Otherwise, I might have to pursue this alternative career path.
Also, I have to say, that if a professor wants to do porn in their spare time as a hobby, and it doesn’t affect their work, the University of Manchester has no good grounds for carrying out an internal investigation, and I should hope that at the end of it all, they would simply shrug their collective shoulders and recognize that it’s none of their business.
That’s a TLA I was unaware of. Please enlighten me of the 3 words this is acronymizing.
Ministers of Education National ?? my first guess.
Was it deliberately chosen to be patriarchal?
or did the article TLA it to prevent any double-entendres being inferred?
At the risk of having to admit that I clicked through to the original story, I assume MEN stands for the Manchester Evening News, who wrote the story.
Yet again, someone is having hysterics about what other people do with their genitals.
re @2:
thanks, my error
re @3:
I’m sure they don’t care about the activities them selves.
Just protecting their “reputation”. How could an actual education be provided at an institute that uses porn stars to teach their classes? no no no
teachers gotta hold up the standards of the school even when off duty and in personal life. So they are protecting the professor from “conflict of interest”, of pursuing two conflicting vocations.
ugh
The nature of the videos might have some relevance. There seems to be some focus on teenage women in the titles, and I could see how that might be an issue, particularly when our commitment to diversifying the STEM intake (he is Chemical Engineer) is so much about reputation and public perception. That could be a problem.
I work in Chemistry at Manchester, so it will be interesting to see what the general opinion is.
#1 Manchester Evening News – the paper ‘breaking’ the news.
Well PZ, you could make a fortune in japanese porn. You know, with cephalopods and all ;-)
It’s a breath of fresh air to have the story about the old male professor who’s getting his professional and sex lives intermingled and the only response I can muster is “you go, grandpa!”
Sadly, while it shouldn’t matter, it will. Having done porn seems to be a major no no for just about any job. Still doing it, as a hobby, is almost always listed, when they are fired, under, “Negatively effecting the image of our company.” Mind you, past acts of murder, rape, theft, sexual harassment, etc., or even on going ones, in many cases, somehow don’t rise to the same level of “impact on our image”. One of the single greatest fears a lot of people with web cams, or a tendency to do things in private, or off work, which certain other people find distasteful (i.e., involving fetishes or semi-public displays of sex), is that their boss is going to find out. Because.. everyone from cops to school teachers have been fired for it, purely on the grounds that it might tarnish their employer, in some manner.
Which, again, is damned ironic, given that real crimes and very public bad behaviors, get excused all the time, even when those things **should** tarnish the image far worse.
Studies in bonding, debonding, excited-state and stripping chemistry, pair interactions, chain formation, wetting and dewetting…he’d be a natural.
As long as there’s no indication that he’s dragged that into his workplace at the university (or has a conflict of interest), it shouldn’t be grounds for punishment or dismissal.
In fact, in general, your speech outside of work should be protected.
I was and I still am of the opinion that there should not be an absolute wall between private life and work. For example making aditional career online of publicaly spouting mysogynist (or racist etc.) opinions (like certain youtube atheist scientist does) that are meant to incite harrasment and that run contrary to almost every workplace code of conduct/ethic should be grounds for dismissal or at least reprimand. I do not think people – even tenured professors – should be allowed to incite and endorse harrasment campaigns while being secure that nothing negative happens to them.
However if the porn mentioned in OP (whatever kind of porn it was) included only consenting adults under legal conditions, my above mentioned objection does not apply and the employer should not care about it other than “meh”.
But we all know that even being serial harasser either connfirmed or with ongoing investigation is not a problem. Only doing icky private things counts.
The real question is, did he really not expect anyone to find out? Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, he must have know the risk he was taking with his reputation and career, and the publicity that it would cause.
Oh come on! You’ve been posting tentacled pin-ups for years on your blog: don’t come and claim tenure stops you for embracing that alternative career when you’ve already been spreading softcore through the tubes for free you hypocrite!
Tsss, amateur hipsters and their “It’s not porn, it’s art!”
/poe
So..who watched the video, recognised him and then felt compelled to tell a newspaper? Or was the Manchester Evening News conducting “research”? I smell some hypocrisy here.
Ah, our old friend the Manchester Evening News. I work at a nearby rival* HE establishment that has suffered more than it’s fair share of reportage within it’s pages in recent years. It does like itself a healthy dose of scandal.
*At least we like to see ourselves as rivals. The 70 odd place difference in the league tables may indicate otherwise. Damn you, Manchester, even your scandals are better than ours! *shakes fist*
Wrath Panda – greetings from the opposition!
Yes, the MEN has has started to specialise in the type of tittle-tattle that used to be the preserve of Sunday tabloids. Lots of very moralistic and personal attacks on private individuals.
They did manage a particularly funny outraged article about Nancy Rothwell spending a couple of thousand pounds on business class flights on a year. I was also shocked -shocked I tell you – that it was so low. Who would have imagined the Vice Chancellor of major research university having to make business flights?
If the MEN saw the bill for the flights my boss takes annually, given that he is a major internationally renowned academic, they would shit their pants.
In this case, I think the porn thing is difficult. In an era of commercialised HE the University can really come under pressure to act in light of negative PR.
This is a case where the publicity, rather than the quality of the acts, might cause UOM to take action. We shall see.
seems like as good a place as any to leave this. just in case the html gets bargled, search ‘squid vs. weinermobile’ — note, I am in no way affiliated with either the artist or the storefront.
the relevance to your alternate career considerations is an excercise best resolved via consultation with the pr0n star name generator of your choice.
” . . . his other job, which involved him having sex with dozens of women – often wearing only a gold watch.”
I was at first confused about where exactly he wore this watch during — you know– the naughty act. And then it dawned on me. On his wrist, of course!
Of course. Where else? And then I started free associating about Trump and his hands and, well, I think I need to lie down now. Take a nice long nap.
Wasn’t there some movie back in the 1980s called Angel with the tag line “Student by day, prostitute by night”? I gathered that the story was that her high college tuition left her no alternative. Needless to say there were sequels, presumably with her paying her way through graduate school, a post-doc and possibly a stint as an adjunct. We didn’t watch any, but we were hoping she’d get an NIH grant or something to end the series, but that’s sort of a fantasy.