Barry Yeoman, an adjunct instructor in Journalism, has published an article in The Nation about a moral and legal collision in higher education and the workplace.
“Here’s the conundrum,” Yeoman said. “We want to ensure harassment-free schools and workplaces. We also want to protect people with disabilities from discrimination. What happens when these imperatives collide?”
At the center of the story is a photographer named Lowell Handler, who lost his community college teaching job after two students filed complaints alleging unwanted comments and touch. He acknowledged some of the behavior, but blamed it on involuntary tics resulting from Tourette Syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder.
The article provides no easy answers. It defies the easy categorization of villains and victims. Read it at: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tourette-syndrome-lowell-handler.
Also, this fall, Yeoman wrote an article for National Wildlife about how researchers are learning how to identify troubled animal populations before they plummet. They do this by measuring how human activities—hunting, tourism, road-building climate change—affect individual creatures’ stress hormone levels. Read it at: https://tinyurl.com/wildstress.
And this summer, Yeoman wrote for The Assembly about the United Methodists, the country’s largest mainline Protestant denomination, who have been torn asunder by a protracted debate over homosexuality. A congregation in Statesville, N.C., invited him inside as they debated their own future. Read it at https://www.theassemblync.com/culture/religion/schism-in-the-united-methodist-church/.
Most recently, Yeoman published an article this week in The Assembly about the growing movement to give independent, inalienable legal rights to ecosystems like North Carolina’s Haw River. Read that story at https://www.theassemblync.com/