Don’t Be Politically Incorrect
and Hard
"Student complains law professor dropped his shorts, exposing
himself"
Copyright Knight-Ridder Newspapers.
News Report, June 17, 1998
By Mark Silva
- TALLAHASSEE – For years, the salty words, sexual innuendo, racial
remarks and berating of students in professor William McHugh’s tough
classes were legendary at Florida State University’s College of Law.
- But when McHugh dropped his Bermuda shorts, as one of his female
students complained last week, the 64-year-old professor’s career suddenly
came into question – as did FSU’s handling of long-simmering complaints
about the shocking manners of a man who has tutored a generation of
lawyers.
- McHugh is, by his own account, a "dinosaur," a "buzz-saw." McHugh
is, according to FSU President Sandy D’Alemberte, one of the law school’s
top teachers. McHugh is, for now, suspended from his $86,824-a-year job
while the university investigates the complaint that he exposed himself to
a student.
- A professor since 1973 – the year John Houseman starred as the
taskmaster Professor Kingsfield in The Paper Chase – McHugh maintains that
the aim of his tough talk is preparing law students for the
rough-and-tumble of law firms, hard-nosed negotiation and abusive judges.
- But Wendy Stein, 22, a second-year law student from Hollywood who
walked into McHugh’s office on June 3 and left in dismay over his alleged
display of flesh, says this isn’t the world she inhabits.
- "It’s a harsh style to prepare you for the legal world," Stein
says. "I have worked in a law firm for many years, and worked with many
lawyers and I have seen none of their genitalia, so I don’t think that is
relevant."
- McHugh has denied exposing himself and makes no apology for his
attention-getting demeanor in his freshman classes on contract law or
courses in arbitration and employment law. He did not return telephone
calls from The Herald, but told The Tallahassee Democrat last week:
- "I’m a working dinosaur and when I run into them, I’m a buzz saw …
The question is, do I create a hostile environment? Yeah, I do. I get real
hostile, if you’re not prepared for my classes."
- FSU Law, a stately institution with a circle of white-clapboard
Southern homes around a grassy commons in an oak-shaded valley behind the
Capitol, wasn’t prepared for a week of publicity about McHugh’s classroom
behavior when newspapers started printing complaints of a student who says
he failed to get the administration’s attention for two years.
- "I think that’s the real story here," says Mark Holten, a
third-year law student who last winter posted on the Internet ream of
documents about McHugh’s abuse of students. "At some point, the university
starts to ratify that conduct when they know about it and do nothing about
it. They put me and other students in a classroom knowing they have this
problem."
- McHugh has taught for much of the school’s existence, leaving a
lasting impression on many who passed through.
- Rep. Roberts-Burke said she recalls McHugh as a "forceful"
professor from her 1981 class with him – but no abuse.
- "I do recall that he was effective in class," she said. "Some
professors can be a little forceful, and he was that kind of professor,
but nothing I felt was out of the ordinary."
- Sandy D’Alemberte, president of FSU since 1994, was dean of the law
school from 1984 to 1989. He reprimanded McHugh for his conduct last year,
but that wasn’t the first complaint D’Alemberte had filed about him.
- "I’ll tell you, it goes back clearly to the time I was law school
dean," D’Alemberte says. "Bill was a problem, to state it plainly.
- "But Bill McHugh is a good teacher. What I found, when I dealt with
him as a dean, I’d get a complaint about him … I’d go ask people and I’d
find that Bill had been in class and he had used some fairly colorful
language, and I’d ask, ‘Was it insulting or demeaning to individuals?’
Some people would say yes, some say no, but he majority of people would
come out on Bill’s side."
- Last June, D’Alemberte wrote to McHugh about a complaint from a
black female law student reporting that McHugh said he didn’t think she
was black because she does not have "black hair" and was so "articulate."
- "Your periodic use of profanity and occasional off-color remarks …
in the course of classroom dialogue with students is unacceptable and is
clearly counterproductive to your mission as an educator," the letter
said.
- Candace Kollas, a lawyer in Atlanta now who filed the complaint,
wasn’t satisfied with the university’s response: "In my opinion, he’s a
vile, obnoxious man who calls himself the Archie Bunker of contracts."
- In 1989, a staff assistant for McHugh received a $1,000 settlement
from the university following a complaint over her supervisor’s
treatment.
- There have been other complaints, but apparently none like the one
Wendy Stein filed last week. She says McHugh was seated, wearing open
shorts, as she entered his office with another student.
- "When I went in, he had his button undone and his belt undone and
his zipper undone," Stein said. "He started talking about his recent
hernia operation and how they put this mesh in him he could still feel,
and how the incision was really long."
- "He said, ‘You have to see this thing.’ We said, ‘No no, we will
take your word for it.’ He said, ‘You have to see this.’ He pulled his
shirt, and the shorts came down."
- Not until last week, when McHugh started making comments about
President Clinton’s sex organ in class, did Stein decide to complain.
- "That is when it hit me," she said. "In this class, he made many
more sexual references, inundated with references to Clinton’s ‘wanker.’
He’d say, ‘Arbitration is like sex, because both come in so many different
forms.’ You could say caterpillars come in many different forms, or
pizza."
- Through the years, it was McHugh’s strength as a teacher that
overrode objections to his style. "The sum of all of it, at the end of the
day: I found that Bill was a good teacher who used bad language and
sometimes bad judgement but he motivated a lot of students," D’Alemberte
said.
- "My continuing conversation with Bill, since I have known him, is:
‘Bill, why do you go out on the edge?’ He would say, ‘I get people nervous
or scared to come to my class without being prepared. They stay awake in
my class. I am going to say something pretty shocking in my class, some of
it comes up pretty raw, and they will pay attention."
"Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the
longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the
mind." Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
This is a page in the section entitled Why Can't Law
Schools Teach Ethics? --FSU in the Web site entitled Legal Reform through Transforming the Discipline of Law
into a Science .