On Friday, August 28, a central Missouri contact of mine alerted me to a podcast that I would surely never have paid any mind to, and that's because the thrust of it is sports at the main campus of the University of Missouri (UMC) in Columbia.  When it comes to sports, my interest is confined to "power croquet" and women's mud wrestling.  But the young podcaster here, one John Miller, uses his medium to comment on an academic matter:

After one day of class at Mizzou, of Zoom classes for the most part, well we've got a professor who's been relieved of his teaching duties already for making a joke.  Yes, an innocuous joke.  Boy that didn't last long did it?  Well, I have some thoughts on this whole debacle.

Miller then segues into sports, which one can skip if one goes to the 23:45 point, where he resumes his comments on the above.  Click right here for the individual podcast.  I think you might listen to the first 2 minutes, which ends with the above block quote, and then go to the 23:45 point to hear this guy's take on the action taken against the professor; it's basically the last ten minutes of the podcast.  Conservatarians will find it refreshing.  (If one is unfamiliar with podcasts, at the very bottom of the webpage, there's a large arrow one clicks to start the audio, and then click on the progress bar to skip forward.  Incidentally, the particular podcast is titled "Kaleb Brown Breakdown," which one can also hear at the home page for the podcast.)

Mr. Miller reports on the misguided journalism coming out of the Columbia Missourian, the newspaper put out by UMC's School of Journalism.  Here's the updated version of the article, which includes four videos.  The first three vids are identical and last for 21 seconds.  The fourth and last video is four times longer and puts the exchange into context.

The newspaper's website seems a bit twitchy, so I've provided the longer video below.  The video shows that the delicate snowflake students whom UMC has erred in admitting are just out for blood.  I say expel them if they make any more trouble, and don't let the little vandals go near Jefferson's tombstone on the quad.

This pathetic flap at UMC seems to have made some national news as well.  On Aug. 25, the Washington Free Beacon ran "Beloved Mizzou Professor Under Investigation After Making Mask Joke to Chinese Student" by Chrissy Clark, which includes some student support for the professor.

Mr. Miller wryly observed that the Wuhan virus is the very reason the class was being conducted remotely on Zoom.  At least it wasn't a class in virology.

Jon N. Hall of ULTRACON OPINION is a programmer from Kansas City.

Image: University of Missouri via Flickr (cropped), CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.