Florida Atlantic University is quite obviously the worst place in the United States to attend college.
The school’s claim to infamy — after last month, anyway — is that the administration tried to punish a student who expressed discomfort with a professor’s assignment to stomp on a piece of paper bearing the word “Jesus.” (RELATED: Florida Atlantic issues new groveling apology over Jesus-stomping)
Turns out, Florida Atlantic has problems that are a lot bigger than a little Jesus-stomping.
Take wackadoodle communications professor James Tracy, for example.
As The College Fix reports, Tracy has taken to his personal blog, Memory Hole, to question official accounts of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings. In the blog, which isn’t affiliated with FAU, Tracy argues that the amount of damage captured on video cannot be reconciled with the homemade bombs that authorities say caused the damage.
More likely, the tenured professor says, what happened in Boston was a “mass casualty drill.”
In an April 23 posting entitled “Witnessing Boston’s Mass Casualty Event,” Tracy contends that “photographic evidence of the event suggests the possibility of play actors getting into position after the detonation of what may in fact have been a smoke bomb or similarly benign explosive.”
Tracy believes the bombing was really just some kind of dress rehearsal. “The event closely resembles a mass-casualty drill, which for training purposes are designed to be as lifelike as possible,” the FAU communications professor asserts. “Since it is mediated, however, and primarily experienced from afar through the careful assemblage of words, images, and the official pronouncements and commentary of celebrity journalists, it has the semblance of being for all practical purposes ‘real.'”
The one-time union leader’s Wednesday blog posting is not his first attempt to marshal a complex conspiracy theory to explain a heinous massacre. He did exactly the same thing after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in mid-December.
“There is a growing awareness that the media coverage of the massacre of 26 children and adults was intended primarily for public consumption to further larger political ends,” Tracy wrote on his blog after Sandy Hook. (RELATED: Public university professors join ranks of Sandy Hook conspiracy theorists)
The bizarro FAU professor suggested that the carnage in Newtown, Conn. was caused by was some kind of training exercise gone awry.
Professors gone wild aren’t the only reason FAU has been basking in awful publicity lately. There’s plenty more craziness on campus.
Earlier this month, explains The Palm Beach Post, school officials announced that the school would bow to immense student pressure and scrap a $6 million agreement to name its football stadium after GEO Group, a for-profit prison company.
During a protest over the GEO Group stadium fracas, Mary Jane Saunders, FAU’s president, hit a student protester with the side mirror of her Lexus, reports the Sun-Sentinel. The protesters were reportedly harassing Saunders and attempting to block her exit.
Also, just last week, former U.S. Rep. Allen West angrily took to Facebook and Twitter because, he charges, FAU students had harassed his wife, Angela Graham-West, who is a trustee at the school.
“I… have no issue with the insidious and incessant personal attacks by the left against me,” West wrote, according to New Times Broward-Palm Beach. “However, I am warning you, end your harassment of my wife Angela. The students from Florida Atlantic University who have gone to my wife’s office, stalked her at the FAU Board of Trustee meetings, and sent letters to her company headquarters, end it now.”
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