Gay Roosevelt Professor Tries Getting Job Back After Racially Charged Comments

Story by Charlsie Dewey, courtesy of The Windy City Times

Robert Klein Engler, a former adjunct professor at Roosevelt University, wants to tell his story, and with the word harassment lingering around his name it is not hard to understand why he is deeply concerned with clearing his reputation.

"I got up in the morning and I had no intention of harassing any students," he said, referring to the day that he told a joke in his "City and Citizenship" class at the university. "Nor did I ever imagine that I would do that. Supposedly I told a joke which some person interpreted as harassment. But there has never been any official statement by the university about this."

The class had been assigned a book about legal immigration and the discussion for the day centered on the new and controversial Arizona immigration law. "I wanted to get the students involved in a discussion on it so I told them I had heard this joke and wondered what they thought about it," he said.

The joke was, "There was a sociological study done in Arizona and they discovered that 60 percent of the people in Arizona approved of the immigration law and 40 percent said, 'no habla ingles.'"

Read the whole story here.