I suppose it was inevitable that the death last week of the Queen of England would lead to a Twitter controversy, and it did. There is a full account, with screen shots, at CHE. Professor Uju Anya (Carnegie-Mellon), upon hearing the news that the Queen was on her death bed, wrote: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”
It is hard to quarrel with the first sentence. Indeed, the New York Times even made note the other day of the brutal events in Kenya at the time the late Queen ascended to the throne. Of course, the Queen, or King, has had little to do with running the Empire in a rather long time; Elizabeth may have been its symbolic head, but she was not the instigator of its policies.
No doubt it was Professor Anya's pathetic second sentence that accounted for the infamy her tweet quickly acquired. Sentiments like those Professor Anya expressed are just manifestations of the viciousness of impotence: unable to actually do anything about the crimes of Empire, she substitutes a bit of creepy malice towards its symbolic head. Her subsequent Twitter "defense" read:
If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.
Expressing "disdain" is one thing, and would not have attracted any attention, but of course she did more than that.
Alas, Carnegie-Mellon did not cover itself in glory. In response to the brouhaha, the University tweeted that it "does not condone the offensive and objectionable messages" tweeted out by its faculty member, noting that her views "do not represent the values of the institution, nor standards of discourse we seek to foster." Personally, I do not condone statements like this by universities about the lawful speech of their faculty, but that is about as relevant as Carnegie-Mellon's tweet: CMU doesn't have to answer to me, and Professor Anya does not have to answer for her lawful speech to the university. I've written about this before, but there is only one proper response for a university actually committed to the AAUP academic freedom rights of its faculty in situations like this:
Faculty have a legal right to express their views on matters of public interest without sanction or reprimand from the university. In so doing, they speak as individuals and citizens, and not for or on behalf of the university.
I encourage other universities to try this response in the future. It will spare them a lot of trouble!
(Thanks to Guha Krishnamurthi for some of the pointers.)
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