Greg Manco is fighting back against the totalitarians of left-wing academia.
Manco, who was fired from Saint Joseph’s University last year over tweets arguing against reparations, filed a federal lawsuit against the college alleging discrimination against him on the basis of race and defamation, among other charges.
Manco was a math professor at the school for 17 years. He did not have any history of complaints against him, and he constantly received strong reviews from the students he taught — evidence that he provided in the lawsuit. In an exclusive interview, Manco told me he loved teaching at Saint Joseph’s. He also felt the need to defend himself and his reputation.
“I have worked and coached at SJU for a third of my life,” he said. “It’s a great place. Obviously, I wish none of this ever happened. It did happen, however, so now, I have to restore whatever is left of my unjustly shredded reputation and hold accountable the individuals who are responsible. Everything needs to come to light.”
What was the egregious act that caused Saint Joseph’s to remove him? Tweets from February 2021 arguing against President Joe Biden’s push to study reparations.
“Suppose your great-great-grandfather murdered someone,” he tweeted Feb. 17. “The victim’s great-great-grandson knocks on your door, shows you the newspaper clipping from 1905, and demands compensation from you. Your response? Now get this racist reparation bulls*** out of your head for good.”
The tweets allegedly offended some students. They made them uncomfortable.
And that’s how it works in many colleges throughout the country nowadays. If someone provides an opinion that runs counter to far-left orthodoxy, and apparently even from a semianonymous Twitter account, students get “scared” and “uncomfortable,” and administrations take action.
“My tweets have been determined to be biased and/or discriminatory, according to the email that I received on the day this all broke,” Manco told me. “The same email said that the university was ‘concerned about the impact on students in the classroom.’”
Shortly thereafter, he was placed on leave and subsequently fired. What is even stranger is that the school exonerated him after its investigation, but he was still fired.
“To be exact, it was the external investigator hired by the school who completely exonerated me,” he said. “The university, who keeps all of the investigation documents under tight wraps, decided to knowingly misrepresent her conclusions in media statements. That’s one of the many defamation claims I have in my lawsuit.”
Despite this vindication, St. Joe’s still did not allow him to return. They then proceeded to not renew his contract.
“University officials then proceeded to not renew my full-time contract, just a month later, for alleged ‘need-based’ staffing reasons,” he told me. “This is an obvious pretext. An unbiased jury will ultimately come to that conclusion. But here’s the thing. Even if you assume that the nonrenewal was completely unrelated, it makes all the other administrative misconduct significantly more egregious. That right before pointing me to the unemployment line they had to destroy my character. Totally reprehensible.”
The entire situation is a gross miscarriage of justice. A professor offers his opinions about something unrelated to his coursework on an anonymous Twitter account. A bigoted, intolerant, agenda-driven student didn’t agree with it and maliciously acted to get Manco removed from teaching. What is even more arrogant and insulting was that the student gloated about his firing on an Instagram account.
“Oooops….did I do that…” was typed over a picture of a Philadelphia Inquirer article about the incident in an Instagram story. Subsequent stories from the account defamed Manco. In another Instagram story, there was a picture of the tweet against reparations. The student typed over the picture, saying, “When I took this man for stat I had a feeling he didn’t like black people but now reading his Twitter I know that he does not like black people.”
In other stories, she referred to the school as having “white supremacist alumni” and labeled other white people who worked at the university as “white supremacists.”
Basically, any white person with whom this bigoted, hateful student disagreed, she labeled a white supremacist. This is the toxic culture that exists on college campuses because of left-wing indoctrination and administrators willing to enable such behavior.
“I would add that this is an important case in that we are not only calling out SJU’s sacrifice of my client to the cancel culture mob, but we are also taking action against the individuals who conspired with SJU to defame Mr. Manco,” his lawyer told me. “For too long, professors and students with mainstream American viewpoints have been shouted down by the leftists who control our higher education system. Hopefully, this case will help point the way towards changing that awful paradigm.”
There are far too many left-wing totalitarian aggressors on college campuses throughout the country who act constantly in bad faith. Thanks to them, civil disagreements can no longer exist. Students have been brainwashed to believe false ideas about such fatuities as “microaggressions” and to regard any opinion that does not fit leftist orthodoxy as “racist.”
This country needs more brave teachers like Manco who are willing to fight back. Hopefully, court battles like his will help make cancel culture too expensive for university administrators to embrace.
