Marquette Paid PR Firm Big Bucks to Counter Negative Publicity Over Attempt to Fire Warrior Blogger

We recently got an e-mail from an academic outlining an exchange he had with a public relations firm hired by Marquette to deal with the negative fallout from the university’s attempt to fire us. He explained:

FYI - see below. I received a very odd email from Marquette’s PR firm re: your case a few months ago. I had forgotten about it, but was reminded when I saw the recent court ruling. Anyway, I’m not sure why they contacted me, but thought you should know.

The e-mail exchange started with this message from an executive at the Edelman firm:

On Tue, Mar 6, 2018 at 1:58 PM, Diaz, Ricky wrote:

Professor, I hope you are doing well. Because of your background and previous commentary on doxing, I thought you might be interested in a recent development happening at Marquette. The Wisconsin State Supreme Court has agreed to hear a high profile case in which a Professor (and later, George Will) doxed a student and it led to terrible consequences. Marquette is looking to connect with experts such as yourself interested in doxing to discuss the case and I think you would find it to be fascinating given your background.

Please let me know if you’d like to talk with Marquette and I could put you in touch with a few folks at the University to speak with directly about the case. Look forward to hearing from you,

Ricky

Of course, the claim that we doxed Cheryl Abbate is a flat out lie. Webster’s defines “doxing” as

. . . to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge.

In fact, we published zero “private information.” We did link to a toxic feminist essay on Abbate’s blog. Her e-mail address was elsewhere on the blog (not on the page we linked to). But it could also be found by a simple google search. If your e-mail address is all over the web, it’s not “private information.” Nothing in our post suggested anybody should harass or even contact her.

Even more bizarre is the notion that George Will doxed Abbate. All he did was mention her name. Did the editors at the Washington Post allow doxing? Marquette’s position is apparently that Marquette Instructor Abbate must somehow never be named.  But in the wake of our post criticizing how she told a student that he was not allowed to oppose gay marriage in class, since “you don’t have a right in this class to make homophobic comments,” she went to a philosophy blog to attack us.

Back to the E-mail Exchange

From: <[redacted]@redacted.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, March 6, 2018 3:08 PM
To: Diaz, Ricky
Subject: Re: Doxing

Is Marquette’s administration seeking my legal and/or crisis communications advice?

Diaz’ response:

From: “Diaz, Ricky”
Date: March 7, 2018 at 9:33:13 AM EST
To: <[redacted]@redacted.edu>
Subject: RE: Doxing

Hi, [redacted]. Specifically, Marquette is interested in giving you a briefing on the case that’s headed to the Wisconsin State Supreme Court. They would like to ask for feedback on the case, particularly the privacy/doxing issues at play and any other reactions you have. Media coverage of the case will likely increase as the oral arguments get closer, and the school feels that the public doesn’t quite understand doxing or the consequences. While there’s no specific ask or commitment after the initial briefing at the moment, they are trying to build relationships with people such as yourself who may be able to shed light on these issues to media or other groups down the road if there’s interest.

Please let me know if you’re interested in an introduction to the University’s team.

Ricky

The professor didn’t respond, explaining to us that:

I really didn’t understand what the controversy was all about when Edelman contacted me or why they chose me — considering the email’s author is a VP at a major PR firm, he doesn't seem to express himself very clearly. I was also kind of annoyed that a highly profitable PR firm apparently expected me to do free work for them . . .

He gave us permission to publish this exchange, but instructed us not to publish his name, since there are “too many crazy, vindictive SJWs [social justice warriors] out there.”

The Edelman Firm

If you are an institution that has done something really evil, or really stupid, and are trying to manage the resulting firestorm, Edelman is the firm for you. Which is not to say they don’t do legitimate PR work. Their website shows a lot of PR work for a lot of interests, and it’s impressive until you remember they are as good at puffing their own work as they are puffing their clients.

But two things are similar to what they did for Marquette. First, a PR disaster when a crock-pot explodes, burns down a home and kills a man. Edelman claims:

Thrust into an unexpected firestorm, we cooked up a strategic recipe for Crock-Pot® to extinguish the misdirected hatred, defend the brand and playfully remind the world that #CrockPotIsInnocent.

Then there was the bad PR when Samsung released a defective smartphone.

Twitter had become a hostile environment for the brand after the Galaxy Note7 recall, so we couldn’t let this go. This was our chance to stand up for anyone who’s ever received an unwanted picture. Within minutes, we responded with a savagely simple reply: The microscope emoji.

We knew the one-character tweet was a clever retort, but we didn’t predict the viral sensation that followed: More than 80 news stories worldwide — all from a single emoji.

We had already identified that we could rebuild trust with our community by being “real” and transparent after the Note7 recall. After all, millennials expect more from brands; they’re drawn to those that take risks and feel human. Our strategy had become confronting negativity head on, in real-time.

Unfortunately, you never know what the Internet will serve up next. So we stacked our team with community managers and strategists who not only deeply understood Twitter, but could act on the unexpected quick. They knew what to look for, and how to react to it with brevity and incisive wit.

In fact, they have an entire division devoted to “crisis and reputation risk.”  And the fellow who wrote the professor (Ricky Diaz) identifies himself as expert in “crisis communications, research, digital, media relations and public affairs.”

Interestingly, a Google Advanced Search of edelman.com shows no mention of the work they did for Marquette.

Wikipedia has a long list of Edelman’s clients. Some of their work involves legitimate activities supporting controversial policies (eg. the Keystone Pipeline), but at other times they seem to have used questionable tactics (setting up front groups claiming to be grassroots support for their clients).

How Much Did it Cost

Of course, neither Marquette nor Edelman is going to say how much the campaign against this blogger (which included an attack website, ads on Google, an ads in major newspapers) has cost them.

But some public information comes from another case: Michigan State’s response to sexual abuse accusations against former Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. According to NPR:

Michigan State University spent more than $500,000 to keep tabs on the online activities of former Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar’s victims and journalists covering the case, according to the Lansing State Journal.

The public-relations company Weber Shandwick billed the university $517,343 for more than 1,440 hours of work tracking social media in the month of January, the Journal reports.

Michigan State’s Office of Communication and Brand Strategy monitored social media and news media activity involving the Nassar case previously and concurrently with Weber Shandwick, the newspaper notes.

“The firm billed for work done by 18 different employees, whose hourly rates ranged from $200 to $600 per hour,” the Journal writes. “Five of those employees billed MSU for more than $50,000, including one who billed for $96,900 and another who billed for $120,893.”

Weber Shandwick is a major PR firm, but apparently no more prestigious than Edelman, so it is almost certain that Marquette got billed at similar rates.

The Total Cost

We can add whatever Marquette paid for the services of Edelman to the legal fees the university paid, which were in the range of $750,000 to a million dollars, according to informed sources.

Then there are lost alumni contributions. We have no way to estimate those, but literally dozens of alunni have told us that they discontinued contributing to Marquette because of our case.

And while the attempt to fire us may have increased Marquette’s reputation among a politically correct fringe, it has doubtless hurt it among parents who actually want a Catholic education for their children. That is, hurt it among the sort of parents who might prefer Marquette to a much less expensive state school, or an overtly secular private college. But now they have no reason to.

All because of Michael Lovell’s rigid, authoritarian jihad against this blogger.

Updated 8/13 with information on Diaz.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Trashed Marquette, Faculty Hearing Committee

A victory for academic freedom was a massive fiasco for Marquette, as the Wisconsin Supreme Court laid waste to Marquette’s attempt to fire us for a blog post where we reported about a graduate philosophy instructor who insulted and demeaned an undergraduate who wanted to express his opposition to gay marriage.

Marquette has touted a “123 page report” from the Faculty Hearing Committee to support its claim that we should be disciplined. Somehow, the fact that it’s a long report is supposed to mean it’s really good. The sensible people, in contrast, will suspect that anybody with a cogent argument doesn’t need to drone on for 123 pages.

Worse, the university tried to use the Faculty Hearing Committee report as an excuse to fire us, when in fact it only recommended we be suspended for one or two semesters.

Supreme Court Unimpressed

The Wisconsin Supreme Court was entirely unimpressed with the report of the Faculty Hearing Committee. One problem (and a damning one in the view of at least some justices) was that Prof. Lynn Turner had attacked us in an open letter signed by a few dozen leftist faculty. The Court found:

¶42 Under any reasonable standard of impartiality, Dr. Turner would be disqualified. She publicly inserted herself into the dispute and expressed a personal interest in its outcome. And she did not just express her opinions on these matters in passing—she committed herself to them in writing. Having done so, she could not decide the FHC proceedings in favor of Dr. McAdams without contradicting what she had already said to the entire Marquette University campus. These are not anonymous members of the public to whom she would be admitting that her initial convictions were mistaken. They are her professional colleagues and students. The natural human impulse to resist acknowledging a mistake, especially in light of the audience to whom she would be making the acknowledgement, is sufficiently powerful to affect Dr. Turner’s consideration of the dispute. If an arbitrator evidenced this level of bias, we would set aside the resulting award. The FHC’s composition was unacceptably compromised by Dr. Turner’s bias.

But more basic was the faulty logic the FHC (and Marquette) used:

¶72 The defects inherent in the University’s alternative analytical structure, however, represent just one of two problems with its assessment. The second is that the University conducted the analysis backwards. With the benefit of hindsight, the University reverse-engineered its conclusion that Dr. McAdams is a plainly unfit professor because of unknown third parties’ reactions to his blog post. The blog post caused “harm,” the University said, in the form of critical, sometimes vile, sometimes violently-worded, responses sent to Instructor Abbate after the story had received national attention. Its “unfitness” analysis proceeded as follows: Instructor Abbate suffered harm because she received offensive communications from third parties; the communications were prompted by Dr. McAdams’ blog post (directly or indirectly); Dr. McAdams has a responsibility not to harm his students; a professor is unfit to serve if he violates his responsibilities to the University’s students. Quod erat demonstrandum. But the University can reach this conclusion only because its analysis traveled in reverse. So quod non erat demonstrandum.

¶73 Performing the analysis in the correct direction leads to the unavoidable conclusion that the blog post has nothing relevant to say about Dr. McAdams’ fitness as a professor. The University’s end point is where we start—that is, we consider first whether the challenged extramural comment, on its face, violated Dr. McAdams’ “responsibilities to . . . [the University’s] students.” Although Instructor Abbate was functioning as a University instructor, we will consider only her status as a student for purposes of this analysis. The University identified several aspects of the blog post that it believes were problematic. For instance, it says Dr. McAdams relied on improperly obtained information (the surreptitious recording of the conversation between Instructor Abbate and the student); he identified Instructor Abbate by name; he linked to her contact information; he drafted the post in a way that would subject Instructor Abbate to public contempt; and the post contains factual errors.

¶74 The undisputed facts show that none of the aspects of the blog post about which the University is concerned could have violated Dr. McAdams’ responsibility to Instructor Abbate. The FHC’s Report acknowledged that there is no prohibition against naming a student in a blog post. Nor is it improper for a faculty member to link to a student’s personal webpage, even when that webpage lists the student’s contact information. The Report acknowledged this is still true even when the blog post is critical of the student. Nor do blogging faculty members have a general obligation to ensure every statement they make in a post is accurate.

Note that it sounds nice to say “professors should always be accurate.” But if any inaccuracy — even a trivial one — can be used as an excuse to fire a troublesome professor, academic freedom doesn’t mean much. Further, what is “accurate” is often a matter of opinion. Can a professor who expresses skepticism about man-made, catastrophic global warming be fired for being “inaccurate?” What about a professor who says that Donald Trump would not have been elected without the interference of the Russians?

But worse, nothing about our blog post was inaccurate.

¶76 Finally, there is the University’s assertion that Dr. McAdams drafted the blog post in such a way that it would subject Instructor Abbate to public contempt. The blog post is certainly critical of her, so one could reasonably foresee that it would engender critical responses. We do not understand the University to argue that an extramural comment that causes such responses is beyond the pale—an extraordinarily unusual argument for an educational institution to make—so we perceive its concern to be about the responses that go beyond the realm of reasonable criticism. But the University did not identify any aspect of what Dr. McAdams actually wrote to support its charge. Instead, it used third-party responses to the blog post as a proxy for its allegedly contempt-inducing nature. Here again, the University demonstrates that reverse-engineering a conclusion is not the most reliable method of conducting an analysis. In this instance, the University caught itself up in the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. Just because vile commentary followed the blog post does not mean the blog post instigated or invited the vileness. The University must identify which part of the blog post is supposed to have been responsible for eliciting the offensive remarks. It did not even attempt to do so. Our review of the blog post reveals that it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the University’s logical fallacy represents the entirety of its assertion that Dr. McAdams wrote the blog post to subject Instructor Abbate to contempt, we must reject it.

The Supreme Court decision was a humiliating defeat for Marquette generally, and specifically for the Faculty Hearing Committee and President Michael Lovell.

Both the FHC and Lovell actually believed they could ignore Marquette’s contractual promise to faculty of free expression. The Faculty Statutes say:

“Dismissal will not be used to restrain faculty members in their exercise of academic freedom or other rights guaranteed them by the United States Constitution.”

What sort of arrogance on the part of Michael Lovell and mendacity on the part of the Faculty Hearing Committee made them think they could trample on that legally binding promise?

Marquette’s Lame Arguments to Wisconsin Supreme Court: Must Defer to Faculty Hearing Committee

Although we were never completely sure before the decision was announced, the implausible, tortured arguments Marquette presented to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in our legal case should have made it obvious the court would come down on our side.

Exhibit 1: Marquette’s Claim that the court should defer to the verdict of the Faculty Hearing Committee, which claimed that our blog post was grounds to suspend us without pay for one or two semesters.

Of course, the Faculty Hearing Committee did not say we should have to render a Stalinist apology for the blog post. That was entirely Michael Lovell. So Marquette was demanding that the FHC be deferred to in one issue, but contravened on another.

The Decision

The Supreme Court trashed that notion:

The University denies Dr. McAdams’ right to litigate his breach of contract claim in our courts. Instead, it says, we must defer to its procedure for suspending and dismissing tenured faculty members. It claims we may not question its decision so long as it did not abuse its discretion, infringe any constitutional rights, act in bad faith, or engage in fraud.

¶2 The University is mistaken. We may question, and we do not defer. The University’s internal dispute resolution process is not a substitute for Dr. McAdams’ right to sue in our courts. The University’s internal process may serve it well as an informal means of resolving disputes, but as a replacement for litigation in our courts, it is structurally flawed.

¶3 The undisputed facts show that the University breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom. Therefore, we reverse the circuit court and remand this cause with instructions to enter judgment in favor of Dr. McAdams, conduct further proceedings to determine damages (which shall include back pay), and order the University to immediately reinstate Dr. McAdams with unimpaired rank, tenure, compensation, and benefits, as required by § 307.09 of the University’s Statutes on Faculty Appointment, Promotion and Tenure (the “Faculty Statutes”).

Why did the court refuse to defer to Marquette? For several reasons.

¶25 The most obvious reason we will not defer to the University is simply that the parties never agreed that its internal Discipline Procedure would either replace or limit the adjudication of their contract dispute in our courts. They certainly could have agreed to an extra-judicial resolution of their contract dispute. This is a common feature in society today and is accomplished most often through an arbitration agreement. [...]

¶26 Our exhaustive review of the Faculty Statutes reveals no indication that the University and Dr. McAdams agreed the Discipline Procedure would supplant the courts or limit their review of a contractual dispute. Two of the Faculty Statutes acknowledge Dr. McAdams’ right to seek judicial adjudication of his claims. The first describes the right negatively by demarcating a period of time in which the parties agree not to litigate. . . .

¶27 The Faculty Statutes also contain an explicit, positively-stated recognition of Dr. McAdams’ right to litigate. . . .

This provision unambiguously recognizes that the University’s suspension and dismissal decisions are subject to litigation in our courts. It was with good reason that the University conceded, during oral arguments, that it had no express agreement with Dr. McAdams that the Discipline Procedure would preclude his right to litigate his cause here.

¶28 The University and Dr. McAdams could have agreed that the court would defer to the Report and Discipline Letter in the same way we defer to arbitration decisions. They could have done that, but they did not. They did the opposite: The University agreed it would defer to the court’s adjudication of Dr. McAdams’ right to reinstatement.

Why Defer to the Faculty Hearing Committee?

Marquette was touting the Discipline Procedure of the Faculty Hearing Committee as authoritative, but the court saw no reason to treat it that way:

¶49 As a matter of process, therefore, there is a hard break between the Discipline Procedure and the actual decision to suspend Dr. McAdams. While the dispute was in the hands of a body that had no authority to resolve it (the FHC), the case was subject to the detailed Discipline Procedure. However, once it reached the actual decision-maker (President Lovell), there were no procedures to govern the decision-making process. The Discipline Procedure does not tell President Lovell how to reach his decision, and nothing in the record before us suggests the president’s decision must have any relationship to the FHC’s work. As far as the Faculty Statutes and Faculty Handbook are concerned, the president may proceed as if the Report said nothing but that the FHC had completed the Discipline Procedure. Consequently, the efficient cause of Dr. McAdams’ suspension without pay was the Discipline Letter, and there is no evidence that it resulted from any prescribed procedure at all. It was the product of President Lovell’s exercise of unfettered discretion. Even if we were inclined to defer to the authoritative resolution of Dr. McAdams’ case (as opposed to the FHC’s Report), there is quite literally nothing to which we could apply an arbitration-style review.

The Court Liberals Speak

The two liberal justices dissented. This is not surprising, given that liberals less and less believe in free speech. Both Ann Walsh Bradley and Shirley Abrahamson sided with Marquette, invoking the “academic freedom” of the university.

¶140 The majority errs in conducting only half of the academic freedom analysis. It fails to recognize, much less analyze, the academic freedom of Marquette as a private, Catholic, Jesuit university. As a result, it dilutes a private educational institution’s autonomy to make its own academic decisions in fulfillment of its unique mission.

¶141 Further, the majority compounds this error by rendering meaningless a key component of shared governance, reducing the faculty’s bargained-for role in reviewing dismissal for cause to “nothing” or a mere “distraction.” In disregarding the faculty hearing committee’s expertise and unanimous recommendation, it throws aside a process that is mutually agreed upon and time-honored. Apparently, the majority thinks it is in a better position to address concerns of academic freedom than a group of tenured faculty members who live the doctrine every day.

This, of course, is complete nonsense. The “group of tenured faculty members” (the Faculty Hearing Committee) does not “live by academic freedom.” Most of them have nothing much controversial to say, or if they do, they express the leftist opinions approved by most of the faculty (and thus safe from faculty-centered disciplinary procedures).

Further, most faculty who participate in “shared governance” are, to put it bluntly, sycophants. Administrators have a lot of goodies to hand out to faculty (raises, promotions, grants, reduced teaching loads, administrative positions, etc.) and few faculty are inclined to get on the wrong side of the campus bureaucrats.

Marquette’s Choice

Marquette, of course, had the academic freedom to refuse to give faculty a contractual guarantee of free expression. Some schools (mostly religious ones) don’t guarantee academic freedom, and are honest about the fact that they will fire faculty they consider heretical.

But Marquette made a different choice.

The Majority Responds

The majority responded to the liberal judges as follows:

¶58 The dissent says we should nonetheless defer to the University, and that failing to do so “renders meaningless a key part of shared governance, reducing the faculty’s role in this decisionmaking to nothing.” Dissent, ¶173. The author, however, does not identify the key part of shared governance we have rendered meaningless, nor could she. The faculty’s authority to share in the University’s governance comes from the Faculty Statutes and Faculty Handbook, not some formless notion of what shared governance ought to be. We have taken these authorities as they are, and scrupulously examined their provisions. The faculty’s role is what our opinion says it is because that is the arrangement upon which the University and its faculty members have agreed. It is not our place to rewrite their management structure to give the faculty a more muscular role in the University’s affairs than they currently have. Because the dissent identified no Faculty Statute or Faculty Handbook provision that we have overlooked or misconstrued, we decline the implicit invitation to disregard what these authorities so plainly say.

Marquette’s case was so poor we are left wondering “what were they thinking?” Quite likely, when they began their jihad against us, they expected we would just take some money and walk away. But when they found that wasn’t so, why did they not back off?

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Marquette President Michael Lovell is so rigid, and so arrogant, that he was unable to cut the university’s losses. Those losses have been huge.

Michael Lovell’s Fiasco: The Cost

Marquette’s defeat in the Wisconsin Supreme Court for its attempt to fire us was epic. The Court trashed Marquette’s lame arguments, one of which was that it should defer to a Faculty Hearing Committee that said we had been guilty of misconduct and should be suspended without pay for one or two semesters.

The court noted that we had not agreed in our contract to accept the judgment of a bunch of other professors as to whether we could express our opinions on our blog. Further, Marquette President Michael Lovell went beyond the Faculty Hearing Committee in punishing us, demanding a Stalinist apology. Marquette, in other words, was arguing that Faculty Hearing Committee was binding when it was convenient for the university, but not binding when it was inconvenient.

“Guiding Values”

The university claimed it could invoke its “Guiding Values” to override our black letter guarantee of free expression. The Court trashed this notion:

The University posited that educational institutions assume academic freedom is just one value that must be balanced against “other values core to their mission.” Some of those values, it says, include the obligation to "take care not to cause harm, directly or indirectly, to members of the university community,” “to respect the dignity of others and to acknowledge their right to express differing opinions,” to “safeguard[] the conditions for the community to exist,” to “ensur[e] colleagues feel free to explore undeveloped ideas,” and to carry out “the concept of cura personalis,” which involves working and caring “for all aspects of the lives of the members of the institution.” These are worthy aspirations, and they reflect well on the University. But they contain insufficiently certain standards by which a professor’s compliance may be measured. Setting the doctrine of academic freedom adrift amongst these competing values would deprive the doctrine of its instructive power; it would provide faculty members with little to no guidance on what it covers.

The Court was doubtless unimpressed with Marquette’s pious rhetoric about “values” in light of the fact that our blog post highlighted an instructor who insulted a student, telling him that his opposition to gay marriage would sound homophobic, would be offensive, and could not be expressed in her class. When he complained to authorities he was blown off, and indeed insulted.

Even if the Court had been inclined to defer to Marquette’s real values, why should they defer to hypocritical rhetoric about values?

Michael Lovell

Marquette President Michael Lovell has, quite simply, been responsible for a huge fiasco. His obtuseness in not recognizing our binding contractual right to the same free expression guaranteed in the Constitution, and his stubbornness pushing the issue all the way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court has been stunning.

The Cost

Three sources of ours intimately familiar with this case and with lawyers’ billing rates estimate the legal fees Marquette has incurred at between $750,000 and $1,000,000.

But there were further costs. The Chronicle of Higher Education quotes Lovell (paywall):

The university has forcefully pushed back against McAdams’s narrative that the key issue is academic freedom. It pressed its case in advertisements in newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal. It set up a web page, complete with a timeline and fact-vs.-myth section. It hired a public-relations firm with a storytelling team.

“In terms of our brand and public perception,” Lovell says, “we were taking a beating. We thought it was important to at least try to get the truth out about what we felt our side of the story was.”

Marquette, in fact, even bought Google ads to lead web surfers to a page that attacks us.

None of this came out of Lovell’s pocket. He has spent other people’s money. It was either endowment, or tuition, or a combination of the two. His jihad against this blogger has been expensive.

Lovell’s Motivation

There are two theories about what moves Michael Lovell. One is that he is simply a careerist bureaucrat wanting to “move up” to a more prestigious institution. The theory is that his incessant pandering to the forces of political correctness is his strategy for doing this. Thus he demonstrated in sympathy with students at the University of Missouri — students who latched onto bogus grievances and began bullying everybody else on campus.

Thus he piously claimed to “stand against racism” when black students at Marquette were in an uproar about a “racist” photo that was not, in fact, racist.

It bears repeating: We shouldn’t expect only students of color to respond to racism. I’m asking all of @MarquetteU to join me and share why you #StandAgainstRacism pic.twitter.com/ZzS4nlSxqU

— Michael Lovell (@PresLovell) April 30, 2018

The other theory, one we are beginning to favor, is that Lovell is an actual social justice warrior. That, instead of being an opportunist, his pandering to the forces of political correctness is sincere, and his campaign to fire us was was a matter of conviction.

Unfortunately, having a president who is a sincere social justice warrior is even more toxic than having an opportunist bureaucrat. The latter might back off of a disastrous policy.

Jerry Bader: Two Important Takeaways from the McAdams Victory

What Marquette Could Have Done, But Didn’t

From Margot Cleveland, writing in The Federalist: an analysis of our recent Wisconsin Supreme Court victory. Cleveland sides with us and the court, and explains:

Next, the court considered whether Marquette had “discretionary cause” to suspend McAdams. The court began by citing the relevant contractual provisions, which defined “discretionary cause” as conduct that “clearly and substantially fail to meet the standard of personal and professional excellence which generally characterizes University faculties.”

However, as the court highlighted, the faculty contract expressly stated that discretionary cause will not “be interpreted so as to impair the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action.” The court then methodically considered Marquette’s rationale for suspending McAdams, stressing that it was McAdams’ conduct—and not the response of third parties—that mattered, explaining:

Just because vile commentary followed the blog post does not mean the blog post instigated or invited the vileness. The University must identify which part of the blog post is supposed to have been responsible for eliciting the offensive remarks. It did not even attempt to do so. Our review of the blog post reveals that it makes no ad hominem attack on Instructor Abbate, nor does it invite readers to be uncivil to her, either explicitly or implicitly. Because the University’s logical fallacy represents the entirety of its assertion that Dr. McAdams wrote the blog post to subject Instructor Abbate to contempt, we must reject it.

But Cleveland goes on to highlight the fundamental social problems behind this whole incident:

Further, Marquette’s attempt to hold McAdams responsible for threats meted out by third parties upends academic freedom. It implies a faculty member must self-censor and limit criticism out of a fear that others will respond with threats or even violence. Yet nothing McAdams wrote reeked of an incitement to harassment or violence. The Wisconsin Supreme Court published the entire blog post and a quick read confirms the court’s view that McAdams had not invited the vile emails Abbate received.

Yet Abbate did receive emails that made her fear for her safety. I am not unsympathic to Abbate’s concerns, and few conservative journalists or politicians would be. But McAdams isn’t the problem. The problem is a society that teaches that words spoken in a classroom debate are so offensive that they must be silenced; a society that resorts to doxxing to silence speech instead of countering speech; and a society that views harassment and violence as appropriate responses to “offensive” speech.

This says nothing about McAdams, who criticized Abbate on the merits of her conduct, and everything about the decline of civility facing our country.

What Marquette Could Have Done

Cleveland goes on to highlight a grain of truth in the two leftist justices’ dissent.

Two Wisconsin Supreme Court justices dissented from the majority’s decision in favor of McAdams. The dissent merits consideration, not because of the faulty analysis of McAdams’ case, but because of the helpful discussion of academic freedom.

Many wrongly believe academic freedom rests solely with faculty members, but the dissent, authored by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, highlights that academic freedom includes two components: academic freedom of the faculty and academic freedom of the institution. Marquette’s “institutional academic freedom is inclusive of four ‘essential freedoms’: ‘to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.’“

As a Catholic, Jesuit institution, Marquette possesses the right to exercise these four “essential freedoms” consistent with its guiding values, described by the dissent as the “holistic development of students” and a “commitment to the Jesuit tradition and Catholic social teaching.” Marquette could, then, have hired only faculty members willing to instruct students consistent with the university’s professed Catholic mission, in which case it could fire faculty members who do not live up to that commitment.

But it didn’t, as is obvious from the university’s decision to employ an instructor who, in contradiction of clear church teaching, taught students that “everybody agrees” on “gay rights.” Marquette instead promised faculty members the right to individual academic freedom, without regard to the university’s Catholic character. By committing itself “not to impair the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms,” Marquette forfeited its right to rein in McAdams’ speech as purportedly contrary to the university’s mission.

In its news release, Marquette hinted that it intends to reassert its institutional right to academic freedom, explaining that “in light of today’s decision, Marquette will work with its faculty to re-examine its policies, with the goal of providing every assurance possible that this never happens again” (emphasis added). Of course, by “this,” Marquette means public criticism of an instructor. If only the Jesuit university meant assuring faculty members do not silence student speech, especially speech defending Catholic teaching against a professor’s heresy. That is something I could get behind.

Marquette claims the right to hire “for mission.” This means Marquette has the right to hire people loyal to Catholic teaching, and even to prefer practicing Catholics.

This is perfectly consistent with academic freedom if, once hired, faculty are free to write and speak as they please. In some departments, this has largely been ignored. In Political Science we have always hired on the basis of pure scholarly credentials. This blogger has been as guilty of that as anybody else in the department.

In many departments, hiring is anti-mission. Somebody who opposes abortion, or gay marriage, or who believes homosexual acts are illicit would be quickly vetoed in the job search.

If Marquette is unwilling to hire for mission (which it certainly is), it could at least demand that faculty be tolerant of arguments on different sides of an issue. But in fact, Marquette doesn’t mind politically incorrect arguments being shut up — even when those arguments support Catholic teaching.

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.

WILL: Academic Freedom Wins at State Supreme Court

Our client, Dr. John McAdams, gets to teach at Marquette again

July 6, 2018 – Milwaukee, WI -- Today the Supreme Court of Wisconsin delivered a clear, decisive victory for our client, Dr. John McAdams, a conservative political science professor who was indefinitely suspended by Marquette University for blogging on a controversial topic. The victory ends a nearly four year fight between the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty and Marquette University to have McAdams reinstated.

As we have argued since the beginning, the only thing Professor McAdams wants to do is to teach students with the academic freedom protections promised by Marquette University. And, because of today’s ruling, McAdams will be back in the classroom very soon.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a decision written by Justice Dan Kelly, found that Professor McAdams’ blog post in defense of an undergraduate student - and criticizing a graduate student instructor - could not possibly have shown him to be unfit as a member of Marquette’s faculty, and Marquette’s decision to fire him violated its contractual promise to protect his academic freedom.

In addition, according to the Court, a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position. The Court rejected the notion that disciplinary decisions regarding free speech by faculty members should be made by administration or faculty. The concept of academic freedom is worthless unless it protects expression which is opposed by the institution and is unpopular with most of the faculty.

Furthermore, today’s decision from the Wisconsin Supreme Court relies on one of the simplest rules of fairness – you cannot punish somebody for violating a rule that did not exist when it was supposedly “broken.” Universities are free to create rules – even strict rules – about what their tenured professors can and cannot say publicly. What they cannot do is make up rules after the fact to punish a professor they want to get rid of.

We sincerely hope Marquette University learns from its mistakes and takes the utmost care at preserving free speech on campus. Unfortunately, the response today from Marquette gives us some pause. Marquette’s statement hints at curtailing academic speech for all their professors, which should alarm students and professors across the political spectrum. They repeat the claim– first made by the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) – that private employers must have the right to set their own standards for employees. Their attorney declared that today’s decision “should be of grave concern to private businesses.”

That is, of course, nonsense. As explained by Justice Rebecca Bradley in her concurrence, “the doctrine of academic freedom has no application within private enterprise, unless of course a private entity incorporates the doctrine into employee contracts.” The only entities that should be concerned of today’s decision are universities who promise free speech to their professors and do not keep that promise.

All across the country, academic freedom is under assault on campuses. Universities are treating academic freedom as the right to say only what administrators or the loudest factions on campus approve of.

But today, the Wisconsin Supreme Court struck a major blow in favor of free speech, delivering the unequivocal message that “academic freedom” means just that.

###

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 Warrior on Vicki McKenna, April 12

The subject: what else, our ongoing legal battle with Marquette University.

Liberal Lawyer Discusses Marquette’s Attempt to Fire Warrior Blogger

Marquette Buys Google Ad to Attack Warrior Blogger

Marquette, knowing they have been taking a public relations beating over their attempt to fire this blogger, has bought a Google ad to point people to their biased and selective page of “resources” on our case.

We do not know how much they are paying per “click through,” but the top position in a Google search does not come cheap.

Click to Enlarge

This ad may not show on every Google search, since even Marquette, which has paid well up into six figures in legal fees in an attempt to fire us, may not have set the “budget” high enough to show on every search. But then, they might raise it.

After all, the money doesn’t come from the pockets of the bureaucrats trying to fire us. It comes from students’ tuition money, and perhaps from endowment given by alumni who thought they were giving to improve the educational experience for students.

Libel

One utterly libelous thing Marquette has posted is the claim that we “doxed” the instructor about whom we posted, one Cheryl Abbate.  Abbate, remember,  told an undergraduate that he was not allowed to express opposition to gay marriage in class since it would be “homophobic” and would “offend” any gay students in class.

“Doxing” is defined as follows:

To dox someone is “to publicly identify or publish private information about (someone) especially as a form of punishment or revenge.”

We, of course, did no such thing. 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.

But just how is an e-mail address somebody publishes on their own blog “private information?”

Marquette, quite simply, is lying about this.

But that increasingly characterizes their jihad against this blogger. Marquette has falsely claimed that Abbate received threats. They claimed that Abbate had to leave Marquette because of our blog post.

The real impetus for the jihad was our several years of exposing misconduct at the University, and revealing the multiple ways Marquette has trashed its supposed “Catholic identity.”

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.

Amicus in Our Case: Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Among several organizations what have filed amicus briefs in our case against Marquette University is the nation’s top organization protecting free expression on campus: the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Their brief is here.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some highlights:

The lower court’s ruling threatens professors’ free speech and academic freedom rights. While this case may, at first blush, seem to present a relatively narrow contract dispute between a private religious university and a tenured member of its faculty, the core dispute between Professor John McAdams and Marquette University must be viewed in the broader context in which it arose. Around the country, the free speech and academic freedom rights of faculty are being eroded by students, administrators, and members of the general public demanding censorship and by administrations caving to those demands. This capitulation is to the serious detriment of American higher education and ultimately the health of our democracy.

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.

. . .

Echoing this national commitment to academic freedom, Marquette vows to protect the “the full and free enjoyment of legitimate personal or academic freedoms of thought, doctrine, discourse, association, advocacy, or action” — a promise bolstered by the assurance that “dismissal will not be used to restrain faculty members in their exercise of academic freedom or other rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution.” Handbook for Full-Time Faculty, Marquette Univ. (Aug. 27, 2013), available at http://www.marquette.edu/provost/307.php. This Court should grant review to hold Marquette true to its word. [link in document updated]

The lower court’s ruling threatens free speech and academic freedom by sanctioning the termination of a tenured professor simply for publicly criticizing what he believed to be dangerous pedagogical practices. The lower court correctly recognizes that “[a]cademic freedom allows both faculty members and students to engage in intellectual debate without fear of censorship or retaliation and it establishes a faculty member’s right to remain true to his or her pedagogical philosophy and intellectual commitments.” McAdams v. Marquette Univ., No. 16-cv-003396, at 24 (Wis. Cir. Ct. May 4, 2017). But despite seeming to grasp academic freedom’s crucial importance, the court dramatically undermines its utility by finding that criticizing a graduate student instructor by name in extramural writing is “professional misconduct” — indeed, a violation of the “protection against harassment and criticism” from faculty members to which graduate students are “entitled.” Id. at 25.

This broad limitation upon what faculty may say, both professionally and as citizens, is flatly incompatible with the lower court’s own understanding of academic freedom. How may a faculty member “engage in intellectual debate without fear of censorship or retaliation” if, by naming the proponent of an opposing view, he or she risks sanction? How might a faculty member “remain true to his or her pedagogical philosophy and intellectual commitments” if he or she is prohibited from rebutting critics by name? If termination is an acceptable consequence of the heated debate and sharpelbowed public criticism that pedagogical dispute may spark, then academic freedom is a dead letter.

The lower court attempts to justify McAdams’ punishment by arguing that his blog post violated the graduate student’s rights. “In short,” the court argues, “academic freedom gives a professor, such as Dr. McAdams, the right to express his views in speeches, writings and on the internet, so long as he does not infringe on the rights of others.” McAdams, supra, at 25. But the court fails to explain exactly how publicly criticizing a graduate student’s performance as an instructor “infringe[s]” upon his or her rights. As FIRE explained to Marquette University President Michael R. Lovell:

If criticism of the ideas proposed, and pedagogical choices made, by fellow instructors in this context are not protected by Marquette’s seemingly robust promises of academic freedom, then it is not clear what is. While in its public statements Marquette professes that “all of our graduate student teaching assistants are students first,” the fact is that teaching and its associated public responsibilities are a pillar of doctoral studies and that they inevitably introduce the possibility of having one’s teaching methods critiqued, perhaps publicly. Of course, graduate instructors in such positions enjoy the same rights of free speech and academic freedom to defend their ideas and pedagogical choices against such criticisms as their faculty peers.

Like Marquette during its disciplinary proceedings, the lower court fails to satisfactorily explain why McAdams may be punished, and his academic freedom abridged, because of the actions of others over whom he had no control. McAdams’ criticism was not incitement; it was neither “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” nor “likely to incite or produce such action.” Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444, 447 (1969). He cannot fairly be held responsible for whatever those who read his blog entry may have communicated to the graduate student. If others unlawfully threatened or harassed the graduate student McAdams criticized, any proper remedy lies against them. Holding otherwise leaves faculty in the impossible position of being professionally liable for the unlawful actions of independent and unknown third parties.

The brief then gives accounts of professors who have been fired because of controversial statements they made. Interestingly, most of the cases involve leftist professors. This smacks of an argument being made to leftists saying, in effect “if you don’t stand up for the rights of a conservative professor, some of your buddies could be next to be fired.”

Whether this has any resonance, or whether leftists are so confident in their power on a typical campus that they are unmoved, is an interesting question.