contain rules prohibiting such language or behavior.