John Galliano has been unceremoniously dropped from Parsons New School faculty before he ever officially joined it, it was reported last night, after students there mounted a petition against him taking a course in ‘emotion’ and the role it plays in fashion design. The college's reasoning for the U-turn is that Galliano refused to be part of a 'frank' discussion about his career during the sessions.

Fair enough, right? These students are paying good money to attend that institution – who does the teaching body think it is, proposing people whose knowledge and experience might be beneficial to them?

What a laudable spirit of rebellion those undergraduates are cultivating. They’ll have that to cling to, at least, when they realise the roadblocks and ravines in their own cultural landscape, having discounted anything and everything else that wasn’t immediately pleasing to them.

It’s a calamitous victory for bigotry that this should have come to pass. Yes, Galliano’s fall from grace was a bigotry all of its own, but he has done penance – physically and financially – and he has apologised for that drunken, distasteful and disastrous error. Do we not rehabilitate people who realise their faults? Do we not find ways for them to become functioning and useful members of society again?

That those moments caught on camera can stand for more than this and this is perfectly understandable in the immediate aftermath. That they will stand for more than them in perpetuity is nonsensical.

It’s the society vs art debate. Do we allow earthbound idiocy to stand in the way of a transcendent cultural legacy? You might argue that Karl Marx was a racist, but he remains one of the most important social theorists ever to have existed. We still read Chaucer, and he was a rapist; André Gide was a paedophile, and he remains in the literary canon.

I don’t suggest that the former Dior designer quite lies in either of these camps, but the decision Parsons has taken implies he is even worse.

Think what you like of John Galliano – he did a Bad Thing – but don’t try to argue that he has nothing to teach us. That’s like saying you have nothing left to learn, and that’s a grave an error as the one he made.

Click the gallery to see some of Galliano's finest couture moments for Christian Dior