I don't see why anyone would doubt that someone could get fired for this. It has so many features in it that could lead to a firing. It has faculty factions over areas of focus in the Latin America vs Europe component. It has an ideological component in the oppressors vs oppressed for the politically correct (there certainly aren't any of THOSE in academia). More importantly, very few college students had Peninsular Spanish in high school. To them, this professor is hard to understand and talking funny. It is also doubtful that they would really be eager to learn new pronunciations of things they had already learned from high school. Now, this wouldn't be as problematic for upper-level Spanish majors who should be exposed to the Peninsular accent, but as a lecturer(?) she probably would have been relegated to the service courses full of students trying to get their foreign language requirement over with.
At my school, an English professor was let go after too many students complained that they couldn't understand the way he talked. He was from New England.
This brings back a nightmare year of high school, my second year of Spanish. The first-year class was taught by a Latin American. The second-year class was taught by a Castilian (I remember how often she employed that label for herself with pride) who told us that everything that we had learned in the first year was wrong.
Many of us shut down, stammering through spoken exercises, knowing that we would get yelled at (in Spanish, of course), and giving up on further foreign-language studies. I regret that so much to this day -- but remain grateful for that first-year class, as some of it comes back to me when we're in Latin American countries.
I also recall that the Castilian instructor was gone from my high school after that year. I hope that this article is not indicative of similar impact on students of such intradepartmental warfare.
