Another DUMB@$$ AWARD wiener

DALLAS - For most of the past two semesters, nobody knew the identity of “The Phantom Professor.”

The educator’s anonymous Web log, set at an unnamed university “in the South,” spun tales of spoiled-rich “Ashleys” with their $500 sandals and $1,500 handbags, eating disorders, plagiarism and drug use, legal and illegal.

“At this school it seems like every kid is on multiple medications,” the professor wrote, describing her charges as “barely literate,” prone to emotional problems and “terrified of displeasing Mommy and Daddy.”

Surrounded by students sporting French manicures and plans for spring break in Cabo, the blog’s author told stories like the one about “a certain member of a Middle Eastern royal family who got a new Mercedes by convincing a frat buddy to crash his one-year-old model into a wall” or how one stall in a certain ladies room was known as “the purge-atory.”

No names were used, but this spring at Southern Methodist University, students and faculty began recognizing themselves in the phantom’s prose. A student in SMU’s corporate communications and public affairs department discovered the blog had quoted the content of e-mail she had sent to one of her teachers. It called her “clueless.”

There are a couple of problems I see with this weblog. First, it’s using the perspective of a 50-year-old adult to judge 19- and 20-year-old students trying to find themselves. It seems rather unrealistic, particularly in the cloistered world of SMU, to expect perspective and maturity from a group of people who have grown up in the lap of wealth and privilege.

Second, the critiquing is done anonymously. It strikes me as rather mean-spirited to be casting aspersions upon others while hiding behind the protective cloak of anonymity. If you’re going to take shots at people, shouldn’t you at least have the courage to identify yourself? What sort of coward ridicules those around her anonymously? Sure, it’s great fun if you’re the one doing the ridiculing, but what about those students who were able to recognize themselves as the targets of Liner?

Earlier this month, Elaine Liner, an adjunct professor who taught writing and ethics classes in SMU’s public relations department since 2001, revealed in an online publication that the blog was hers. Liner, who writes freelance theater reviews for a Dallas weekly, also let it be known that in late March she was told her contract to teach at the school would not be renewed.

“One of the ironies of this is that I worked in a building that had the First Amendment carved in stone across its front,” Liner said in an interview last week. She said she is certain she was let go because of her blog.

Liner is not the first person to be fired for maintaining a weblog- if in fact this was actually the reason her contract was not be renewed. She could have just as easly been fired for her mean-spirited stupidity and cowardice.

Clark Castle, editor in chief this past school year of the Daily Campus, the school newspaper, said students had mixed reactions to the blog and to Liner.

“People either loved her or hated her,” he said.

As for her blog, he said, some students were hurt by it, others saw it as funny and painfully true.

Castle said he thought Liner’s “undercover role” betrayed students’ confidences, and he said he found evidence that she embellished her stories to make students look even more foolish.

The newspaper editorialized last month that the blog was “inappropriate and unprofessional.”

Frankly, I have to agree. Liner has the perfect right to write what she chooses, but she also has a responsibility to recognize that what she wrote could be interpreted as mean-spirited and hurtful to those who might recognize themselves in her writing. Unless she specifically labelled her writings as fiction, which was not the case, she should have had the consideration to recognize that some might take offense at being anonymously lampooned.

Liner said she began the blog last fall as a writing exercise.

“I always wanted to write down the strange things my students say and the odd little culture on this campus, so I just made up the name ‘The Phantom Professor,’ ” she recalled.

The online journal was empowering for a professor who taught afternoon classes, after the tenured faculty had already left for the day.

“I was invisible, and I think that is what drove me to the keyboard,” she said. “If you’re gonna ignore me, I’m gonna sit here and write about everything I see.”

In her very first installment, Liner’s phantom acknowledged that her job “could be in jeopardy for revealing what really goes on in these not-so-hallowed and ivied halls.”

Many of her postings were about liquor-addled jocks or well-to-do airheads or, as she put it, the “Ashleys who half joke about being in college to earn a Mrs. degree, with their Prada handbags and their SUVs (brand new all filled with high octane charged on daddy’s plastic) and their size 0 derrieres kept warm with pastel Juicy Couture sweats that show just a hint of dorsal cleavage.”

Liner conceded, “I made fun of the social attitudes there and the class divisiveness and just some of the silly youthful things that kids say.”

“I never used any names or my name. I changed details so nobody could pin it on who exactly this was,” she said.

The problem is that SMU, like most schools, is a small community. Eventually, people are going to put things together and be able to see themselves or others in Liner’s writing, which is exactly what happened.

There is nothing wrong with using those around you as inspiration. Writers do this all the time. Writing about what you know is really the only truly meaningful and readable sort of writing most writers can effectively produce. Still, there is a profound difference between taking literary license with your experiences with the people who travel in and out of you life and anonymously lampooning them for your own self-aggrandizement.

One SMU professor whom Liner skewered in her blog wrote in an online discussion, “Unfortunately, our students, those who are rich as well as those who are poor, are simply undergraduates with an average age of 19.

“Many of them are not as well equipped to see their faults, their personal problems or those of their family written about so cavalierly and publicly by someone they trusted. Call them babies, call them immature, but they cry when someone they believed in betrays them.”

This is exactly the problem. Elaine Liner violated a trust, her protestations of changing the names to protect the innocent to the contrary. As an employee of SMU, she had an implied responsiblity to at the very least be respectful of those around her in the SMU community.

The students Liner lampooned may truly be grossly immature and totally devoid of perspective and a grip on reality. Nonetheless, they should have a reasonable expectation that SMU faculty should be able to treat them with the respect and decency any college student deserves.

Even in light of all of the above, I was prepared to give Elaine Liner the benefit of the doubt until she shot herself in the foot by owning up to her true motivation:

Since her story broke, Liner said several agents have called and she is actively working to sell her story.

“I heard the two words every writer waits a lifetime to hear,” she said. “Movie deal.”

Yes, in true DUMB@$$ fashion, Liner has proven that she is OK with the idea that financial success may be achieved by trampling on the sensibilities and feelings of her students. Liner no doubt has a story to tell, and a fascinating one at that. The way she has gone about collecting and broadcasting the product of her inspiration is nothing short of reprehensible.

Elaine Liner’s students deserved better. Of course, being a DUMB@$$, we can’t very well expect Liner to recognize this, can we??