Let me offer up another version of Dr. Coward's story: An employee is hired and does his job brilliantly in some aspects and along some metrics, but his employer has complaints in other areas, which are hard to read since we haven't heard their side. These issues are brought up with the employee in writing multiple times over the course of a year: September 2013, April 2014, and November 2014. Apparently, the employee does not address the issues and instead insists that he's doing a brilliant job and that the employer's criticism is really about him being too awesome. Employer decides that they don't want a rogue employee and fires him in October 2014, effective June 2016. Why such almost 2 years of lead time? Maybe it's contractual, but I'm sure that if they really wanted to, they could fire him at the end of the academic year. I read this as the employer trying to get the employee to take them seriously and still giving him another chance to change. Now, in 2015, the employee obviously still doesn't care what the department thinks.

Not everyone who claims to be a misunderstood and persecuted genius actually is one. There are people who are brilliant in some areas, but unwilling to accommodate being part of a larger group and difficult to work with. In programming terms, imagine an extraordinary programmer who's unwilling to use the organization's standard programming language or version control. I'm not sure that the Berkeley math department is really any different in preferring a pretty good in all areas to someone brilliant in some, but flawed in others, and, most importantly, unwilling to change.

At first, I wondered why he was blowing up the whole issue and whether it would actually help. If part of the issue is in the level of preparation for science classes, then the administration is going to be just as unfavorable as the department. Then I noticed that he's started some kind of teaching-related company. So, the department told him to change or be fired and he decided he'd rather do the latter, but as long as he's going out, he might as well try to get some publicity for his company.