When I read that Montclair State University in New Jersey had removed shooting-obsessed adjunct professor Kevin Allred from its course roster, my first thought was: Now who’s gonna teach “Policitizing Beyoncé”?
For Allred could be said to own Queen Bey as an academic specialty. Before Montclair State hired and then fired him, he had been teaching “Politicizing Beyoncé” at Rutgers University as an adjunct for six years when he was abruptly canned (or more precisely, placed on leave and barred from teaching) in November 2016 after tweeting, “Will the Second Amendment be as cool when I buy a gun and start shooting at random white people or no …?” Alarmed Rutgers administrators had informed the police in New York City, and the Brooklyn-dwelling Allred was briefly detained for a psychological evaluation.
Apparently having passed the psycho test with flying colors, Allred maintained that the tweet had been a political commentary on then-President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric assuring his supporters, that, unlike the alleged would-be gun-grabber Hillary Clinton, he would protect their Second Amendment right to bear arms. After the incident Allred posted such tweets as “YES, my 2nd amendment tweet was incendiary but completely w/in free speech. ZERO direct threat involved. posed as a rhetorical question” and “was donald trump forced to submit to a psych eval when he told 2nd amendment supporters to go take Hillary Clinton into their own hands?”
Still despite protests from the Rutgers faculty union, Allred was gone. It was an obvious loss for the Rutgers Bey-hive. In 2015, Rutgers’s women’s studies department, for which Allred had originally taught “Politicizing Beyoncé,” dropped the course from its spring roster, generating quite a bit of backlash —for it turned out that “Politicizing Beyoncé” was the most popular course on the Rutgers campus. Fortunately for the Queen’s many Jersey fans, Rutgers’s American-studies department picked up the course, and Allred was happily teaching it for what was then the twelfth time.
His Twitter fascination with the double themes of Donald Trump and shooting continued as well. On July 28 he combined the two in this since-deleted tweet Trump is a f[—-]ing joke. This is all a sham. i wish someone would just shoot him outright.”
Allred maintained in subsequent tweets that his stated hope for a Trump assassination had been merely a “hyperbolic expression” and that it was tit-for-tat given Allred’s belief that “Trump’ wants Americans dead” by seeking to remove their Obamacare coverage. Still, Montclair promptly informed Allred by email that his services would no longer be required.
Furthermore, according to Inside Higher Education:
Montclair State then issued this statement via email: “Kevin Allred has never been an employee of Montclair State University, is not one at this time, and the university has not made any formal offer of employment to him.”
The only problem: The university had already posted a faculty profile of Allred on its website complete with an official Montclair State email address (since-deleted) for the Beyoncé scholar. Montclair now says the posting was an employee’s mistake.
Allred’s plight at Montclair State has garnered him support from the free speech-focused Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (which also backed him in the Rutgers controversy, as both are public institutions):
[FIRE attorney Ari] Cohn…said that it was unconstitutional for a public university to take away someone’s job for “protected speech” and that Allred’s tweet was well within the legal definitions of protected speech. He said it was clearly not literal and was a use of rhetoric to criticize a
government leader.
It’s hard not to agree that Allred’s tweets were nothing more than First Amendment-protected Park Slope hyperbole and to wish him luck in any quest for justice he might embark upon. But there’s something far more pressing. “Politicizing Beyoncé” promised this meaty intellectual fare to the hundreds of students who signed up for the course:
On the surface, Beyoncé might seem to deploy messages about race, gender, class, and sexuality that appear to coincide with certain stereotypical social norms; but during this course we ask: how does she also challenge our very understanding of these categories? How does Beyoncé’s work challenge the boundaries of these categories to make space for and embrace other perhaps more “deviant” bodies, desires, and/or politics? We will position Beyoncé as a progressive, feminist, and queer icon through meticulous examination of her work and career alongside historical and contemporary black feminist writing. We won’t read about Beyoncé; rather, these juxtapositions will put her work in conversation with larger issues in an attempt to answer: can Beyoncé’s music be seen as a blueprint for progressive social change?
And if Allred will no longer be asking those crucial questions about the five-Grammy billionairess in the halls of academe, who will?
