I have now officially been "retired" from Purdue University for two weeks. I never ever contemplated retiring. I had a job to do in my teaching and I was doing it. My wife who had stood by me agreed also. When Purdue University presented the voluntary retirement in January or so I threw it away because it did not interest me and was not applicable to me. I did not ever voluntarily thought I would ever retire.
The three people that made me retire are my acting department head Johnathan Swartz, my dean Elain Carey and the Chancellor Thomas Keon. From my perception they conspired for their own reasons to have me retire -- ASAP. Swartz did for the reason that he has always been a looser and all of a sudden he got a chance to kiss important people's behind and he did and he got paid well for it. He threw me to the wolves. The Dean Carey is an ideologue and this fit her ideology -- I did not. I disagreed with everything she stood for as an ideology and taught against it. The result is that she and the Department head would not schedule me for any classes for the following fall semester. She, through him, came after me with a complaint about my teaching that came from a student who had attended class for just one week, i.e. two times. But, this person knew all about me.
I had also just finished, in February, another harassment complaint from a student who I never even had a class -- ever -- with me. But I nonetheless had to reply to that student. Not only that, I had to reply to the second student who had also filed a harassment complaint against me during the spring semester who had only attended two classes.
Having two complaints and the Dean and the Department Head fighting me so as to have me leave, I talked to my wife and we decided that I could not take a financial chance on being able to survive there another two years. There is no such thing at Purdue University as academic freedom.
Keon, I, and FIRE had been at war over academic freedom and free speech since the fall of 2011. Remember that everything is decided by Thomas Keon. Any statement by the faculty is strictly a recommendation to him. Keon is already found by a jury of his peers as an harasser of faculty and he has previously recommended that Professor Gideon Falk be fired -- even when all faculty panels recommended the opposite.
The finality is that I feel that I have been fired by Keon and the faculty went along with it -- especially Carey and Swartz.