Warrior Blogger on Fox and Friends

Do Journalists Name People Guilty of Misconduct?

Marquette has loudly claimed that we should not have published the name of Cheryl Abbate, whom we reported told an undergraduate who wanted to oppose gay marriage in her class:

• “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions”
•  “do you know if anyone in your class is homosexual?” . . . “don’t you think it would be offensive to them”
• “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments.” 
• “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

Marquette also upped the ante, claiming that we “linked to Abbate’s contact information.” That was flatly untrue.

But the claim that we should not have named Abbate is a bit odd, since journalists normally name the person on whose misconduct they are reporting.

Example: this last June 19, a Congressional intern shouted an obscenity at President Trump while he was walking through the Capitol Rotunda.

Interns are typically college students (as opposed to Abbate, who was 27 years old), and they don’t have any authority over anybody (unlike Abbate, who was Instructor of Record in her class).

But the profane intern has been identified in every story we can immediately find on the incident.

A Google News search for “Caitlin Marriott” tells the story.

Of course, somebody reading this post weeks or months in the future might not get the same Google result, so here is the Google search, as it exists right now, archived.

Marquette is attacking us for doing what journalists normally do.

The Dirty Little Secret

The dirty little secret here is that most of the people attacking us for naming Abbate simply don’t think she did anything wrong. They fully believe that opposition to gay marriage is “hate speech” and should be suppressed. They, quite simply, don’t think we should have exposed Abbate’s misconduct, because they don’t think it was misconduct.

That’s the reality of academia today.

Another Marquette Falsehood Before Wisconsin Supreme Court

We have already blogged about one falsehood that Marquette lawyer Ralph Weber told to the Wisconsin Supreme Court at our hearing last Thursday: the claim that Cheryl Abbate left Marquette because of the blow-back from our blog post detailing how she insulted and demeaned a student who wanted to express opposition to gay marriage in a class discussion.

In reality, she had wanted to leave Marquette and enter the philosophy graduate program at the University of Colorado the year before. Further, she was unhappy with Marquette’s graduate program.

Judge Michael Gableman thoroughly humiliated Weber on this point.

Was Abbate Disciplined?

Less noticed was a part of the hearing when Gableman asked whether Abbate had violated Marquette’s supposed “Guiding Values,” which Marquette claimed we had transgressed.



Weber admitted that “she could have handled that exchange better, a more experienced teacher would have deescalated the situation . . .” and further that “She was counseled and explained that the way she handled that conversation with the undergraduate . . . [Gableman interrupts, and then] yes, she was counseled.”

This is flatly untrue. As Rick Esenberg has explained (using information gained during “discovery” in our lawsuit):

The student complained to Dr. Susanne Foster in the College of Arts & Sciences, and was sent to the Philosophy Department where he spoke with then-chair Dr. Nancy Snow and Dr. Sebastian Luft. Neither Dr. Snow nor Dr. Luft took any action on behalf of the student. In fact, Dr. Snow referred to him as an “insolent little twerp” in a communication with the College of Arts & Sciences. What Dr. Snow did do was communicate immediately with Ms. Abbate to tell her, in essence, that they had her back. Dr. Snow reported to Ms. Abbate that she told the student that he “needed to change his attitude” and that she would be “monitoring” the situation. Dr. Snow told Ms. Abbate to let her know if the student did anything that Ms. Abbate found objectionable. Ms. Abbate thanked Dr. Snow and said that hopefully the student learned that “oppressive discourse is not acceptable.”

Abbate was, in other words, not some green, inexperienced instructor who needed some tips on how to deescalate a confrontation. She was a politically correct leftist whose suppression of politically incorrect ideas reflected the views of her faculty mentors, and of the leadership of the Marquette Philosophy Department.

See the Entire Hearing

You can see the entire hearing at the website of Wisconsin Eye.

Rick Esenberg Discusses McAdams v. Marquette Supreme Court Hearing

On Vicki McKenna, April 19, the head of our legal team, Rick Esenberg, discusses the just concluded oral arguments before the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Supreme Court Hearing: Marquette’s Lawyer Eviscerated

The Supreme Court hearing yesterday on our case, McAdams v. Marquette, was a hoot to watch. While six judges will vote on our case, only five sat on the panel (Abrahamson was not present).

Three of the judges were openly incredulous about Marquette’s claims, voiced by their lawyer, Ralph Weber.

This, unfortunately, does not guarantee the court will come down on our side. But it was fun to watch.

We’ll blog later on some of the details of the arguments, but a highlight of the proceedings was Justice Gableman catching Weber in a flat out misrepresentation.

But some background. Weber was arguing that the court should accept the finding of the Faculty Hearing Committee that we were guilty of misconduct in blogging about Cheryl Abbate, philosophy instructor who told a student he was not allowed to voice opposition to gay marriage since such an opinion about the “homophobic” and “offensive” to any gays in the class.

Gableman questioned the fairness of the Faculty Hearing Committee by bringing up information that had been withheld from the committee by Marquette. One key piece of information was the reason Cheryl Abbate left Marquette.


Abbate, in fact, testified to the Faculty Hearing Committee and cried when she was describing her horrible ordeal of receiving a lot of e-mail messages, some of which were vulgar and abusive (but none were threatening).

All the while she was bragging via private e-mail about how happy she was to be able to leave Marquette for a much superior Ph.D. program at Colorado.

P.S.

Kudos to Badger Pundit for excellent coverage of this case, including posting the video above.

Fake News: Associated Press Publishes Falsehoods About Our Case

It just appeared on the Washington Times website (and many other places, doubtless): a story about our suit against Marquette University from the Associated Press.

As has happened before, the reporter (Ivan Moreno) appears to have accepted at face value claims made by Marquette, and pretty much blown off statements from our lawyer (Rick Esenberg) whom Moreno talked to, but apparently paid little attention to.

Doxing Claim

Moreno repeats the claim by Marquette that we “doxed” graduate instructor Cheryl Abbate. Readers of this blog will remember that Abbate told an undergraduate that expressing opposition to gay marriage would not be allowed, since it would be “homophobic” and might “offend” any gay students in the class. We put up a blog post about this. Moreno explains that “Doxing is the practice of publicizing someone’s personal identifying information online to subject them to harassment.”

Moreno claimed:

The post included the student-teacher’s name, a link to her personal website and her email address, and it led to a flood of hateful messages and threats against her.

Moreno quotes Esenberg stating that “all McAdams did was link to publicly available information.”

Had Moreno bothered to get the facts straight, he would have learned that we linked to no contact information at all. Rather, we linked to Abbate’s toxic feminist essay “Yes All Men… Contribute to the Prevalence of Rape,” published on her blog. If somebody dug around her blog, they could have found her e-mail address.

We did absolutely nothing to encourage people to send her any e-mails at all (much less abusive ones) unless merely exposing misconduct amounts to such.

The Washington Post, which published the same “doxing” claim in a column by Kathleen Parker, has now retracted it. From the Post:

Correction: An earlier version of this op-ed incorrectly reported that Marquette University professor John McAdams posted the contact information for a graduate student-teacher online. He posted a link to her personal blog.

Journalistic Norms

Any casual reader of the media will know that when journalists expose misconduct, they name the miscreant. This is certainly the case if a teacher says something racist to a class, or if a coach sexually molests athletes.

We can’t imagine Marquette would have gotten upset if we had exposed a white instructor who said something racist to a black student, or a male instructor who sexually harassed a female student.

Further, Marquette did nothing about the abuse of the undergraduate Abbate insulted and bullied. Indeed, in internal communications, they derided him.

It seems that abuses from politically correct leftists are not merely to be ignored by Marquette, but exposing them should be punished.

Abbate Received No Threats

Moreno repeats Marquette’s claim that Abbate received threats.

The post included the student-teacher’s name, a link to her personal website and her email address, and it led to a flood of hateful messages and threats against her. The threats were bad enough that the university posted a security officer outside of her classroom and she noticeably lost weight.

In fact, Abbate received no threats, as she admitted on her personal blog.

Why Abbate Left Marquette

Moreno, accepting Marquette’s claims, implies that Abbate had to leave Marquette because of our blog post.

The graduate student McAdams named in his blog eventually moved to another university, where she had to repeat three semesters and revise her PhD thesis.

He ignores the fact that Abbate left a Marquette program ranked barely in the top 100 nationally for one (at Colorado) ranked in the top 40.

Further, Marquette Associate Arts and Science Dean (a Philosophy faculty member intimately familiar with the situation) explained other relevant factors. In an e-mail to Dean Rick Holz, he explained:

Friday, December 5, 2014 5:11 PM

Rick,

It’s complicated, but the short version is Cheryl is planning to leave Marquette and go to a different Ph.D. Program, which has offered her significant financial aid and is reputationally superior to MU. She’s working on a letter to Nancy [Snow] about this, which she is also going to send to Jeanne.

We can talk more on Monday. But several programs reached out to her and offered her aid and [she] finds MU to be very uncomfortable and toxic. She walks around afraid for her safety and feels unsupported by the senior faculty of the department.

James

South gave more information in another e-mail to Holz:

Hi Rick,

If you have a few minutes, could we talk about this tomorrow? Cheryl is not just leaving because of McAdams, but because she did not feel comfortable in the department — for several reasons, not least because of how [Department Chair] Nancy [Snow] treated her, her research area, and her mentor, Susanne [Foster].

Moreno throws in a few other claims from Marquette, such as “McAdams had been advised previously, in 2011, not to mention a student’s name on his blog.” In fact, Provost John Pauly demanded we not blog about undergraduate students. We only blog about highly visible political activism among undergraduates, so Pauly’s demand was absurd, and we ignored it. We were never disciplined in any way by Pauly.

Conclusion

What we have here, from Moreno, is a fairly typical example of a journalist who accepts uncritically what Marquette says, and largely ignores facts inconsistent with Marquette’s version.

Any journalist who is familiar with contemporary higher education would know to be skeptical of what university bureaucrats say. Particularly when those bureaucrats are pandering to the forces of political correctness on their campus.

Marquette’s Selective, Dishonest List of “Resources” On Our Case

When Marquette, on its own website, gives its side of our suit against the university, we expect it to be biased. But sometimes the bias is so blatant as to defy belief.

The case, remember, involves a graduate instructor (Cheryl Abbate) who told a student who wanted to oppose gay marriage in a class discussion that:

• “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions”
• “do you know if anyone in your class is homosexual?” . . . “don’t you think it would be offensive to them”
• “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments.”
• “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

This was a clear case of academic intolerance, quite typical of colleges today. It was also ironic, since the student simply wanted to defend the Catholic Church’s position on the issue. We blogged about it, a huge brouhaha ensued, and Marquette proceeded to attempt to fire us.

Bizarre Moralizing

So Marquette has a website of “resources” on the case. Some of Marquette’s rhetoric is almost nausea inducing. For example:

The website emphasizes Marquette’s Guiding Values and how they have influenced the university’s position and actions in response to this case.

This from a university which claims to be Catholic, but has fully embraced the gay agenda, and the transgender agenda. This from a university that not only invited Angela Davis (who proudly claims to be a communist) to campus, but paid her a fee that (according to speaker agencies’ online statements) must be well into five figures.

Even worse, they lauded her on a Marquette web page, on Twitter, and in the introduction to her talk.

Things like this are a better guide to Marquette’s real “guiding values” than any unctuous rhetoric.

Suppressing Information

But one particularly egregious example of bias comes at the bottom of the page, where they note:

Recent amicus briefs for the McAdams vs. Marquette have been filed by:

• Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC)
• National Association of Manufacturers (NAM)
• Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU)
• Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (WAICU)
• Marquette University Academic Senate

One might think that nobody supports our case, given that list. But on the website of WILL, the public interest law firm that represents us, is a link to every document submitted to the Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Who has supported us, that Marquette will not tell you about?

• Great Lakes Justice Center
• Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
• Law and University Professors and Academics
• State of Wisconsin
• National Association of Scholars
• Thomas More Society

Interestingly, all the briefs supporting Marquette are from parties with a vested interest in employers being able to fire employers who cause “trouble” for their organizations. It is puzzling, however, why business organizations see any threat in this case, since our argument is not that any employee anywhere has free speech rights on the job, but rather than Marquette has promised us those rights in our contract. The vast majority of businesses don’t do that.

It may be relevant here that three Directors of Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce — Jon Hammes, Todd Adams and Peggy Troy — are also trustees of Marquette University. Anyone with even a slight knowledge of American academia will know that trustees, many of them being business people, have been completely ineffective in tempering intolerant political correctness on campuses. Thus the suppression of conservative speakers (sometimes using violence and disruption), curricula that are essentially indoctrination, the stripping of due process from males accused of sexual assault and so on, never meet any effective opposition from trustees.

Perhaps this is because business types, in their business jobs, are themselves used to pandering to the forces of political correctness. Thus they have to embrace (at least rhetorically) gender and racial “diversity,” the gay and transgender agendas, and “sustainability.” This is the price of being left alone to make money. They are not used to resisting.

The American Association of University Professors

Also not listed on the Marquette website is the brief of the American Association of University Professors. That organization supported the Marquette Faculty Hearing Committee’s claim that we should be suspended for one or two semesters. But the AAUP harshly criticized Marquette’s earlier suspension of this blogger, and also rejected Michael Lovell’s demand that we issue a grovelling apology in order to be reinstated. Those two things kept it off Marquette’s list.

The AAUP, it seems, views “academic freedom” as a collective right that faculty have, but not a right that individual professors have. If faculty as a group will not support the free expression of a particular academic, then neither will the AAUP. This means that faculty out of tune with the reigning orthodoxy in academia are at risk.

The organization did insist that since the Faculty Hearing Committee did not say we should have to issue any apology, Lovell had no right to demand one.

Conclusion

It’s terribly revealing that Marquette would do this, but not unexpected. Marquette has been unable to tell the truth about why Cheryl Abbate left Marquette, whether Abbate received threats, or whether we linked to her contact information.

The rhetoric about “Guiding Values” contrasts sharply with the reality of an institution run by visionless bureaucrats who pander relentlessly to the noisy forces of political correctness on campus, trash vast swaths of Catholic teaching, and try to suppress dissenting voices.

The Jesuits who founded the place would be appalled. Anybody who thinks a Catholic university is a good idea and has been paying any attention is appalled.

Marquette Misleads: Why Cheryl Abbate Left the University

Cheryl Abbate, readers of this blog will remember, was the Marquette graduate instructor who was approached after class one day by a student who noted she had briefly mentioned gay marriage, and seemed to endorse it. The student made it clear he would have liked an opportunity to oppose gay marriage. She told him:

• “some opinions are not appropriate, such as racist opinions, sexist opinions”
•  “do you know if anyone in your class is homosexual?” . . . “don’t you think it would be offensive to them”
• “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments.” 
• “In this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, will not be tolerated.”

We blogged about the issue, and an uproar ensued. Abbate got some rather nasty e-mail messages (and noticed some rather unkind comments about herself surfing Internet discussion boards). But she got no actual threats.

Claiming to feel “unsafe,” she left Marquette for the University of Colorado, and Marquette, blaming us for the e-mails, began the process of revoking our tenure and firing us.

Marquette on Abbate’s Departure

Marquette claims it is all our fault that she left a cushy, comfortable position in Marquette’s Philosophy Department for the wilds of Colorado. For example, a Marquette “FAQ” claims that:

The graduate student left the university . . .  after she  was subject to a stream of threats and hateful messages.

A letter to us from Dean Rick Holz, dated January 31, 2015 outlines some of the unkind e-mails Abbate got, and claims:

Accordingly, and understandably, the student feared for her personal safety, and we posted a Public Safety Officer outside her classroom. In addition, as a result of your conduct and its consequences, Ms. Cheryl Abbate now has withdrawn from our graduate program and moved to another University to continue her academic career.

The Reality

The first thing that might raise some suspicion about Marquette’s claim is the simple fact that Colorado’s Philosophy Ph.D. programs ranks much higher than Marquette’s. One site that lists several different ranking metrics puts Colorado consistently in the top 40 programs in the country, and Marquette barely in the top 100.

Other sites ranking the top programs list Colorado, but fail to list Marquette at all, apparently because it is not in the top 60, and in another case because it is not in the top 50.

The Inside Story

More direct evidence comes from documents produced during the “discovery” process in our suit against Marquette.  James South, Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, and former Chair of the Philosophy Department explained in an e-mail to Dean Holz:

Friday, December 5, 2014 5:11 PM

Rick,

It’s complicated, but the short version is Cheryl is planning to leave Marquette and go to a different Ph.D. Program, which has offered her significant financial aid and is reputationally superior to MU. She’s working on a letter to Nancy [Snow] about this, which she is also going to send to Jeanne.

We can talk more on Monday. But several programs reached out to her and offered her aid and [she] finds MU to be very uncomfortable and toxic. She walks around afraid for her safety and feels unsupported by the senior faculty of the department.

James

Another e-mail on December 9, also from South to Holz, responds to Philosophy Chair Nancy Show’s version of events:

Hi Rick,

If you have a few minutes, could we talk about this tomorrow? Cheryl is not just leaving because of McAdams, but because she did not feel comfortable in the department — for several reasons, not least because of how Nancy [Snow] treated her, her research area, and her mentor, Susanne [Foster].

Anyway, I resent Nancy saying I felt threatened by McAdams and none of the senior faculty she mentioned have been harmed by McAdams in the way she suggests. Indeed, I’ve always felt much more annoyed by Nancy than by anything McAdams said and I’ve seen her intimidate and belittle her colleagues more than McAdams has ever done.

Sorry to unload on you, but I don’t want Nancy giving the wrong impression to people, and at some point she needs to be called to her own account.
Best,
James

We can’t speak to Abbate’s feeling of being “unsafe,” except to repeat that she received no actual threats, and to note that politically correct people on college campuses have weaponized fragility by claiming to feel “unsafe” in all sorts of circumstances.

It seems that on this, as on so many issues, Marquette has intentionally issued misleading and (in some cases) flatly false statements. All the while exuding pious rhetoric about its “Catholic mission.”

Journal-Sentinel on McAdams v. Marquette

Appearing today, a very good article in the local paper by columnist Christian Schneider titled “In the case of professor John McAdams, Marquette lost its way.”

Schneider gives some history:

In 1853, the Rev. Anthony Urbanek of the newly minted Catholic Diocese of Milwaukee reported back to Vienna on the state of Catholics in the fledgling city. Urbanek expressed optimism at how quickly Catholicism had taken root in Milwaukee, especially among its German and Irish settlers.

“What an encouraging sight it is to witness crowds of young and old on Sundays, coming from all sides out of the woods, as though they arose out of the ground,” Urbanek wrote, noting many churches weren’t large enough to hold all the people who wanted to attend services.

Not so with schools. If parents wanted to send their children to Catholic schools to “preserve their children from Yankee-ism,” he said, they would have to pay for the schools themselves. Trying to educate Catholic children in public schools, he said, “soon deteriorates into heathenism.”

And so, led by Archbishop John M. Henni and funded with a $16,000 gift from a rich Belgian, the diocese founded a small Jesuit college. The purpose of Marquette was to allow for academic freedom, distinct from the pressures of the secular world.

Schneider then outlines the basics of Marquette’s attempt to fire us, and concludes:

Marquette’s contract with faculty contains the promise that they will not be disciplined for “legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.” It vows not to “restrain…rights guaranteed (faculty) by the United States Constitution.”

McAdams’ treatment vaporizes those promises; in this case, freedom of speech ended when an offended graduate student and sympathetic faculty advisers said it did. And the university capitulated to the very outside forces it was founded to resist.

Biased Reporting

Schneider’s column is in stark contrast to the slanted reporting the Journal-Sentinel usually provides, courtesy of Karen Herzog. In an absurdly biased story back on January 23, she pretty much acted as a mouthpiece for Marquette, suppressing information and giving a biased version of events.

The story, as it now exists online, is slightly sanitized relative to the one originally posted (but Google cache is the friend of people wanting to document embarrassing things posted and then changed).

In the original story, Herzog wrote “McAdams argued that he could say anything he wanted on his blog because of academic freedom protections.” This is nonsense, since we never claimed we could say anything we wanted. We never claimed the right to libel anybody, for example. Herzog changed that to “McAdams argued what he writes on his blog has academic freedom protections,” which is correct.

Much worse is Herzog’s description of what our original post was about. She said: “McAdams said he did it because he felt the graduate student was trying to impose her liberal views on students she taught.” In fact, we blogged about a graduate instructor (Cheryl Abbate) who told at student who wanted to argue against gay marriage (which had come up in class) that he could not do so, since he was not allowed to say “homophobic” things, and any such argument would “offend” any gay students in class.

Herzog apparently believed that an accurate account of what Abbate did would leave readers much less sympathetic to her, and would make it obvious that a serious issue of campus political correctness was involved.

Naming Wrongdoers

Herzog repeats Marquette’s claim that we should not have named Abbate. But Herzog knows perfectly well that the Journal-Sentinel (or any other news outlet) will name people accused of misconduct. This would apply to (say) an athletic coach accused of sexually molesting athletes or a county employee accused of embezzling funds. But Marquette wants to claim that a graduate instructor, who was 27 years old and had been in the military, and was the “instructor of record” in the course, should be exempt.

Herzog uncritically accepts Marquette’s claim that “the graduate student instructor reportedly started receiving threats as a result of the blog post.” Had Herzog simply bothered to read what was at the time the most current post on our blog, she would have known this was flatly untrue.

Herzog, without bothering to check, repeated Marquette President Michael Lovell’s claim that I had “expos[ed] her [Abbate’s] personal contact information as recently as last month.” I was puzzled reading this, until it was brought to my attention that a link to an Abbate page was included in a column by George Will in the Washington Post, which I republished on my blog. It seems Lovell’s real beef is with the Washington Post. Herzog could have checked this out.

Read Only One Side

Finally, at the very bottom of the story as it first appeared, was the notation “While in the national spotlight over the case, Marquette posted a list of frequently asked questions and answers about the case on its website.” This is linked to a Marquette “FAQ.”

An unbiased story would also refer readers to the website of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, to get the other side of the issue. But Herzog has chosen to be, essentially, a sock puppet for Marquette.

Again: Wall Street Journal on Marquette v. Warrior Blogger

The paper chimes in again:

Marquette and the First Amendment
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court will judge a promise of academic freedom.

A political-science professor who says Marquette University violated his employment contract’s guarantee of academic freedom will get his day in court. Though a judge for a lower state court earlier ruled for the university, last week the Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed to John McAdams’s request that it bypass the appeals courts and take up his suit directly.

Professor McAdams is now in his seventh semester outside the classroom because of a November 2014 post on his Marquette Warrior blog. The post criticized a graduate instructor, Cheryl Abbate, for telling a student with more traditional views that she would tolerate no dissent on same-sex marriage in her class on ethics.

After the post Ms. Abbate received several ugly emails. Mr. McAdams was blamed and punished, though he had nothing to do with those messages. The university contends that Mr. McAdams’s offense is having identified a student by name—Ms. Abbate. The characterization is telling, because though Ms. Abbate was indeed a grad student she was also a paid employee of the university teaching a course. If any student was harmed here, it was the Marquette undergraduate who was told there was no room for his views in Ms. Abbate’s classroom.

No one forced Marquette to enter into an employment contract with Mr. McAdams. But it did. And that contract says he cannot be fired for exercising a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. By any reasonable standard that would include the First Amendment—even at a Jesuit university.

The First Amendment is relevant here since, although Marquette is a private university, faculty have a contractual guarantee of the free speech rights embodied in the U.S. Constitution. This most certainly includes the First Amendment.

Since we did absolutely nothing that would not be protected speech under the First Amendment, Marquette is trying to weasel out of this promise by claiming that we violated some “expectations” that bind faculty. But those “expectations” are not written down anywhere, not supported by any precedent, and were in fact merely concocted because Marquette (under pressure from leftist faculty) wanted to get rid of us.

If Marquette can get away with that, faculty at public universities (who are protected under the First Amendment even without any explicit contractual language) are vulnerable to the same tactic.

Lovell’s Falsehood: Abbate Received Threats

Marquette President Michael Lovell, to support the narrative that graduate instructor Cheryl Abbate was terribly victimized has claimed that Abbate received threats. Recall that we reported that she told a student that he was not allowed to argue against gay marriage since that would be “homophobic” and “offensive.”

He claimed this in a letter to the Wall Street Journal:

Instead of expressing his concerns through established internal channels, he chose to blog about our graduate student—publicly shaming her, questioning her values and including a link to her contact information. Through those actions, he exposed her to a flood of violent threats and hateful messages.

He has done this multiple times, for example on an April 2016 FAQ posted on Marquette’s website:

Dr. McAdams disagreed with the way one of our graduate students led a classroom discussion. Instead of expressing those concerns through established internal channels, he chose to blog about our graduate student — publicly shaming her, questioning her values and including a link to her contact information. He sought opportunities to amplify his public shaming of her on cable news and talk radio. Through those actions, he exposed her to a constant stream of threats and hateful messages.

The “hateful messages” part is true. But “threats” is an entirely different matter. Threats are a matter for law enforcement.

Abbate Says No Threats

It’s odd that Marquette would make this claim, since Abbate herself says she received no threats.

She discusses her experience in a long essay on her blog. Amid the usual rhetoric about the evils of patriarchy and violence against women, she said this:

As you will note, none of the men who e‐mailed me or left a violent comment about me directly stated “I am going to blow your brains out,” “I am going to rape you”, or “I am going to physically assault you.” Yet, although these men were careful not to frame their messages in the form of a direct threat, their comments and emails should not be dismissed as just “harmless comments.” First of all, it is often the case that there are violent intentions that motivate these somewhat carefully constructed comments (they are careful in the sense that they do not express direct threats). To write‐off these abusive comments by saying “he didn’t say he is going to rape you; he just said he hopes you are raped!” is to wrongly trivialize the real threats of harm that very well might be contained within these comments.

Furthermore, even if these comments do not express actual threats of violence, these comments are harmful in the sense that they are intended to engender fear in women by reminding them of the very real and prevalent violence women experience.

Translation: since feminists are obsessed with violence against women, comments that are not threats can be viewed as threats.

Another interesting thing shown in Abbate’s essay is that she apparently spent considerable time looking around rather marginal websites (she mentions IOTW Report and Auto Admit) for comments about her. So many of the nasty comments she quotes did not come in e-mails to her, but were posted in some obscure corner of the web.

Conclusion

Why Marquette would keep repeating something that not only is false, but can easily be shown to be false, is a mystery. If it is mere carelessness on their part, it shows how little they care about facts in their jihad against this blogger. If it’s not that, they have simply chosen to lie.

Lovell’s Falsehood: Linked to Abbate’s Contact Information

Marquette President Michael Lovell has repeatedly claimed that we, in a November 9, 2104 blog post, linked to the “contact information” of one Cherly Abbate, the philosophy instructor who told an undergraduate that he was not allowed to voice opposition to gay marriage in her class since it would be “homophobic” and “offensive.”

He made this claim most recently in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, and in an “FAQ” posted on Marquette’s website in April of 2016.

This is important because Marquette wants to claim that we somehow encouraged or incited the unkind e-mails Abbate got when the story went national.

When our case was being argued before the District Court, Marquette’s lawyer (Ralph Weber) told the judge that we had “linked to Abbate’s contact information.” The judge, David A. Hansher, asked why we would do that. Weber responded “because he wanted to hurt her.”

Unfortunately, the claim that we linked to her contact information is flatly untrue.

Linking to Her Blog

We linked to Abbate’s blog twice, once in the original November 9, 2014 post, and again in a November 13, 2014 post.

Here is the link. As you can see, there is nothing there now.

But courtesy of archive.org, this is what it looked like in November 2014. Is there any contact information there? No, there is not.

But suppose, on that page, you go to Abbate’s toxic feminist essay “Yes All Men… Contribute to the Prevalence of Rape” at the bottom left of the page. You end up here.

Still no contact information.

But then you might click on “Cheryl E Abbate” at the bottom of the page, and you end up here. This is promising. At the top right-hand part of the page, it says “How to contact Cheryl.” When you click on that, and then go back to the December 2013 version of the page, you finally find her e-mail address.

Did Anybody Actually Do That?

So if somebody dug hard enough, they could have found her e-mail address on her blog. But suppose they just Googled up a list of Marquette Philosophy graduate students? There Abbate is, along with her e-mail.

If we want to be generous, we might say Marquette has been stretching the truth. If we want to be less generous, Marquette has been out and out lying.

Our Case v. Marquette Goes Direct to the Wisconsin Supreme Court

Wisconsin Supreme Court Agrees to Hear McAdams v. Marquette

WILL, McAdams had petitioned for the state Supreme Court to take case because of its effect on all colleges, universities in state

January 22, 2018 – Milwaukee, WI – The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to bypass the Court of Appeals and immediately hear Professor John McAdams’ case against Marquette University. McAdams sued Marquette after the university fired him for blogging about a graduate student instructor who mistreated her undergraduate pupil. The court will likely hear oral argument in April or May and issue a ruling by July.

“We are pleased that the state Supreme Court has agreed to hear our case on behalf of John McAdams,” said Rick Esenberg, President and General Counsel at WILL. “It is very important to have clarification on this important issue and I’m glad that John will have his day in court sooner than later.”

WILL asked the court to take the case because there is no binding precedent on the question of how far academic freedom extends. A ruling from the court will also provide a standard for the rights of professors at UW System schools and private universities and colleges that also promise their faculty academic freedom.

In November 2014, McAdams shared a story on his blog, Marquette Warrior, of an undergraduate student who had been told by a graduate student instructor, Cheryl Abbate, that he could not express his disagreement with same-sex marriage in her theory of ethics class because doing so would be homophobic and offensive. The story went national, resulting in significant amounts of bad press for Marquette.

In response, Marquette summarily suspended McAdams from his teaching duties and banned him from campus, initiating proceedings to revoke his tenure and fire him. An internal faculty hearing committee (FHC) was convened to judge the dispute, but it suffered from serious procedural flaws, as Marquette withheld evidence from McAdams and allowed a clearly-biased professor to sit on the FHC. The FHC eventually recommended McAdams be suspended for two semesters. Instead, Marquette President Michael Lovell suspended McAdams indefinitely without pay unless he issued a written apology for his behavior – effectively firing him.

More information about the case is available here. ###

President Lovell Attacks Warrior Blogger, We Respond

When the Wall Street Journal came down on our side in our academic freedom case against Marquette, Marquette President Michael Lovell responded with a letter published in the Journal.

The paper then kindly gave us a chance to respond to Lovell. We are reprinting Lovell’s letter, and our response, as well as a few of the comments both letters provoked.

First Lovell:

Your editorial “A Jesuit School Gets Dogmatic” (Jan. 8) describes Associate Professor John McAdams’s interaction with one of our former graduate students as “normal give and take of debate.” That couldn’t be further from the truth. Mr. McAdams inflicted a public and personal internet attack on our student. Instead of expressing his concerns through established internal channels, he chose to blog about our graduate student—publicly shaming her, questioning her values and including a link to her contact information. Through those actions, he exposed her to a flood of violent threats and hateful messages.

In January 2016, Marquette’s faculty hearing committee unanimously concluded in a 123-page report that Mr. McAdams violated his core obligations as a tenured professor when he used his blog needlessly and recklessly to harm our student. In May 2017, a Milwaukee County judge issued a 33-page decision dismissing all claims against Marquette University. The judge’s decision states: “academic freedom does not mean that a faculty member can harass, threaten, intimidate, ridicule, or impose his or her views on students.”

John McAdams has the right to talk about controversial topics on his blog and to disagree with and debate Marquette-related positions freely. But he crossed the line when he launched a personal, demeaning internet attack on a Marquette student, choosing to publicly shame her to advance his narrative and draw attention to himself and his blog. Tenure and the freedoms that come with it also have obligations and responsibilities. These disturbing, harassing actions will never have a place on our campus. Just as they have no place in any work environment.

Michael R. Lovell

President, Marquette University

Now, our response:

Marquette University President Michael Lovell claims to be upset because in a blog post I exposed the misconduct of a graduate instructor who told one of her students that arguing for the Catholic position on gay marriage was forbidden, being “homophobic” and “offensive” (Letters, Jan. 12). The instructor in question (Cheryl Abbate) was 27 years old and had been in the U.S. military. She was the “instructor of record” in the class—to her students “the professor.”

Mr. Lovell claims I had “shamed” and “harassed” Ms. Abbate. But any journalist who exposes misconduct could be said to have “shamed” or “harassed” the subject of the reporting. Journalists (including faculty bloggers) expose misconduct. Exposing misconduct that politically correct folks dislike would never be labeled “shaming” or “harassment.” And I certainly questioned her “values” which are shamefully too prevalent on college campuses. That was why the incident mattered.

The claim that I linked to her “contact information” is flatly false. I linked to her toxic feminist blog post of Sept. 20, 2014 titled “Yes All Men . . . Contribute to the Prevalence of Rape.” Possibly people dug around on her blog and found her email address, or simply used Marquette’s standard formula.

Mr. Lovell claims I should have fought a quiet internal battle for redress. Of course bureaucrats want misconduct in their organizations handled quietly and internally. But journalists are under no obligation to accommodate them.

Mr. Lovell notes that a faculty panel recommended that I be suspended. But academic freedom for conservative faculty is pretty precarious in the hands of other faculty. Further, the faculty panel did not suggest I should render a Stalinist apology to get my job back. That was Mr. Lovell.

John McAdams

Milwaukee

And a few of the more interesting comments:

Responses to Lovell’s letter:

I have been involved and effective at raising millions of dollars for Marquette University. Recently I observed the law of unintended consequences working when a fellow dental alum rescinded his six-figure donation because of President Lovell’s action.

Paul A. Gruber, DDS

---

“But he crossed the line when he launched a personal, demeaning internet attack on a Marquette student”

In other words, he told the truth about a 27 year old graduate student teaching a class. It may be inconvenient to the dual objectives of fundraising from alumni while adhering to campus leftist dogma, but it’s still the truth, n’est-ce pas? — Catherine Pate

---

President Lovell states: The judge’s decision states: “academic freedom does not mean that a faculty member can harass, threaten, intimidate, ridicule, or impose his or her views on students.”

Isn’t that what his leftist graduate student was doing? — Matt Burkholder

---

President Lovell claims that Professor McAdams “shamed” the graduate student. I read the blog and he factually reported what the graduate student did. No one disputes what took place. If what she did was not shameful, then nothing Professor McAdams said could be considered shaming. — Christopher Iliff

---

Comments in response to our letter:

I have fond memories of growing up in Milwaukee in the days when Marquette was still an unabashedly Catholic university. Guess the same folks who brought us Liberation Theology are running the place. — St.Clair Tweedie

---

McAdams was employed by Marquette. As such, he has an implicit responsibility to try to improve the University and at a minimum, not to damage it. He could have done so by going through the appropriate channels to have the situation addressed. He chose not to and his hiding behind his role as a journalist. He had a choice; carry out his responsibilities to his employer, or to pursue his freedom as a “journalist.” He chose to be a “journalist.” Given the potential and apparently intentional damage that he caused to Marquette, he was fired. — Stephen OBrien

---

@STEPHEN OBRIEN It is quite possible he did evaluate how to improve the University and in his own personal determination felt that the best way to do that was to “out” the situation because the sunshine was needed so it didn’t get brushed under the rug. — Michelle Madsen

Marquette Attempt to Fire Warrior Blogger / Update

First, a briefing on the current state of the case from our lawyers at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

John McAdams was a conservative professor at Marquette University, teaching political science. When he blogged criticizing a liberal graduate instructor who refused to permit debate about gay marriage, claiming that any opinion against gay marriage was homophobic and would not be permitted in her class, Marquette administration threw the book at McAdams. He was suspended from his teaching duties and banned from campus as if he were a dangerous criminal – all in violation of his teaching contract, which requires various procedures be followed before a suspension may be imposed.

Marquette then moved to formally fire McAdams. The university convened a “faculty hearing committee” that failed to provide McAdams his contractual due process rights, such as unbiased members and the right to access all of the university’s evidence and witnesses. After a weeklong hearing, the committee issued a convoluted report that created new rules it could then claim McAdams violated. The committee recommended he be suspended without pay for one or two semesters.

Marquette President Michael Lovell went beyond that recommendation, however, not only suspending him but giving him a few days to issue a Soviet-style admission of wrongdoing or be fired. McAdams refused to engage in such coerced speech, and has been indefinitely suspended without pay – effectively terminated.

McAdams sued Marquette for breach of his employment contract. The trial court ruled in favor of Marquette, concluding that it had to defer to the faculty hearing committee, and adopted all of its findings of fact and conclusions of law, despite McAdams proving that Marquette had withheld key information from the committee. We appealed and asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to bypass the Court of Appeals, hearing the case immediately.

An organization on our side is the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the nation’s most important defender of academic freedom, both for faculty and students. They published a recent article on the case, and noted:

If a faculty member is not free to criticize, even publicly, the pedagogy of a fellow instructor, or to respond in kind to his or her critics, important institutional dialogues about teaching, scholarship, politics, and more will be deeply chilled. Faculty already report being reluctant to speak out and even to teach about sensitive issues for fear of professional repercussions. If the lower court’s ruling stands, the increasing chill on faculty expression will only intrude further as administrators around the country seize on the decision to justify disciplining faculty for public dissent on topics both internal and external to the university.

Finally, three radio interviews about the case. First, Tom Kamenick (one of our legal team) on the Jerry Bader show out of Green Bay.

---

Second, our interview with Right Wisconsin.

---

Finally, Rick Esenberg (head of our legal team) on the Jim Bohannan show (national).

Wall Street Journal on Marquette Attempt to Fire Warrior Blogger

A Jesuit School Gets Dogmatic
Is Marquette’s promise of academic freedom worth anything

By The Editorial Board

Marquette is a Jesuit university in Milwaukee. Which is appropriate, because jesuitical is the word that fits its explanation for firing a tenured political science professor who defended a student who was badly treated by an intolerant graduate instructor.

The sacked professor is John McAdams, who in 2014 wrote a blog post criticizing by name Cheryl Abbate, who taught a course on ethics. Ms. Abbate had told a student he could not express his disagreement with same-sex marriage in her ethics class because it was “homophobic” and on that issue there could be no debate.

In his post on the incident, Mr. McAdams made no judgment on same-sex marriage. But he noted that liberals are inclined to deem views they disagree with as offensive and then use that to shut down debate. The story went national.

Marquette officials took action—against Mr. McAdams. He was blamed for the hate mail that Ms. Abbate received after he named her, even though there’s no evidence he was part of any of it. Marquette President Michael Lovell gave him an ultimatum: apologize or be suspended without pay indefinitely. Mr. McAdams refused to apologize and has been effectively fired.

He’s also suing, and last May a Wisconsin trial court backed the university’s dismissal. But Mr. McAdams has appealed and wants to go straight to the state Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Institute for Liberty and Law, which has taken his case, says the firing violates Mr. McAdams’s contract with Marquette, which promises freedom from threats of dismissal over constitutional rights such as free speech.

As a private institution, Marquette has the right to set its own employment standards and it needn’t abide by the First Amendment. But it is hard to square Mr. McAdams’s dismissal with any reasonable understanding of Marquette’s contract guaranteeing him academic freedom.

We wish these issues weren’t left for courts. But when institutions such as Marquette are unable to handle what should be the normal give and take of debate, they invite that intervention. How much better we’d all be if Marquette would acknowledge its mistake and give the professor his job back.

George Will on Marquette Attempt to Fire Warrior Blogger

Academic freedom goes on trial

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court can soon right a flagrant wrong stemming from events set in motion in 2014 at Milwaukee’s Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. Although just a graduate student, she already had a precocious aptitude for academic nastiness.

On Oct. 28, in an undergraduate course she was teaching on ethics, when the subject of same-sex marriage arose, there was no debate, because, a student said, Abbate insisted that there could be no defensible opposition to this. (Marquette is a Jesuit school.) After class, the student told her that he opposed same-sex marriage and her discouraging of debate about it. She replied (he recorded their interaction) that “there are some opinions that are not appropriate that are harmful. . . . Do you know whether anyone in the class is homosexual? . . . In this class homophobic comments . . . will not be tolerated.” The student’s appeals to Abbate’s superiors were unavailing (the chairman of her philosophy department referred to the student as an “insulin [sic] little twerp”), so he gave John C. McAdams his recording of Abbate rebuffing him.

McAdams, a tenured professor then in his 41st year at Marquette and a conservative who blogs about the school’s news, emailed Abbate seeking her version of the episode. Without responding to him, she immediately forwarded his email to some professors. She has called McAdams “the ringleader” of “extreme white [sic] wing, hateful people,” a “moron,” “a flaming bigot, sexist and homophobic idiot” and a “creepy homophobic person with bad argumentation skills.” This aspiring philosopher’s argumentation skills can be inferred from her reliance on epithets.

Before McAdams had written a syllable, she claimed for herself the coveted status of victim, branding as “harassment” his request for her side of the story. Striking a pose of bravery, she accused him of trying “to scare me into silence.” When, on Nov. 9, 2014, McAdams blogged, his post took no position on same-sex marriage but said this should be a debatable issue. The next day, Abbate drafted a letter asking that McAdams be disciplined. He was.

After this matter earned national media attention, she received some critical emails, some of them vile, and Marquette rightly branded them “hate mail.” However, for these, and for the unspecified “harm” they supposedly caused Abbate, McAdams was held to be somehow blameworthy. Marquette, however, offered no evidence that he had anything to do with the emails. After a committee drawn from the university’s monochrome culture recommended suspending McAdams without pay for two semesters, Marquette’s president insisted that McAdams also express in writing “deep regret” and confess that his blog post was “reckless and incompatible” with Marquette’s mission and values. McAdams refused and has been unemployed ever since.

Being a private institution, Marquette had a right to be as hostile as it obviously is to the First Amendment — except for this: Its contract with tenured faculty says no one shall be disciplined for exercising “legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action” and that the threat of dismissal shall not be used to “restrain” constitutional rights. A circuit court, ignoring Marquette’s ignoring of a Wisconsin contract, refused to adjudicate this dispute. Deferring to Marquette, the court essentially held that a professor’s academic freedom exists only until some other professors and university administrators say it does not. So, the deferential court allowed Marquette an unconstrained right to settle a contract dispute in which it was an interested party.

Because there is almost no Wisconsin case law concerning academic freedom that could have guided the circuit court, McAdams is asking the state supreme court to bypass the appeals court and perform its function as the state’s “law-developing court.” He is also asking the court to be cognizant of the cultural context: Nationwide, colleges and universities “are under pressure” — all of it from within the institutions — “to enact or implement speech codes or otherwise restrict speech in various ways.”

This episode, now in its fourth year, began because McAdams tried to assist a student who suffered unprofessional behavior by a bullying instructor. Abbate has moved on. Now at the University of Colorado, she is still a (perhaps career) graduate student, writing a doctoral dissertation on the importance of the rights of . . . animals.

The wreckage she left in her wake illustrates how rights are imperiled when judicial deference becomes dereliction of judicial duty. Prospective Marquette students, and Marquette alumni, must decide whether this school, awash with the current academic hysteria and corruption, merits their confidence and support. Wisconsin’s Supreme Court must lay down the law that can stop some of the rot this case illustrates.

Marquette President Michael Lovell: One of the Scariest People of 2016

From Watchdog.org, by John Bicknell, a list of the “scariest people of 2016,” and holding the very dishonorable position of number 8 is Marquette President Michael Lovell.

Marquette University President Michael Lovell has brought back the Inquisition to Catholic universities.

When political science professor John McAdams criticized Philosophy Department instructor Cheryl Abbate on his blog in November 2014 for not allowing a student to defend Catholic teaching on same-sex marriage in her classroom, Lovell dropped the PC hammer on McAdams by suspending the professor and banning him from campus pending termination.

McAdams’ crime, in the view of Marquette University, was criticizing Abbate publicly because, in addition to being an instructor, she was also a prized graduate student. But what made it worse was that McAdams’ blog post went “viral” and Abbate received hate mail, even though McAdams did not encourage anyone to contact her.

McAdams appealed his termination and was placed in limbo while a faculty committee debated his fate. The suspension continued until April of this year when the panel completed its investigation. It recommended his suspension continue through the end of 2016, but that wasn’t good enough for Lowell.

Lowell said McAdams could not be reinstated until he acknowledged the blog post was “reckless,” accepted the judgment of the faculty committee and expressed regret over the hostile emails Abbate received. McAdams refused, instead demanding that Marquette live up to the promise of academic freedom in McAdams’ contract.

Now McAdams is suing to get reinstated, and the two sides are scheduled to appear in court Feb. 2.

Lovell’s actions have placed Marquette University on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s list of Ten Worst Universities for Free Speech. Meanwhile, McAdams, a nationally respected expert on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, is unable to teach students or even visit the campus.

But Lovell continues to govern Marquette, turning a once-proud university into a bastion of political correctness.

Warrior Blogger on Vicki McKenna / May 2, 2016

Here we are on the Vicki McKenna show on May 2, shortly after announcing that we are filing a lawsuit against Marquette, demanding reinstatement and monetary damages for their attempt to fire us.

Press Conference: Warrior Blogger Will Sue Marquette