Kenneth E. Hardy, 45, a former college professor who challenged his employer's decision not to rehire him after a student complained about a classroom discussion of racial slurs, died Saturday of lung cancer in Louisville, Ky.
His widow, Adreinne Regnier, a professor and coordinator of Jefferson Community College's philosophy department, said she would continue with her husband's lawsuit charging that the college took his job for using epithets in a class discussion on the power of language.
In April, the U.S. Supreme Court refused without comment to hear the college's appeal of lower court rulings letting Mr. Hardy's suit proceed to trial.
After teaching for four years, Mr. Hardy wasn't rehired after the summer of 1998, when a black female student complained that one of Mr. Hardy's communication classes included a discussion of racial slurs and sexist epithets.
His superiors' lawyer said that Mr. Hardy was speaking as a college employee and could not claim his constitutional rights were violated. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel disagreed, saying, "The First Amendment tolerates neither laws nor other means of intimidation that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the free exchange of ideas in the classroom."
Dr. Richard J. Wyatt, 63, chief of the neuropsychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health who made early advances in the study and treatment of schizophrenia, died of lung cancer Friday in Washington.
A Los Angeles native, Dr. Wyatt earned his undergraduate and medical degrees at the Johns Hopkins University. He joined the National Institutes of Health in 1967 and was named chief of the neuropsychiatry branch in 1972.
He founded a schizophrenia research program in 1969, and in his years there led research teams that conducted some of the first experimental studies on brain grafts for patients with Parkinson's disease, studied mood disorders and Alzheimer's disease, and demonstrated that early intervention could alter the course of schizophrenia.
His teams did some of the earliest basic studies on the biochemistry of schizophrenia and on the ability of the brain's circuitry to adapt to changed circumstances, like injury. But Dr. Wyatt is best known for helping to train many of today's leading neuroscientists.