LETTER: Computer science professor not in the wrong

Professor Thomas Ahlswede is by no means the most interesting professor on the planet.

However, this does not detract from the fact that he’s one of the few professors that are super nice and willing to help where they can.

The fact that Central Michigan Life would run this article and attack this man so that some senior “journalist” could get their degree disgusts me.

There are thousands of art classes in schools all across the nation that actually have nude models come into the classrooms and pose. If an art teacher would have had his art in a sketchbook or even drawn/painted in a frame behind the desk in his office, no one would have said a word about it.

For example, Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which depicts hundreds of nude people in provocative positions as well as one right near the front bent over with flowers sticking out of his/her ass. In fact, this piece is well known to be studied in art history classes.

Let’s not forget that Ahlswede also TEACHES computer graphics courses and this just goes to show that he’s really good at what he teaches.

Even if he was creating “porn,” as someone who worked on a lot of broken student computers while attending Central Michigan University, I can guarantee this isn’t the first time most of those “innocent 17/18 year olds” have seen a naked body.

Some of the stuff I stumbled across on many student machines, while ridding their PCs of malware, was borderline illegal and definitely disgusting.

As an alumnus of CMU, I am appalled to see this is what this paper has come to in my absence.

What people do in their free time is their own business anyway. He admits himself he didn’t try to hide it and he shouldn’t have to.

No one made this kid Google Ahlswede’s name and then look at almost every-one of these pictures and Ahlswede never showed them in any of my classes.

If he felt really uncomfortable, he had the ability to hit that little close button in the top corner of his machine. Instead, he sits there, looks at all of them trying to formulate a way to take a good man’s means of expression and run his name through the mud.

Which it seems CM Life was happy to oblige by featuring this article better suited for a tabloid magazine on the front page.

Dan Riehl

CMU alumnus