This is going a little OT, so feel free to delete if you like. Sometime back in the '80s, _The Nation_ ran a symposium on the then-new requirements the NEA was imposing on would-be grantee artists. (Essentially, the requirements were intended to avoid the Mapplethorpe, etc., "obscene" art being funded by the NEA. The relative merits of the requirements are beyond the scope of this discussion.) Most of the panelists on the symposium said that a responsible, leftist artist ought not take the money given what they saw as a kind of "loyalty oath" requirement. But one panelist -- and I have to go back to look at the symposium to remember who -- thought that position was ass-backward; instead, s/he argued that such an artist ought to take the money, do the kind of art s/he thinks appropriate, and fight if and when s/he is called on it.
I have been thinking about this debate a lot lately, mainly in terms of recent debates surrounding external funding of curricula at UNC-CH. In any case, one way of thinking about the OP's situation is that there's no reasonable way a current employer can control an employee's general knowledge base gained in the course of employment, so a response might be take the job, do what's right, and defend yourself if the employer is idiotic enough to try to enforce. Of course, all of this is spoken from behind the veil of academic freedom, wherein I am never forced to make such choices, so please feel free, even entitled, to ignore it entirely! Andy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill [EMAIL PROTECTED] * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
