RACIST PROFESSORS? Two journalism professors at Iowa State University have been forced out of their leadership roles at the school amid charges of racism. We don't know the whole story yet, but it seems that the departure of three junior faculty members who are minorities is playing a big role. And it sounds like someone got their wittle feewings hurt:

It also has created a frustration that has "boiled over into what I would characterize as uncivil behavior of senior faculty to each other," Richmond said. Some of that behavior, he said, has included comments that some might consider racist.

The vacuum created by what "some might consider racist" has sucked up many a decent person in the world of academia. Unfortunately, we have to wait until the 12th graf of a 14-graf story to find this out about one of the accused:

Eighmey took over the school in July 1996. In February 1999, he wrote a guest column in Advertising Age magazine in which he objected to racist overtones in a television commercial for running shoes. The commercial showed four white men drugging a Kenyan long-distance runner. "I find it hard to believe that today anyone in America would deliberately set out to make a racist commercial," Eighmey's column said. "It must have been an accident. But it is an accident that should have been prevented."

This case bears watching.