Is Professor Michael Schlesinger a really big deal in the area of atmospheric science? Inside Higher Education says so, not that it really matters.

A famed atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is on leave after refusing to heed administrators’ request that he give electronic lecture slides to a student with disabilities.

There is a gut reaction to this reference to a “student with disabilities,” since making reasonable accommodations is both the law and, well, a kind thing to do. Or, as most people will react, how can it hurt?

A dispute over electronic lecture slides and accommodations for a learning-disabled student may have ended the teaching career of Michael Schlesinger, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

One of the more disastrous influences of political correctness is the white-washing of detail that enables us to understand what this is really all about. The initial reference was to a “student with disabilities,” which could mean someone wheelchair-bound or blind. Who knows? This description could color the issue against the prof, since why would anyone refuse to accommodate a blind person?

But then, a bit more information taints the impression the other way. A learning-disabled student? Learning-disabled creates the impression that the student isn’t intellectually up to snuff. Anybody want the learning-disabled surgeon doing their brain surgery?

This too, however, fails to impart any meaningful information. A learning disability could be anything from dyslexia to dyscalculia. If someone with Asperger’s is doing your brain surgery, you may well be a very lucky patient.

In Professor Schlesinger’s case, we never actually learn what the problem is, making his reaction difficult, if not impossible, to assess.

“Although you have a doctorate, I doubt that you teach. Although you have a doctorate, I doubt that you do research,” Schlesinger wrote to a disabilities services specialist at the university, announcing his departure last week. He accused the staff member of writing him “coercive emails” about the accommodation and copied his entire class on climate and global change on the exchange.

“Yet,” he continued, “it is you who have pressured me, who has taught and researched for 41 years in university and is a Nobel Prize recipient, to do that which I will not do, advantage a single [Disability Resources and Educational Services] student over the 100-plus non-DRES students in my course by providing that student with my lectures electronically.” (Note: This article has been updated from an earlier version to clarify Schlesinger’s Nobel connections. He was one of many contributors to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.)

It’s fair to assume that Schlesinger isn’t a total idiot. But that doesn’t mean he’s not a mean old curmudgeon.

After teaching the climate and global change class 16 times and accommodating various students with disabilities, Schlesinger wrote, he was for the first time this year asked to provide electronic copies of his slides before each lecture.

While he gave all of his students hard copies of his lecture notes before class, he said, he didn’t provide electronic copies because “based on my experience of providing all my students my lecture slides after each lecture for most if not all of the 16 times I have taught this course, I knew that one-third of my class would cease coming to my lectures if I provided them my lecture slides electronically. And their ceasing to attend my lectures would lower their course grades.”

There was a rationale behind his decision, to prevent students from using, and disseminating, his electronic slides and then failing to come to lectures. And it’s not as if he was refusing to make a reasonable accommodation otherwise.

Parts of the email exchange have been posted online by students, and Schlesinger confirmed their authenticity to Inside Higher Ed. The messages say that Schlesinger offered to pay for someone to take notes for the student in question, so the professor’s main contention was sharing his slides with the student to supplement the notes.

Was this an insufficient accommodation? Was it less than optimal in the eyes of the school, or academic proponents of accommodations? Perhaps. Without more information, it’s impossible to know. And even with more information, it may be hard to say. Theories of how best to teach “other learners” is still in its relative infancy, and theories have shifted as more is learned.

The one thing that is clear is that the price exacted for this dispute is the education that Michael Schlesinger can impart to students. Even if he’s being unnecessarily resolute in his position, his knowledge and experience will be denied students, disabled or not, as a result of this.

Maybe Schlesinger is a pompous dick who is 100% dead wrong in his refusal to provide the demanded accommodation. Is there no resolution that doesn’t end in students being denied his instruction?

“Although the university has forbidden me to communicate with you, on pain of ???, I am,” he wrote, saying that Cassini is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. “We puny human beings have learned incredible things from Cassini … It is important for you to understand the past, the present and the future. It is you who will decide the future of our planet, this island Earth, as I have taught you. Learn well.”

Learn well is what students need to do. But who teaches them?