Tuesday, Sept. 9, 2003 | 10:59 a.m.
When Holliah Hove, 27, logged onto the website for an online English 101 course she was taking at the Community College of Southern Nevada this semester, she got a surprise.
Along with information on the course expectations, she found pictures of a man's buttocks, handcuffs, paddles and a woman dressed in a dominatrix outfit.
After Hove complained, the course's teacher, Douglas Eyman, an adjunct professor who was running the course from North Carolina, was fired last week. Another instructor has been hired to replace Eyman.
"The handcuffs alone didn't bother me, but the more I saw the more I understood," Hove said. "I saw the pictures with a rack and another one of a dominatrix and I just thought it was completely inappropriate."
The incident has raised questions about how well "distance education" -- instruction such as online classes, in which the instructor and the students are not in the same physical location -- is monitored. It has also raised questions about how thoroughly adjuncts are screened before being hired.
Eyman, who has taught online courses for CCSN since 2000, ran the English course while teaching at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, N.C.
Students taking Eyman's course would go on CCSN's website for information and link up to a Cape Fear Community College Web page with Eyman's class information.
But CCSN officials did not check those sites for content, nor did anyone at Cape Fear Community College.
Eyman resigned from Cape Fear Community College to pursue graduate work, Eric McKeithan, Cape Fear president, said.
Eyman could not be reached for comment.
Eyman told the Cape Fear college officials the pictures were for a project he had been working on about power and authority. The images were supposed to be erased, but Eyman was unable to access the page after his resignation on July 31, McKeithan said.
"It comes as a complete surprise to us," McKeithan said. "It looks to us to be a straightforward misuse of resources. Even if it was a project on power and authority, to put those kinds of icons on a website doesn't make sense."
Avoiding such mishaps can be difficult for a large institution such as CCSN, which hires 1,000 part-time instructors a semester.
Screening of part-time instructors is often done by individual departments rather than by the human resources department. Distance education instructors are hired either through in-person interviews or by phone. Background checks are not routine and website postings are left up to the individual instructor.
"The fact is that the process of hiring adjunct faculty is fairly decentralized," said Thomas Peacock, CCSN's associate vice president of human resources. "The background check may or may not be done. It's pretty much up to the chair whether or not they hire that person."
Adjuncts are a important to filling demand quickly at CCSN; many come to work on short notice and for relatively little pay, about $700 a credit hour.
This year CCSN hired more than 1,000 adjunct professors to fill the expanding demand for classes. That number is up from 800 adjuncts in 2000, Peacock said.
Peacock and Chris Giunchigliani, who is a spokeswoman for the college and a Las Vegas assemblywoman, said the incident underscores the need for background checks, which CCSN plans to begin doing.
"There ought to be a policy at least to explore the links that go out under our school's name," Giunchigliani said. "Especially when it's an English 101 class where you have so many younger students."
CCSN has since severed Eyman's link from its website, Don Smith, dean of arts and letters, said.
"In a nutshell, we identified the problem and then we fixed it," Smith said.
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