How do we curb racism and antisemitism – and protect free speech?

To all appearances, Michael Chikindas was a reasonably successful professor in the Department of Food Science at Rutgers University, but that was before the website Israellycool.com discovered that his Facebook page was plastered with antisemitic cartoons.

The caricatures – with hook noses, leering grins and ultra-Orthodox religious clothing – were sometimes accompanied by “anti-Zionist” messages, but Chikindas also promoted conspiracy theories ranging from sickeningly familiar to sickeningly inventive. Along with the usual Holocaust denial, Chikindas asserted that Israelis were behind the 9/11 attacks and, more creatively, that Jews had perpetrated the Armenian genocide.

University president Robert Barchi initially took a hands-off approach. When questioned about Chikindas at a campus town hall meeting, Barchi said, “You may not like what the guy says, but you have to like the fact that he can say it.”

As protests mounted at the New Jersey university, Barchi issued a far stronger statement, condemning Chikindas’ imagery as “bigoted, discriminatory and anti-Semitic material” that “perpetuated toxic stereotypes.” Barchi announced that Chikindas would be barred from teaching required courses and removed from his position as director of the Center for Digestive Health. “No Rutgers student will be required to take a course that he teaches,” Barchi explained, and “no Rutgers employee will be required to work in an administrative unit that he heads.”

Academic freedom generally prohibits punishing faculty members for “extramural speech,” but it does not guarantee the right to hold a directorship or to teach any particular classes. Thus, reassigning Chikindas may have been technically permissible as an administrative measure – protecting students and staff from the risk of future discrimination – although it no doubt seemed punitive to him. But Barchi also disclosed that Chikindas remained subject to an investigation that could potentially lead to a one-semester suspension.

A suspension would clearly constitute punishment, which makes it problematic under Rutgers’ 1967 statement of academic freedom:

“Outside the fields of instruction, artistic expression, research, professional and clinical practice, and professional publication, faculty members, as private citizens, enjoy the same freedoms of speech and expression as any private citizen and shall be free from institutional discipline in the exercise of these rights.”

In other words, Chikindas could be disciplined if he had spread his theories in the context of his professional work – in class, at an academic conference or in a scholarly publication. But in this case, his screeds were unrelated to food science, which means that he cannot be subjected to “institutional discipline” such as suspension or docked pay.

The line between administrative measures and punishment may be imprecise, but some observers think it should be abandoned in favor of unrestrained free speech. According to John Wilson, who writes for the Academe Blog of the American Association of University Professors, Chikindas should have faced no consequences at all.

In a post titled “In Defense of Michael Chikindas,” Wilson allowed that “Chikindas is an anti-Semite, and an idiot,” but argued that “upsetting people” did not violate any campus rules. “The fact that some students feel uncomfortable about a professor’s views,” said Wilson, “is not a good reason to ban [him] from teaching required courses.”

According to Wilson (and other absolutists), academic freedom means that a professor cannot be sanctioned, or even reassigned, for claiming that “gay men have a propensity to molest children,” or “Muslims are a terrorist threat,” or “blacks are less intelligent than whites on average.” If we allow “personal opinions to be the basis of penalties, almost any controversial professor could be punished.”

This position is most troubling because it trivializes antisemitism, and other forms of racism, under the rubric of mere idiocy or “personal opinions.” Although it is tempting to dismiss bigots as fools, the truth is that anti-Jewish imagery is constantly used to inspire attacks on synagogues, schools, community centers, museums and kosher supermarkets.

Some academics may not comprehend the power of Internet caricatures to instigate violence, but it is well understood by the neo-Nazis, whose “style guide” advises that “there should be a conscious agenda to dehumanize the enemy, to the point where people are ready to laugh at their deaths.”

Chikindas will continue teaching at Rutgers for the foreseeable future, whatever his course and administrative assignments, but that is not the most important issue raised by his case. Faculties can endure a handful of rabid antisemites, but their poisonous ideology must still be recognized as truly dangerous, and never discounted as simply “uncomfortable.” Those who encourage anti-Jewish terrorism are racists, not idiots; and they are motivated by hatred, not personal opinions.

The author is a law professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and director of the Bartlit Center for Trial Advocacy.

(Chicago Tribune/TNS)