The Ill fate of Professor Belot

Ok, if you’re reading this essay, which you obviously are, we first have to set up some ground rules. I’ll agree not to get mad when I’m writing this if you agree not to consider this piece an angry rant. It’s not a rant, it’s just a ‘hey, come on now.’ Now that that’s clear, on to the fun stuff. For this entry, I read a story from the Omaha World Herald about a UNL professor who ‘agreed to resign’ because of an incident that occurred involving some explosives that got passed around class one day. At first thought, you may be thinking, “Uh, duh? He could have like blown up UNL with those things. He better have gotten canned.” But I dare to take the opposite position. I believe this story falls into the rapidly expanding category of “little things that got blown out of proportion and extreme action was taken to save the big man’s buttocks.” This is the kind of category where a third grader gets expelled for carrying a finger nail clipper in their back pack or parents press sexual assault charges against a kindergartener who kissed his classmate. Back to the story about the professor… Let’s think of this logically.
Professor John Belot Jr. was a Professor of Chemistry at a major university. That means he had a pretty good amount of Education under his belt. A lot of teachers pass around visuals in class; it keeps the interest of the students. If professor Belot was sober when he made his judgment that the explosives were not volatile enough to be dangerous to decently cautious students. The story never actually said what the explosives were, and many are not actually dangerous unless put under extreme conditions. One example of this is nitrogen, a substance that can usually be put through a tractor to fertilize crops without exploding, yet if put under extremely high temperatures and pressure can result in explosions such as the one that produce the Oklahoma City bombing. Professor Belot should have been able to tell the difference between a volatile and nonvolatile explosive.