The idea that football is, or can be, a metaphor for life, which was presented in the commentary “Recent sports scandals should be a campus wake up call,” bespeaks a rather trivial and shallow view of life.

Still, I agree that lessons need to be learned from the ugly events at Penn State, though I can’t see how these lessons have anything to do with Ithaca College faculty’s performance. Indeed, to go from the sexual abuse of children to condemning the college’s faculty at large shows terribly muddled thinking.

I’m not sure what sorts of people Ms. Keller has worked with in her 20 years at the college, but, in my two decades here, I haven’t found the rampant abuses of faculty privilege she claims exist. Moreover, while she condemns a faculty member for having gone to “the court of public opinion,” she has done just that herself — and in a manner that shows a striking lack of accountability on her own part to faculty on this campus.

Asma Barlas, Director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity