Profile of Ken Hardy
by Marla Kay Houghteling
WORDS ARE IMPORTANT to Ken Hardy; he doesn’t shy away from the difficult ones. He’d like his students to have this same respect for language. In the summer of 1998, he was teaching an interpersonal-communications course at Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Kentucky, where he had been an adjunct since 1995. Scheduled to teach three courses in the fall, he was subsequently stunned by a message from the academic dean that there were no classes for him. The college would claim that low enrollment in one class and reassignment of two classes to a full-time professor resulted in its decision.
But Mr. Hardy believes the real reason stemmed from an incident in his summer class which set in motion a debate over the meaning, and the very existence, of academic freedom in Kentucky. Mr. Hardy is now suing the college for violating his free-speech rights. Nothing in his background suggested that controversy would embroil him. He was born in Highland Park, Illinois and grew up in Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. He began his academic career in 1984 as a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he graduated with a B.A. in Communications Arts and an M.A. in Rhetoric and Public Address.
He has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Carthage College in Kenosha, and two community colleges in northern Illinois-the College of Lake County and Harper Community College. Mr. Hardy and his wife, Adrienne Regnier, moved to Kentucky when she accepted a job at Jefferson Community College, where she heads the philosophy department and where he once taught. In his 1998 summer class of 22 students, he was illustrating what he terms the “metaphorical nature of language and its connotations” in an effort to help students see that “words are never neutral.” Mr. Hardy observed that many common words have negative connotations. He wanted his class to understand that the “user of language does not dictate the meaning.”
He focused on words used to oppress and offend and asked students for examples. They generated a list which included girl, faggot, bitch, and nigger. He asked his students to consider their derivation and why they were ineffective in communication. A black student objected to the use of nigger. Others in the class, not all of them white, tried to steer her toward the purpose of the discussion. According to a 1999 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “the student could not be appeased,” even after Mr. Hardy, who is white, told her she could skip the rest of the lecture. She refused and accused Mr. Hardy of violating his own syllabus, which states that there will be no “abusive’ language in class.” Mr. Hardy explained that the discussion of “abusive” words was different than using those same words to degrade a student. He wanted students in his class to feel safe enough to discuss offensive language.
Five days later Academic Dean Mary Pamela Besser summoned Mr. Hardy to her office, where he learned that a local civil-rights activist had complained to the college’s president, Richard Green. Besser feared that this incident might tarnish the college’s reputation, and thereby result in lower enrollment. In August she informed Mr. Hardy that the college had no classes for him to teach. He met with President Green, Dean Besser and the department chair several times and continued to teach at the University of Louisville, where he had been an adjunct since 1996.
With no resolution at Jefferson in sight, he filed suit in September of 1999. The ACLU was willing to take his case, but when approached by another lawyer, Mr. Hardy decided to go with a private firm because he wanted to act for the ” benefit of academic freedom without burdening the ACLU,” an organization that already has plenty of weighty issues to shoulder. Mr. Hardy does not want to be a poster boy for free speech, but he “wants to see this thing through.” He’s in touch with the court almost daily in order to track the progress of his case. The suit has two parts.
The first seeks injunctive relief against the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, Jefferson Community College, President Green, and Dean Besser, in their official capacities and unofficial capacities. Injunctive relief asks the court to order the college to reinstate Mr. Hardy. The second element of the suit is a claim for monetary damages. Because of Kentucky’s sovereign immunity policy, it is difficult to sue a public institution. For that reason, the part of the suit naming the Kentucky Community and Technical College System and Jefferson Community College was dismissed. However, President Green and Dean Besser are still named as defendants.
The two men may be “individually liable,” Hardy believes, if it can be proven that “they knew or should have known that there is academic freedom in the classroom in Kentucky.” The defendants have countered that there is no academic freedom in Kentucky. They claim that the college controls the curriculum, and that a professor’s speech in class is not protected by the First Amendment. Mr. Hardy is optimistic about the outcome because the Western District Court of Kentucky in Louisville determined that academic freedom exists in Kentucky. The defendants appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati, where the case has been since February 2000. Final briefs from the two sides are scheduled for presentation on August 30, 2000. If the final judgment is in his favor, Mr. Hardy says, “Sure, I’d go back to Jefferson.”
He reflects that his experience with Jefferson “really hasn’t had much effect on the content” of his syllabi, though he has added a “no tape recording” clause to them. Now at 43, Ken Hardy says, ” I still love teaching.” He wants to continue “doing whatever I can to help students become better and more informed citizens.” Certainly this teacher’s legal stand is an example of informed citizenship in action.
