[caption id=”attachment_107270″ align=”aligncenter” width=”2328″] Image via AP/Morry Gash
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A sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has compared Scott Walker to Adolf Hitler and claimed the similarities between the two are “terrifying.”
Sara Goldrick-Rab has made it no secret what she thinks about the Wisconsin governor and 2016 presidential candidate. After Walker signed a state budget on Sunday that repeals tenure guarantees at public colleges and universities, Goldrick-Rab posted a diatribe of comments against Walker on her Twitter account. In one tweet she compares the governor to the mass-murdering dictator of Nazi Germany.
My grandfather, a psychologist, just walked me through similarities between Walker and Hitler. There are so many- it’s terrifying.
— Sara Goldrick-Rab (@saragoldrickrab) July 1, 2015
On July 12, Goldrick-Rab tweeted that Walker “robbed” her of the tenure she spent 20 years working for. She also accused him of taking her job and driving her out of her home state. In another tweet, she called Walker and many other Wisconsin legislators “facists.”
The new Wisconsin law ends the state’s practice of tenure by statute, and will allow each school’s board of regents to decide whether professors have tenure protections.
UW leaders including system President Ray Cross have underlined their commitment to tenure.
“No tenured faculty member should be dismissed — ever — without a rigorous process that is that is rationally developed and in concert with standard practices around the country,” Cross said in an interview with NPR.
Goldrick-Rab defended her tweet comparing Walker to Hitler in an email to The College Fix, saying she had been referring solely to psychological similarities.
“If you reread the tweet, you will see that I stated that an expert in the field — a psychoanalyst with decades of experience — compared the ‘psychological characteristics’ of the two individuals, and that I was struck by his analysis,” she wrote. “There do appear to be commonalities.”
