UM law-school lecturer tries to make a case for Trump on Twitter. Some of his colleagues object
Like many supporters of President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the Nov. 3 presidential election, a University of Miami law-school lecturer jumped on social media to criticize the ballot counting in a half-dozen battleground states that would decide the next occupant of the White House.
Daniel Ravicher, without identifying himself as a UM instructor, turned to Twitter to declare that Trump’s challenger, Joe Biden, “lost” in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and other swing states — yet their goal is “to deny @realDonaldTrump [the] ability to win tonight, to falsely claim [the] election was close, to weaken him. Like all their other dirty tricks, it won’t work.”
Ravicher, who views himself as a conservative, also tweeted that “Latinos are clearly now the most politically important minority group in America” and that “blacks allow themselves to be taken for granted and treated horribly by Democrats.” Then he added that the population difference between the two groups will grow because “blacks have 50% more abortions than Latinos per [capita].”
His comments have drawn some backlash. More than two dozen of Ravicher’s colleagues at UM law condemned his “baseless claims about [election] fraud” in a letter to the student newspaper, The Miami Hurricane, which has been covering the controversy over his pro-Trump series of tweets on the Coral Gables campus. After talking with the law school’s dean last week, Ravicher announced on Twitter that he was going to be fired from his job as a lecturer — though apparently that won’t be happening.
Ravicher, who has lectured at UM since 2015 on legal issues surrounding start-up companies and advises student entrepreneurs, has a contract with the law school through May 2022. He is not a tenured professor, however.
“I want to be very clear,” UM law-school dean Anthony Varona declared in a statement released Tuesday to the Miami Herald. “Prof. Ravicher ... has not been terminated nor threatened with termination by me or anyone else in the University of Miami leadership because of his social media posts.”
“Mr. Ravicher has made numerous inaccurate statements in his tweets and interviews,” Varona added. “Unfortunately, many of the things he has said about our exchanges are simply not true.”
In an interview Tuesday, Ravicher said the law-school dean told him last week that his contract would not be renewed if he “didn’t apologize and retract” his Twitter statements.
Ravicher refused to do that, defending his right to speak out on social media as long as he does not violate UM’s policy. He said he was within his rights as a UM employee because he did not identify himself as a lecturer at the law school or indicate that he was speaking on behalf of the school. He said his tweets reflected his personal thoughts and beliefs about the presidential election and his support for Trump, and that’s why he drew the scorn of his colleagues.
“When it became known that I was a Trump supporter, their animus toward me heightened,” Ravicher told the Herald. He said he felt personally attacked when the UM law professors accused him of using his words to incite violence, suggesting they were trying to censor him.
In their Nov. 11 letter to the Hurricane, more than two dozen law professors said that “Ravicher has promoted baseless claims about fraud in the presidential election, suggested a need to use lethal force against protesters after the election, compared calls for political accountability to the Holocaust, groundlessly accused law faculty of retaliating against students for their political views and made several uninformed claims about race, ethnicity and identity in the United States.
“These public social media posts demonstrate, at the very least, an egregious lack of professional judgment,” the professors wrote. “While Ravicher’s unprofessional behavior may be defended as a matter of academic freedom or free speech, academic and free speech norms do not insulate lawyers from critique. To the contrary, the principles of academic freedom and free speech compel us to speak out against Ravicher’s promotion of disinformation, invocation of violence and racially derogatory commentary.”
Ravicher said he is being attacked by his peers for lacking professional judgment because he openly supported Trump. He said he now recognizes that after two weeks of legal challenges by the president, Trump lost the election to Biden.
The law lecturer, who appeared on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show, “The Ingraham Angle,” on Friday, told the Herald that he will continue to use Twitter to express his views, comparing the social media platform to the “Roman
Colosseum.”
In his own letter to the Hurricane to answer his critics, Ravicher said: “On social media, I don’t deny having the temperament of a Dave Chappelle or Bill Maher, who intentionally provoke listeners with uncomfortable commentary.
“I can dish it and take it, and usually both sides of Twitter battles leave better off for them,” he wrote. “Yet here, instead of addressing the substance of my statements, critics have responded with conclusory labels and personal attacks.”