The Australian | 26 September 2012
A scholar and teacher of French who wrote a satirical poem to cheer up a sacked colleague upset a few colleagues who considered his poetic reflections defamatory. He ended up having his own services dispensed with by the University of New England. After a flurry of letters and meetings, UNE has said goodbye to its mostly unpaid French lecturer Jim Nicholls, saying his poem was “calculated to bring senior officers of the university into disrepute”.
He wrote the poem for music academic Jan-Piet Knijff, who was headhunted from New York in 2010 and shown the door in March after some students mounted a petition accusing him of a classical bias against contemporary music.
It was posted to Knijff’s personal website under Nicholls’s academic title of adjunct lecturer.
In June, the machinery of discipline was set in motion at the university, and Mr Nicholls was sacked on July 1 by a committee overseeing honorary appointments. On staff since 1975, Mr Nicholls retired in 2002 but stayed in an honorary capacity to teach, supervise PhD students and do research, almost wholly unpaid.
He was handed his most recent teaching award from the university the same day the poem appeared on the Knijff website.
In a letter to UNE pleading his case, Mr Nicholls said he had written the poem “as a gesture of support to a former colleague, who I believed sorely needed the support”. He denied the poem was meant to bring anyone into disrepute and he said he had not approved the use of his adjunct title, a no-no under university rules.
