Another week, another example of colleges succumbing to a sick fetish for racializing and penalizing things that actually aren’t racist. The good news is that some faculty are fighting back. It’s time for university boards to fight back, too.
The blog Legal Insurrection has a full account of the hullabaloo at the University of San Diego law school. Thomas Smith, a professor there for 29 years, wrote in a March 10 blog post that anyone who doubts the coronavirus escaped from a lab in Wuhan should “at least consider that you are an idiot who is swallowing whole a lot of Chinese cock swaddle.” He did so after posting several paragraphs from a Wall Street Journal article about the Chinese government’s interference with a delegation from the World Health Organization.
Right on cue, several student groups went bananas by accusing Smith of contributing to an atmosphere that helped foment “the nearly 4000 hate incidents reported against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States over the last year.” A petition signed by the outgoing and incoming student bar association presidents demanded Smith’s resignation or his firing by the university, and a representative of the “Asian and Pacific Islander student association” called the blog post “racist.” Further on cue, a cowardly dean named Robert Schapiro announced that because Smith used “offensive language in reference to people from China” that “demeans a particular national group,” he had convened an inquiry “to review whether university or law school policies have been violated.”
He did this even though Smith had posted an “update” to his blog post reemphasizing that he was “referring to the Chinese government,” not to Chinese people in general as an “ethnic group.”
Now it was obvious to any reasonable reader, even before the update, that Smith was writing the Chinese government. While we can question his use of the curious but completely nonracial term “cock swaddle” that can have an offensive or an inoffensive meaning, he was unambiguously assailing the Communist Chinese government, which deserves the criticism.
Nonetheless, because the woke mob howled “racism,” the dean threatened disciplinary action against Smith for comments wrongly imputed to have denigrated a whole race. The university media relations office specifically accused the blog post of representing a “form of bias” that might have violated school policies against “slurs based on race.”
Fortunately, several other professors from the law school are fighting back on Smith’s behalf. In a letter to the dean, they wrote that “an academic institution committed to free inquiry cannot allow misplaced accusations of bigotry to become an all-purpose tool for silencing critical comment.” They complain that the words and tone of the dean’s letter create “the impression that judgment has been rendered in advance and the outcome of the promised review has been predetermined” to find Smith guilty.
This sort of response from Smith’s colleagues ought to become commonplace anywhere and everywhere academic freedom is threatened by whiny students and lickspittle administrators. Still, honorably dissenting faculty carry only so much weight. Unless the administrators feel the heat, they will surely continue to bow to the mobs.
What is needed is for university boards of directors, whether public or private, to put administrators on notice that any interference with academic liberty, especially without full and fair due process, will not be tolerated. Indeed, boards should tell administrators that they risk their own jobs if they side against academic freedom.
Now that should wake up those administrators. As the saying goes, sometimes the only way to get an official’s attention is to break a little china.
