Fools in the high church of liberalism
Where do we draw the line? If you’re a college professor with tenure, can you say anything, no matter how hateful, and get away with it? Are there any limits to free speech on campus, especially at a public university where professors have First Amendment rights?
These are questions that come up from time to time, usually after a professor — almost always someone from the so-called progressive left— says or tweets something widely seen as indecent and outrageous.
The questions have come up again. This time the offending boor is a professor of creative writing at Fresno State in
California, who moments after the announcement that Barbara Bush had died took to Twitter to tell the world how happy she was that the “racist ... witch” was dead.
The professor, Randa Jarrar, tweeted that “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.” And then this, for good measure: “I’m happy the witch is dead. can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis did.”
When social media lit up with criticism, Jarrar said she was being attacked because she’s “an Arab American Muslim American woman with some clout.” And she laughed off demands that the school fire her, tweeting that, “I work as a tenured professor. I make 100K a year doing that. I will never be fired.”
Her arrogance aside, she appears to be right, at least for now. There is a First Amendment after all, and it protects academic deplorables just as it protects the rest of us.
Fresno State, of course, is not alone when it comes to hate-mongers posing as intellectuals.
At Rutgers University in New Jersey, a professor took to social media to say that Israeli Jews want to “exterminate” Palestinians but haven’t succeeded because so may Jews in Israel are gay. Because he’s a tenured professor, he kept his job. He did, however, get a slap on the wrist. The school said he could no longer teach required courses, which gave students the right to stay clear of his class.
A professor at the City University of New York went on Twitter to blame “white-nuclear families” for racism and white supremacy.
A professor at Austin Community College in Texas resigned after tweeting about President Trump’s education secretary, “I’m not wishing for it ... but I’d be ok if #BetsyDevos was sexually assaulted.” There are more, of course.
About Jarrar’s comments on Mrs. Bush, Sigal Ben-Porath, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, told The Washington Post that her opinion was disrespectful “but it was clearly protected under the First Amendment.”
“This is part of what we are expected to do as academics,” Ben-Porath said, “not just work according to dogma, but push the boundaries of what is acceptable that people would say or think or consider. That is what academic freedom is for.”
Forgive me for wondering how open minded the progressive left would be if a professor went on a twitter rampage with blacks or Muslims or Latinos or women in the cross hairs. Would the intellectuals say, “This is part of what we are expected to do as academics” — “That is what academic freedom is for”?
But no matter how satisfying the thought, dismissing professors for expressing ugly views can lead to the dreaded slippery slope. Would anyone expressing views seen as deviant be safe? Would that rare bird— a conservative professor in the sociology department— be able to keep his job if he tweeted a few kind words about Donald Trump?
Universities have become the high church of American liberalism — a church where every kind of diversity is worshipped, except intellectual diversity. Inside that campus bubble, left-wing churls can masquerade as scholars and feel not only secure in their jobs, but comfortable while they make fools of themselves.