A left-wing professor in Kansas has been removed from his job after saying, “There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president. We could line all those guys up and shoot them. They clearly don’t understand the way the world works.”
The university removed him from his job for supporting violence, but what he said wasn’t a “true threat.” So he was probably disciplined for the wrong reason: he wrongly used his class as a soapbox for pushing Kamala Harris’s candidacy for presidency — which was not germane to what he was teaching, and was so obviously irrelevant to the subject matter of the health sports class he was teaching that he had no business doing it in class. But it wasn’t really a threat.
Making light of violence isn’t the same thing as a threat. For example, an appeals court ruled that a professor had a First Amendment right to express a yearning for the death of a college president in Bauer v. Sampson (2001). The professor had written about “a two-ton slate of polished granite which I hope to someday drop in Raghu Mathur’s head.” (Mathur was the college president).
But professors aren’t supposed to use class time to push things completely irrelevant to the course they are teaching, such as getting Kamala Harris elected when their class’s subject matter doesn’t even touch on political issues.
At Reason magazine, a professor explains:
A health sports instructor at the University of Kansas is out of a job after a video clip of his in-class behavior went viral. The university’s statements do not inspire confidence, even though the professor might well have been out of bounds….reporting suggests that the statement was made in the midst of a health sports class at some point this semester. The university announced yesterday that the instructor was under investigation, saying “His intent was to emphasize his advocacy for women’s rights and equality, and he recognizes he did a very poor job of doing so.” Today, the university announced that the professor had “left the university.”
“The free expression of ideas is essential to the functioning of our university, and we fully support the academic freedom of our teachers as they engage in classroom instruction. Academic freedom, however, is not a license for suggestions of violence like we saw in the video,” [Provost Barbara] Bichelmeyer said. “While we embrace our university’s role as a place for all kinds of dialogue, violent rhetoric is never acceptable.”
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) immediately issued a statement defending the professor. “The viral video shows an instructor making an off-handed joke—not communicating a serious intent to commit unlawful violence,” [Graham] Piro said in a statement. “That’s protected speech, and people advocating that the instructor be punished for his expression are advocating for the erosion of the First Amendment.” Today, FIRE pointed out that the classroom statement could not credibly be viewed as a “true threat.” As a consequence, FIRE asserts it is protected by the First Amendment and the instructor should be immune from adverse employment consequences for his actions….I think the situation is more complicated that FIRE has so far made out, but that Kansas is focusing on the wrong issue. The core problem is not one of “violent rhetoric” and whether or not this speech is an example of a true threat. The core problem is one of unprofessional classroom behavior….Faculty speech in the classroom that is neither germane nor competent, however, is unprotected, and professors can be properly disciplined for such speech. For example, a chemistry professor who spends part of her class time stumping for Kamala Harris or an astronomy professor who instructs her students that the moon is made of green cheese is operating outside the bounds of academic freedom or First Amendment protections and can properly be disciplined….The question at hand is whether an instructor in a health sports class should be trying to “emphasize his advocacy for women’s rights and equality” and encourage his students to vote for Kamala Harris. The answer to that question is probably “no,”…A state university has both the authority and the responsibility to make sure that professors in its classroom engage in professionally appropriate speech and do not abuse their captive audiences by engaging in professional misconduct….A professor has no right to commandeer his health sports class in order to engage in political advocacy.
