Georgetown law professor Paul Butler calls for a newly hired colleague, Ilya Shapiro, to be fired for an offensive tweet, but offers no account of academic freedom or its limits. (A faculty letter organized by F.I.R.E. correctly noted that it would violate AAUP academic freedom rules to fire Shapiro. See also.) As mathematician Craig Larson (Virginia Commonwealth) wrote to me,
[Butler] thinks his colleague should be fired over a tweet. He never states any principle that might be discussed, but implies something like: "If you tweet something that is offensive to some group of students, making it *impossible* to teach that group of students, then you should be fired".
That he hasn't thought this through is easy to see: the principle could equally be applied to evolutionary biologists who ever say that the bible account of creation is false, to cartesian physcists who are offended by those upstart newtonians, to Peter Singer, etc, etc.
Anyone with a different view from a professor might claim that it is *impossible* to learn from some professor. Maybe Butler thinks professors shouldn't have any extra-mural opinions?
Another Georgetown professor, David Cole, fortunately understands the AAUP academic freedom principles:
Shapiro’s message was offensive, but if academic freedom is to mean anything, those two tweets can’t be a firing offense. And without academic freedom, the voices suppressed are as likely to be those of critical race theorists as opponents of affirmative action.
On Twitter, philosopher Jennifer Frey (South Carolina) made a similar and astute observation about Professor Allen's ill-considered proposal to sanction extramural speech:
Why don't people realize that the tables will get turned on them once they dissolve academic freedom? It's just such a failure of imagination and lack of attunement to political reality.
Indeed, little imagination is required at this point: just look at what's happening in Texas.
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