I really, really hope there is more behind this story than appears in the newspaper report. If a lecturer truly was sacked for no more than telling a student he would not accept a late assignment and that she had no aptitude for graduate study, then that is kind of scary.
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It is a pretty rude e-mail and he shouldn't sent it (http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/story.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10456465). I think she right to complain, but he should have received a written warning... not sacked.
Wow, yeah, that is shockingly rude. And badly written. Makes me wonder whether the NZ Herald has got hold of a fake instead of the real email. Surely no professor writes such bizarrely ungrammatical sentences, and has so many typos, even in an email.
As for the content, totally unacceptable. I'm sure we've all thought similar things about the occasional problem student, but most of us wouldn't even say them out loud to colleagues, let alone directly to the student.
Wow, if that email is real I have to wonder if he wasn't drunk when he sent it. Keep us posted on updates to this story, please, Styley!
I find the email quite unbelievable because of the grammatical errors: "worse" for "worst"?
If this is really what he wrote, he deserves to be fired for being illiterate, but I hope the university investigated whether or not the email was genuine.
And I have had so many students use the "dead relative" excuse that I often do ask for proof, too. Generally, if it is a genuine case, you get an outraged email from a parent, to which you reply "Given that there is a grade riding on this, I have a policy, and your kid has missed X classes, and has X late assignments" and it turns out that said kid has failed to mention such things to the parent.
Usually, if the death excuse is real, students actually volunteer proof.
I can imagine that "worse" might have just been a typo, but combined with all the other typos, plus the sentences that don't even make sense, I am sure the email is either a fake, or was written when drunk.
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