Professor Shaviro is a stupid person who said a stupid thing. His endorsement of murder rather than shouting down disfavored speakers is morally repugnant. Shouting down disfavored speakers is not permitted in our community. Killing a human being for making disfavored statements is murder.
We do not believe that any student should have to take a course from Professor Shaviro. Accordingly, I have arranged for alternative professors to teach each of his courses. Consistent with the First Amendment, we cannot take adverse job action against Professor Shaviro, but we can act to protect our students from being required to submit to his judgment on any issue, including grades.
A student may choose to continue to attend a course as taught by Professor Shaviro.
I think the desire here, speaking solely from a presidential management perspective, is to not give financial incentives to your employees to be unserious dipshits. That has all kinds of perverse incentives, from diminishing the school's reputation to forcing it to employ an inefficiently large number of faculty because of all of the rubber-roomers.
I studied physics in college, and there were a couple of professors who were essentially blacklisted from teaching the core undergraduate classes because they were known to be tyrannical assholes who couldn't be trusted to respect their (undergraduate) students. They remained professors, though, since they were talented researchers, capable of running a lab and even of mentoring graduate students in that capacity. I wouldn't be too surprised if they even taught the occasional graduate level class, just because the social dynamic of those classes is different.
That's the sort of logic that shapes my attitude when we discuss quarantining a professor from students, but I'm genuinely not sure how you would apply it to a literature professor without just turning him into a media critic. The job of a physics professor, or really any professor in a research-driven department, is much broader than just teaching undergrads, and in my experience the importance of that component is often driven by the individual professor's enthusiasm as much as anything else. But I really don't know what the expectations are for a professor in an art department. Maybe there's less to it than I would have assumed.
one might be concerned about the incentives generated by demonstrating to professors that, if they say enough odious and foolish things in public, they will be freed from their teaching responsibilities
that said, when i wrote that, i meant it simply as an observation rather than an argument
That response while eminently reasonable, assumes that there are others in his department who will step forward and take his classes. You have more faith in the collective wisdom of a contemporary university Literature Department than I have. Mary McCarthy’s GROVES OF ACADEME should be required reading in these troubled times.
Genuine question: is taking all his classes away not an adverse employment action? I don't know the legal definition of the term but it seems like punishment for his speech from a lay perspective.
I completely disagree, and I think the President should say, "Professor Shaviro is entitled to his own opinions, which of course are not necessarily those of the University in this case or any other. Read what he says, and you can see that he has not made a serious threat to kill anyone."
I say this as someone in the category Prof. Shaviro says to kill, and as someone who has been called reprehensible, sexist, racist, homophobic, intolerant of women, disrespectful to women, intolerant of racial diversity, unchristian, vile, stupid, bigoted, and loathsome by his Provost and Dean for far milder statements. See http://www.rasmusen.org/special/2019kerfuffle/.
Funny, if my title and name were "President Wilson" I would be extra wary of being the guy arguing that someone's heated rhetoric was unprotected speech.
Nominative determinism at work once again I suppose.
Actually, Roy Wilson used to have a Provost who was married to me, but she retired, and I like to think she might have suggested this wasn’t a good idea. FWIW I’m retired from that English department, and know Shaviro slightly. Seemed somewhat out of character, but I guess folks have the receipts. It will be interesting to see how this plays out--WSU is unionized (my wife just negotiated the last contract), and has a somewhat activist grievance process.
Since we're thinking of academic institutions, I go back to a clever person who deserves credit if I could only remember who it was. The question was, is FIRE allowed to shout in a crowded theater?
Thanks for this analysis. This is a more interesting case than I had understood from news reports.
Reading Shaviro's actual post, I think his error is less egregious than news reports had suggested. It's clear that the actual message he inteded to send lies in the two central paragraphs of his post, which echo Ken White's well-articulated position. Given the nature of Shaviro's academic profile, I suspect he was writing with a sense of urgency to people he was aligned with, but felt very worried that the content of his message would make it appear that he was unacceptably straying from their common ground. So he framed it with a "more radical than thou" preface, headed with careful esculpatory phrasing, before putting on his Popehat and aligning, consciously or not, with this blog.
That seems a tactically clever design to me, in theory. The problem that Shaviro seems to have overlooked is that he was posting in the real world (or, perhaps, the real virtual world), where the impact of his post was going to fall on people outside his small, academic, targeted audience. In that context his clever tactic created exactly the same effect as the Stanford law students' stupid tactic that he was attacking for its tactical stupidity. He became a mock-troll feeding real trolls a gourmet meal (great fodder for post-modernist deconstruction, though).
Still, I'd never heard of Sholem Schwarzbard and I'm always eager to learn. Now that I have Wikipedia-deep knowledge of the case I can see how totally irrelevant it is, but Shaviro's a teacher and I have to admit that he taught me something new.
Shaviro's statement, taken as a whole and read with care, is that protests that shut down speech are stupid, counterproductive and serve no other purpose than to make the make the protesters feel good about themselves and to signal their moral rightness to their own cohort at the expense of the actual cause.
If you really feel, Shaviro argues, that these speakers are so evil that they can't be allowed to present their ideas, such as they are, to the public, then you should just go all the way and take them out. If you recoil at that prospect, either because of moral qualms or concern about risk to yourself, then sit down and let them speak.
Yes, that’s how I read it...He should have done a Jonathan Swift and indicted his meaning with satire. Not that it would have helped for the pearl clutchers but someone like Popehat would not have read him as making an actual statement in favor of killing people but instead a hypothetical statement like ‘if it is so terrible they speak and they are so dangerous for their words...then the implication is they should be dead.’ But if they are not so dangerous, maybe we have to let them speak.
More or less, Chuchundra. I'd modify your second paragraph and replace "then you should just go all the way and take them out" with "then it would be best if there were the option for you just to take them out--but there isn't, and please note the big sign saying so that's covering my ass." (The sign was naturally trampled in the ensuing stampede, as anyone without a PhD would have known.)
Given the ability of college professors to misconstrue context, ignore disclaimers, and carry a grudge for decades, anyone with a PhD should have known also.
Is your point--anyone should be able to misconstrue and it's all on him, no matter the context of his statements? This will not be a great speech climate if so. If not, what do you mean?
Yes, this is unfortunately true. Administrators won't protect the free speech of faculty, faculty often act against their own interests as well. People are letting propagandists get a leg up because they simply don't have the common sense or guts to understand the only solution is to stand together against what is a very coordinated and underhanded assault on universities. Everyone is out for themselves and the ship can only go down this way.
On a slightly more serious note, I think Shapiro wins but I think that is through the malleable Pickering Test. Shapiro’s comments are on an issue of public concern. I think the University can plausibly argue that a professor suggesting that people should kill invited speakers on a college campus is something that interferes with the efficiency and disruption free work place, with lots of gesturing towards school shootings or something.
Excellent point. I could see Wayne State and President Wilson trying to retcon the statement to mean that, but I think it's pretty clear that's not what they meant -- the reference to referring it to criminal authorities and the reference to it being far outside protection makes it pretty clear that it's claiming a categorical exception.
I think this could be a whole new blogging oeuvre for Professor Shaviro, stealth assassin from the clouds, and I eagerly await hearing how his unquenchable bloodlust informs his opinions on various topical issues.
“So here is what I think about provoking people to say stupid bullshit about free speech. Although I do not advocate union busting or committing the largest mass murder in Michigan history, I think it is far more admirable to shout fire in a crowded theater than it is to post some doofy nonsense on Facebook.”
I woke up to this story and just rolled my eyes. Wasn't really worth an extra thought but as an academic expatriate (U of Hawaii, 1987-2001; Los Alamos National Lab afterwards) thanks for covering it, anyway.
Sometimes academics say the silliest things. This story reminded me of the year of the U of Hawaii faculty strike, when a Professor of English lamented how much harder her job was, sitting in her office and writing papers, compared to the labors of the garbage collectors or bus drivers. Most of us rolled our eyes. My wife, teaching five sections of community college Bonehead English, had hypothetical thoughts short of Brandenburg about what should be done to English professors divorced from reality.
Ken, your last paragraph sums it up. In an age when it has become fashionable for many on campuses to exercise the heckler's veto over ideas they don't like, the University president, perhaps, should do two things. One, remind the campus that interfering with other people's speech, whether by homicide or screaming like idiots to shout down a speaker, is not compatible with the purpose of a university. If the professor actually proceeds to encourage campus unrest rather than only speaking hypothetically, it might be actionable. Two, that what Professor Dingbat said on his own time and without a faculty hat on was stupid but protected speech and that yes, at times, even Yale-educated tenured professors can sound like Arthur Figgis, the village idiot on the Monty Python show. Recall Arthur could sound quite erudite except when choosing to act out for the public. But Prof. Shaviro's words do not represent the thinking of the university.
Speaking as a formerly tenured professor i found the comments disgusting and mostly indefensible
Tenure is not s verbal open season in my opinion. However his comments are borderline defensible. Were I a Dean I would put his name in a file where i would not like my name to be. Were I Pres looking at a hostile legislative body i would do what his pres did and hope it blows over.
One other thing i find the argument that no one will pay attention to his remarks upsetting. In my. 60 years of teaching my underlying assumption was that people did pay attention to what I said. That is why I never said fundamentally silly and foolish things in the classroom.
Fair enough. Agree that the comments were awful. I don't think, tenured or not, public university faculty should set a bad civic example given we are on the public dime. But given it is likely protected speech and not, presumably, uttered using university resources or in the classroom, it seems the President or a Dean doing as you say is about as far as it can go.
I do think people pay attention when this stuff gets in the news and it is not good for the university. Even if not said in the classroom.
There's a much simpler rule to use: if you find out a person has said "there's no such thing as cancel culture, it's just called being held accountable", they lose any right to object to being "held accountable" for their speech.
You know what would happen to someone on the other side who said anything remotely like this.
Since I am in the presence of an expert, I will present a hypothetical involving a government actor and an employee, with similar but not identical facts.
If a police officer posts from his private social media account that it is morally admirable to kill African-Americans who "don't know their place", there may not necessarily be workplace disruption, but he or she would have provided evidence of unfitness for the job.
What does the law say about the department, a government actor, firing the hypothetical officer?
Of the differences between this hypothetical and the real case, which differences are legally important?
In particular, is tenure relevant or irrelevant? The standard for firing a police officer is whatever is in the collective bargaining agreement. Firing a tenured professor requires, what, "gross misconduct"? And might there be a requirement of viewpoint neutrality in the interpretation of "gross misconduct"?
Tenure is relevant in that there might be legal agreements between faculty and the college. If there is a collective bargaining agreement, as there was in Hawaii (I was on the Univ of Hawaii Professional Assembly Board of Directors in the 1990's) disciplinary rules were also in the collective bargaining agreement.
At least some courts have ruled that cops have to be a little careful before posting opinions or ideas that may reduce confidence in, or create fear of, the cops.
There was a case a while ago in Albuquerque : "The officer who listed his occupation as “human waste disposal” on Facebook within days of fatally shooting a suspect is named as a defendant, along with the city of Albuquerque, in a federal lawsuit alleging civil rights violations and wrongful death."
Given cops carry force of law and a gun, I suspect there is far more justification for controlling excesses of their speech compared to faculty. Not sure even a tenured full professor holds those kinds of levers of power. In fact, Ken, didn't Florida faculty sue against the state's new "don't say gay" law on the basis that they speak as individual professors even in their roles as faculty rather than stating positions as representing those of the state or the campus? My hunch, even though I am not a lawyer and don't play one on TV, is that in a campus environment, the Brandenburg rules apply. If not, imagine a professor at East Overshoe University using this case for a classroom discussion of where to draw ethical lines on how to deal with ideas or people with whom we strongly disapprove, and who plays devils advocate for Prof. Shaviro's purported point of view?
"More extreme speech can have very different results, particularly when the public employee is in a job that depends on public trust. So there’s a long line of cases where police officers’ participation in racist groups is accepted as a basis to fire them, because it disrupts the polite fiction that law enforcement officers are not racist and their testimony against people of color can be credited. Had Dodge worn a “Jews Will Not Replace Us” hat, the result would have been different."
> posts from his private social media account that it is morally admirable to kill African-Americans who "don't know their place", there may not necessarily be workplace disruption
Not only is it not workplace disruption, but in many police departments it would be deemed workplace harmony. Consider Minneapolis, Memphis, Srt Louis, and others too numerous to enumerate here.
Again, I agree with your analysis. No matter how provocative and moronic Professor Shaviro’s comments are- and I oppose bigotry and intolerance as much as the next 60s liberal- turning this over to law enforcement is nonsensical and demeans those instances when speech is truly incited and needs to be moderated. My response would have been more like “ we’re very disappointed in Professor Shapiro’ s comments that it would be better to kill those who espouse bigotry rather than shout them down. While we defend his right to free speech and are certain that no rational person would see his comments as inciting or fomenting violence, his rhetoric around murder is inappropriate and only seeks to exacerbate a situation, rather than elicit an honest analysis of how to handle situations when someone’s bigotry, intolerance or just plain disagreement with you on an issue occurs. We should moving towards open and constructive debate, not ratcheting up emotions that espouse violence as a ways of handling our differences.” Or words to that effect, and maybe add “after all, we’re an institution of higher learning, not Fox News.”
I understand your point completely. Yet, Tte past 6 years have revealed to me the degree of malevolence that we have in America along with all the celestial revelations provided to Supreme Court Justices who, oddly, look to the 18th century in the Dobbs case, but ignore the history of gun restrictions that go back to the settlement of the west.
What I mean is. Is it possible that conditions in society have changed such that we need to re-examine how close or imminent means in incitement?
Ken, much respect for your consistency on these issues. He’s a moron, but morons still get to say moronic things without fear of government retaliation.
Thank you for shedding light on a situation that is already generating a lot of heat.
Since you did not ask, here is the statement that I would have put out if I were Wayne State University President M. Roy Wilson:
_________________________________________________________________________________________
Professor Shaviro is a stupid person who said a stupid thing. His endorsement of murder rather than shouting down disfavored speakers is morally repugnant. Shouting down disfavored speakers is not permitted in our community. Killing a human being for making disfavored statements is murder.
We do not believe that any student should have to take a course from Professor Shaviro. Accordingly, I have arranged for alternative professors to teach each of his courses. Consistent with the First Amendment, we cannot take adverse job action against Professor Shaviro, but we can act to protect our students from being required to submit to his judgment on any issue, including grades.
A student may choose to continue to attend a course as taught by Professor Shaviro.
_______________________________________________________________________________________
This is a very strong reaction, but not out of bounds.
Feels like we need to work "dipshit of little importance" into there somehow; it's my favorite four words from this post.
for the median professor this would be more of a reward than a punishment
So?
It's his influence over students that matters here, not his mood.
I think the desire here, speaking solely from a presidential management perspective, is to not give financial incentives to your employees to be unserious dipshits. That has all kinds of perverse incentives, from diminishing the school's reputation to forcing it to employ an inefficiently large number of faculty because of all of the rubber-roomers.
Fair enough.
I studied physics in college, and there were a couple of professors who were essentially blacklisted from teaching the core undergraduate classes because they were known to be tyrannical assholes who couldn't be trusted to respect their (undergraduate) students. They remained professors, though, since they were talented researchers, capable of running a lab and even of mentoring graduate students in that capacity. I wouldn't be too surprised if they even taught the occasional graduate level class, just because the social dynamic of those classes is different.
That's the sort of logic that shapes my attitude when we discuss quarantining a professor from students, but I'm genuinely not sure how you would apply it to a literature professor without just turning him into a media critic. The job of a physics professor, or really any professor in a research-driven department, is much broader than just teaching undergrads, and in my experience the importance of that component is often driven by the individual professor's enthusiasm as much as anything else. But I really don't know what the expectations are for a professor in an art department. Maybe there's less to it than I would have assumed.
one might be concerned about the incentives generated by demonstrating to professors that, if they say enough odious and foolish things in public, they will be freed from their teaching responsibilities
that said, when i wrote that, i meant it simply as an observation rather than an argument
In my conception, so long as at least one student continues to want to take the course, Professor Shaviro would still be required to teach.
That response while eminently reasonable, assumes that there are others in his department who will step forward and take his classes. You have more faith in the collective wisdom of a contemporary university Literature Department than I have. Mary McCarthy’s GROVES OF ACADEME should be required reading in these troubled times.
GLS
they can just hire a grad student or something, can't they?
Genuine question: is taking all his classes away not an adverse employment action? I don't know the legal definition of the term but it seems like punishment for his speech from a lay perspective.
I don’t think it’s taking his courses away. It’s allowing students to take alternatives.
I completely disagree, and I think the President should say, "Professor Shaviro is entitled to his own opinions, which of course are not necessarily those of the University in this case or any other. Read what he says, and you can see that he has not made a serious threat to kill anyone."
I say this as someone in the category Prof. Shaviro says to kill, and as someone who has been called reprehensible, sexist, racist, homophobic, intolerant of women, disrespectful to women, intolerant of racial diversity, unchristian, vile, stupid, bigoted, and loathsome by his Provost and Dean for far milder statements. See http://www.rasmusen.org/special/2019kerfuffle/.
Funny, if my title and name were "President Wilson" I would be extra wary of being the guy arguing that someone's heated rhetoric was unprotected speech.
Nominative determinism at work once again I suppose.
This is a high-quality post. I like to imagine that President Wilson has a Provost named Mitchell Palmer (which he doesn't).
Actually, Roy Wilson used to have a Provost who was married to me, but she retired, and I like to think she might have suggested this wasn’t a good idea. FWIW I’m retired from that English department, and know Shaviro slightly. Seemed somewhat out of character, but I guess folks have the receipts. It will be interesting to see how this plays out--WSU is unionized (my wife just negotiated the last contract), and has a somewhat activist grievance process.
Of all the possible silly academic hypotheticals, is any sillier than the concept of a post-COVID crowded theater?
Since we're thinking of academic institutions, I go back to a clever person who deserves credit if I could only remember who it was. The question was, is FIRE allowed to shout in a crowded theater?
Do bears have the right to fully automatic weaponry? I submit that they do by the plain language of the Constitution.
Can a bear shoot in the woods?
This is why I send my children to Garth State University. Party on.
Thanks for this analysis. This is a more interesting case than I had understood from news reports.
Reading Shaviro's actual post, I think his error is less egregious than news reports had suggested. It's clear that the actual message he inteded to send lies in the two central paragraphs of his post, which echo Ken White's well-articulated position. Given the nature of Shaviro's academic profile, I suspect he was writing with a sense of urgency to people he was aligned with, but felt very worried that the content of his message would make it appear that he was unacceptably straying from their common ground. So he framed it with a "more radical than thou" preface, headed with careful esculpatory phrasing, before putting on his Popehat and aligning, consciously or not, with this blog.
That seems a tactically clever design to me, in theory. The problem that Shaviro seems to have overlooked is that he was posting in the real world (or, perhaps, the real virtual world), where the impact of his post was going to fall on people outside his small, academic, targeted audience. In that context his clever tactic created exactly the same effect as the Stanford law students' stupid tactic that he was attacking for its tactical stupidity. He became a mock-troll feeding real trolls a gourmet meal (great fodder for post-modernist deconstruction, though).
Still, I'd never heard of Sholem Schwarzbard and I'm always eager to learn. Now that I have Wikipedia-deep knowledge of the case I can see how totally irrelevant it is, but Shaviro's a teacher and I have to admit that he taught me something new.
Right.
Shaviro's statement, taken as a whole and read with care, is that protests that shut down speech are stupid, counterproductive and serve no other purpose than to make the make the protesters feel good about themselves and to signal their moral rightness to their own cohort at the expense of the actual cause.
If you really feel, Shaviro argues, that these speakers are so evil that they can't be allowed to present their ideas, such as they are, to the public, then you should just go all the way and take them out. If you recoil at that prospect, either because of moral qualms or concern about risk to yourself, then sit down and let them speak.
Yes, that’s how I read it...He should have done a Jonathan Swift and indicted his meaning with satire. Not that it would have helped for the pearl clutchers but someone like Popehat would not have read him as making an actual statement in favor of killing people but instead a hypothetical statement like ‘if it is so terrible they speak and they are so dangerous for their words...then the implication is they should be dead.’ But if they are not so dangerous, maybe we have to let them speak.
More or less, Chuchundra. I'd modify your second paragraph and replace "then you should just go all the way and take them out" with "then it would be best if there were the option for you just to take them out--but there isn't, and please note the big sign saying so that's covering my ass." (The sign was naturally trampled in the ensuing stampede, as anyone without a PhD would have known.)
Given the ability of college professors to misconstrue context, ignore disclaimers, and carry a grudge for decades, anyone with a PhD should have known also.
These are the waters he swims in.
Is your point--anyone should be able to misconstrue and it's all on him, no matter the context of his statements? This will not be a great speech climate if so. If not, what do you mean?
My point is that academia is a school of piranhas. Not ought to be, is.
The post I was replying to implied that PhDs were somehow insulated from bad faith arguments. I said that this wasn’t the case.
Yes, this is unfortunately true. Administrators won't protect the free speech of faculty, faculty often act against their own interests as well. People are letting propagandists get a leg up because they simply don't have the common sense or guts to understand the only solution is to stand together against what is a very coordinated and underhanded assault on universities. Everyone is out for themselves and the ship can only go down this way.
On a slightly more serious note, I think Shapiro wins but I think that is through the malleable Pickering Test. Shapiro’s comments are on an issue of public concern. I think the University can plausibly argue that a professor suggesting that people should kill invited speakers on a college campus is something that interferes with the efficiency and disruption free work place, with lots of gesturing towards school shootings or something.
Excellent point. I could see Wayne State and President Wilson trying to retcon the statement to mean that, but I think it's pretty clear that's not what they meant -- the reference to referring it to criminal authorities and the reference to it being far outside protection makes it pretty clear that it's claiming a categorical exception.
The president’s statement sucks. But clients are gonna client sometimes.
This “Professor” should be fired.
Out of a cannon.
Into the sun.
I think this could be a whole new blogging oeuvre for Professor Shaviro, stealth assassin from the clouds, and I eagerly await hearing how his unquenchable bloodlust informs his opinions on various topical issues.
“So here is what I think about provoking people to say stupid bullshit about free speech. Although I do not advocate union busting or committing the largest mass murder in Michigan history, I think it is far more admirable to shout fire in a crowded theater than it is to post some doofy nonsense on Facebook.”
I woke up to this story and just rolled my eyes. Wasn't really worth an extra thought but as an academic expatriate (U of Hawaii, 1987-2001; Los Alamos National Lab afterwards) thanks for covering it, anyway.
Sometimes academics say the silliest things. This story reminded me of the year of the U of Hawaii faculty strike, when a Professor of English lamented how much harder her job was, sitting in her office and writing papers, compared to the labors of the garbage collectors or bus drivers. Most of us rolled our eyes. My wife, teaching five sections of community college Bonehead English, had hypothetical thoughts short of Brandenburg about what should be done to English professors divorced from reality.
Ken, your last paragraph sums it up. In an age when it has become fashionable for many on campuses to exercise the heckler's veto over ideas they don't like, the University president, perhaps, should do two things. One, remind the campus that interfering with other people's speech, whether by homicide or screaming like idiots to shout down a speaker, is not compatible with the purpose of a university. If the professor actually proceeds to encourage campus unrest rather than only speaking hypothetically, it might be actionable. Two, that what Professor Dingbat said on his own time and without a faculty hat on was stupid but protected speech and that yes, at times, even Yale-educated tenured professors can sound like Arthur Figgis, the village idiot on the Monty Python show. Recall Arthur could sound quite erudite except when choosing to act out for the public. But Prof. Shaviro's words do not represent the thinking of the university.
No
Care to elaborate?
If you've ever edited or graded undergraduate essays, you might change your opinion of the professor and English professors in general.
Only second hand knowledge. My wife taught English 22 and English 100 at the U of Hawaii.
Speaking as a formerly tenured professor i found the comments disgusting and mostly indefensible
Tenure is not s verbal open season in my opinion. However his comments are borderline defensible. Were I a Dean I would put his name in a file where i would not like my name to be. Were I Pres looking at a hostile legislative body i would do what his pres did and hope it blows over.
One other thing i find the argument that no one will pay attention to his remarks upsetting. In my. 60 years of teaching my underlying assumption was that people did pay attention to what I said. That is why I never said fundamentally silly and foolish things in the classroom.
GLS
Fair enough. Agree that the comments were awful. I don't think, tenured or not, public university faculty should set a bad civic example given we are on the public dime. But given it is likely protected speech and not, presumably, uttered using university resources or in the classroom, it seems the President or a Dean doing as you say is about as far as it can go.
I do think people pay attention when this stuff gets in the news and it is not good for the university. Even if not said in the classroom.
This was the most entertaining thing I've read in a while. Keep up the good work.
Seriously! It was the first thing in a long time that I read on the internet and forwarded to my husband for his entertainment.
There's a much simpler rule to use: if you find out a person has said "there's no such thing as cancel culture, it's just called being held accountable", they lose any right to object to being "held accountable" for their speech.
You know what would happen to someone on the other side who said anything remotely like this.
Ken, I love you. "Comp-lit majors carrying baseball bats"🤣🤣🤣
Since I am in the presence of an expert, I will present a hypothetical involving a government actor and an employee, with similar but not identical facts.
If a police officer posts from his private social media account that it is morally admirable to kill African-Americans who "don't know their place", there may not necessarily be workplace disruption, but he or she would have provided evidence of unfitness for the job.
What does the law say about the department, a government actor, firing the hypothetical officer?
Of the differences between this hypothetical and the real case, which differences are legally important?
Everyone did my work for me in the replies already.
In particular, is tenure relevant or irrelevant? The standard for firing a police officer is whatever is in the collective bargaining agreement. Firing a tenured professor requires, what, "gross misconduct"? And might there be a requirement of viewpoint neutrality in the interpretation of "gross misconduct"?
Tenure is contractually relevant -- it adds a layer of contractual protection on top of the First Amendment protection.
Tenure is relevant in that there might be legal agreements between faculty and the college. If there is a collective bargaining agreement, as there was in Hawaii (I was on the Univ of Hawaii Professional Assembly Board of Directors in the 1990's) disciplinary rules were also in the collective bargaining agreement.
At least some courts have ruled that cops have to be a little careful before posting opinions or ideas that may reduce confidence in, or create fear of, the cops.
https://sianalaw.com/no-first-amendment-protection-for-off-duty-police-officers-facebook-posts/
There was a case a while ago in Albuquerque : "The officer who listed his occupation as “human waste disposal” on Facebook within days of fatally shooting a suspect is named as a defendant, along with the city of Albuquerque, in a federal lawsuit alleging civil rights violations and wrongful death."
https://www.abqjournal.com/74077/human-waste-disposal-officer-city-being-sued.html
Given cops carry force of law and a gun, I suspect there is far more justification for controlling excesses of their speech compared to faculty. Not sure even a tenured full professor holds those kinds of levers of power. In fact, Ken, didn't Florida faculty sue against the state's new "don't say gay" law on the basis that they speak as individual professors even in their roles as faculty rather than stating positions as representing those of the state or the campus? My hunch, even though I am not a lawyer and don't play one on TV, is that in a campus environment, the Brandenburg rules apply. If not, imagine a professor at East Overshoe University using this case for a classroom discussion of where to draw ethical lines on how to deal with ideas or people with whom we strongly disapprove, and who plays devils advocate for Prof. Shaviro's purported point of view?
"More extreme speech can have very different results, particularly when the public employee is in a job that depends on public trust. So there’s a long line of cases where police officers’ participation in racist groups is accepted as a basis to fire them, because it disrupts the polite fiction that law enforcement officers are not racist and their testimony against people of color can be credited. Had Dodge worn a “Jews Will Not Replace Us” hat, the result would have been different."
https://popehat.substack.com/p/can-i-wear-a-maga-hat-to-my-government
> posts from his private social media account that it is morally admirable to kill African-Americans who "don't know their place", there may not necessarily be workplace disruption
Not only is it not workplace disruption, but in many police departments it would be deemed workplace harmony. Consider Minneapolis, Memphis, Srt Louis, and others too numerous to enumerate here.
Again, I agree with your analysis. No matter how provocative and moronic Professor Shaviro’s comments are- and I oppose bigotry and intolerance as much as the next 60s liberal- turning this over to law enforcement is nonsensical and demeans those instances when speech is truly incited and needs to be moderated. My response would have been more like “ we’re very disappointed in Professor Shapiro’ s comments that it would be better to kill those who espouse bigotry rather than shout them down. While we defend his right to free speech and are certain that no rational person would see his comments as inciting or fomenting violence, his rhetoric around murder is inappropriate and only seeks to exacerbate a situation, rather than elicit an honest analysis of how to handle situations when someone’s bigotry, intolerance or just plain disagreement with you on an issue occurs. We should moving towards open and constructive debate, not ratcheting up emotions that espouse violence as a ways of handling our differences.” Or words to that effect, and maybe add “after all, we’re an institution of higher learning, not Fox News.”
I understand your point completely. Yet, Tte past 6 years have revealed to me the degree of malevolence that we have in America along with all the celestial revelations provided to Supreme Court Justices who, oddly, look to the 18th century in the Dobbs case, but ignore the history of gun restrictions that go back to the settlement of the west.
What I mean is. Is it possible that conditions in society have changed such that we need to re-examine how close or imminent means in incitement?
**what “close” or “imminent” means regarding incitement.**
Ken, much respect for your consistency on these issues. He’s a moron, but morons still get to say moronic things without fear of government retaliation.