In the case of the dismissal of tenured professor Nona Gerard from Penn State (details here, Brian Leiter cites the generic response

Thank you for your email. President Spanier is out of the country so I am responding on his behalf. I will be sure he is aware of your opinion. I can assure you that there is much, much more to this than you are reading in the papers. I hope you realize that the University is also limited in what it can say publicly about this case at this point in time, especially given that the faculty member has already indicated she plans to file a lawsuit. I can also assure you that the University’s hearing process was followed explicitly at every step of the way.

“We have never taken away anyone’s job for criticizing the quality of a program, and we never will. You should also know that when five members of the University community who heard over 40 hours of testimony in what was a quasi-legal proceeding would vote unanimously that the faculty member was guilty of grave misconduct, there is not just smoke but a lot of fire. For the faculty member to make public statements about due process not being served is understandable in her circumstances, but simply untrue.

“What you have been reading in the press has simply not reflected the whole story.”

As it happened, I recently received an almost identical letter in relation to a property dispute in which I am peripherally involved. In both cases, I’m tempted by the simple response MRD> But I think it might be worth exploring the issues a bit further.

There are really two implications in this kind of letter. The more creditable is that the information on which the decision relied must be kept confidential for reasons of due process but that, if it were public, the decision would be seen to be reasonable. The problem is that this kind of claim is hard to sustain when the information that has been made public about the case seems clearly inconsistent with the claim. In the Gerard case, for example, the statements that Gerard “demonstrates difficulties accepting supervision.” and that “the hostile communications of Professor Gerard go beyond what is permitted as free speech.” do not sound as if the grounds for dismissal were much different from those made public by Gerard herself. It’s hard to believe that the charges were so radically different from those described by Gerard as to justify, on their own, the extraordinary step of dismissing a tenured professor without notice.

The second, less creditable, implication, typically associated with phrases like “no smoke without fire” is that the real offence on which the decision was based is something other than that on which the committee made its finding. The classic example of this kind of thing is the case of Sir Roger Casement: convicted of treason following the Easter Rising, his execution was ensured by the secret circulation to jurymen and others of his private diaries, which included explicit descriptions of his homosexuality. Some Irish writers maintain that the diaries were forged, though this seems unlikely. But this is beside the point. Even accepting the harsh view of homosexuality that prevailed at the time, this could not justly have played any role in a decision on the death penalty.

I don’t take an absolutely purist line on this kind of thing. If a proper process found appropriate grounds for Gerard’s dismissal, knowledge of unrelated bad behavior might be relevant in rebuttal to a claim that leniency should be exercised in view of long and meritorious service. But it’s easy to make unsourced and unspecific imputations of this kind and effectively impossible to rebut them.