The College Fix

It’s amazing that a man’s 22 years serving in the U.S. military can actually be deemed a black mark as he seeks a new job, but that’s exactly what’s taking place right now at the University of Missouri.

Retired Army Colonel Larry James is hoping to land a job as division director in the school’s College of Education, and he’s one of two finalists. But the outlook looks bleak as anti-war and Muslim student groups on campus have hosted a series of protests to make sure he does not get hired.

At issue is “the 16 months he spent during two stints overseeing interrogations at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay,” reports the Dayton Daily News.

James, a retired military psychologist, defended his service at a recent community forum, the paper reports:

As he has in the past, including in the 2008 memoir ‘Fixing Hell,’ James told the crowd he went to Guantanamo, as well as the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq in 2004, to clean up what James referred to not as abuse but “some diabolical things” at both prisons. In the sexual humiliation incident, James said he disrupted the interrogation after a 5-minute coffee break.

“I was sent to Guantanamo not to aid these CIA operatives, but to teach these young men and women, how do you sit down and interview someone without any abusive practices whatsoever,” he said. “That’s what my mission was.”

Other audience members, including members of the university’s Muslim Student Organization, asked James about his characterization in his book of the International Committee of the Red Cross as “a bunch of radical left do-gooders” who consider military detainees “completely innocent, and only needed to be hugged more.”

The University of Missouri’s student newspaper has also covered the controversy, noting “James currently serves as the Dean of the School of Professional Psychology at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, a position he’s held for five years. He was awarded a Bronze Star and the Defense Superior Service Medal during his 22-year service in the military. So far, James has not been sanctioned for any professional or ethical misconduct by any state or court of appeals court, or any licensing board.”

But the protests continue. The Maneater student newspaper quotes Mid-Missouri Fellowship of Reconciliation Coordinator Jeff Stack as launching a protest against James by noting: “Let’s begin with a silence for our brothers and sisters who’ve been victimized. This decision is obscene to us as people of good will in our society. We are standing with the people who have been oppressed. We are not standing with the torturers.”

This is almost eerily reminiscent of the welcome home Vietnam veterans received on college campuses, where they were called “baby killers” and other horrible names.

James has not been found guilty of any professional misconduct, and if his records show anything, it was that he worked hard to put a stop to what he called “diabolical things” at military prisons.

But as usual, political correctness, anti-military sentiment and un-American rhetoric runs amok on college campuses, influencing far too much of what goes on inside and outside the classroom.

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