This professor shreds any iota of credibility she may have had with such verbal garbage. Reading stuff like this makes me cringe waiting for the inevitable right-wing responses. Breitbart couldn’t make up a better narrative.
Just for reference, the accusation of racism seems to stem from this statement she made in the Houston Astrodome, which was being used to shelter people who had been evacuated from New Orleans after Katrina.
Medium magazine is interpreting this statement in the following manner:
I’d assume that she meant it in the sense that she meant that these people didn’t have many prospects - no spare savings that they could use to find housing, establish themselves somewhere else, etc. - so it was good that the Astrodome had been repurposed for the situation.
Not to say that she wasn’t a racist - for all I know she was - but the argument seems like someone did their best to misread the words to support the view they wanted to have of her.
It’s been suggested on this board that, when someone like Richard Spencer shows up on a college campus, the people demanding that he be kicked off are interfering with his right to free speech - perhaps not in a legal sense, but certainly in the philosophical sense. It’s been explicitly argued that this demonstrates that liberals do not understand or appreciate the concept of free speech.
Would you agree that the conservatives who have demanded this woman be fired for being mean about a dead lady are proof of a similar lack of understanding of or appreciation for free speech among American conservatives? If not, can you explain why it’s okay for conservatives to demand that an employee lose her job over her speech, but it’s not okay liberals to demand that a guest speaker be dis-invited over his speech?
You previously created a thread to subtly attack students who disagreed with a professor and exercised their free speech rights, yet didn’t feel the need to defend this other professor?
The students in my thread went a bit beyond just ‘disagreeing’ with the professor:
AFAIK, “this other professor” has not been credibly threatened with violence for her speech (but if she is, I condemn those threatening violence against someone for saying something disagreeable).
I don’t care what that woman says. But if we are going to have speech police and thought police everyone should be afraid and not just some on the fringe right.
She’s alienated Republican students with her comment and they would have every right to suspect she would not grade fairly. What if she said something racially stupid about (pick a politician and use your imagination)?
Municipalities routinely fire people over stuff like this.
There’s nothing wrong with what she said. The idea that it’s grossly offensive to call someone racist is stupid. It’s an idea that was created by racists to shield themselves. They can pretend that being called racist is worse than being racist. And any claim by the right about some sort of decorum died when they elected Trump, and refuse to try to get rid of him. When you say that political correctness is bad, they don’t get to turn around and then try to enforce political correctness.
That said, they have a right to their own hypocrisy. I have no problem with them using their speech to demand she be fired. She shouldn’t be fired, mind you, and I would consider that a bad thing if she were, but the people who want her fired have the right to say so. Just like the kids have a right to say they don’t want a particular speaker on their campus. The school would be within their rights, IMO, to limit her public speaking roles, but not in firing her. She should only be fired for making the school look bad or doing a bad job, neither of which has she done.
The thing the right does need to understand is that they can’t tell the left that being offended is wrong, and then turn around and have a different reaction when their ox is gored, and not be seen as total hypocrites who don’t really believe the shit they say.
Oh, and finally, firing for giving out the wrong number is stupid, and comes from people looking for an excuse to condone firing her without the hypocrisy. The people who would call to harass her do in fact need mental health care. It’s only a problem if there are a lot of people who want to harass her.
This is a lady who showed you what it means to not be politically correct. Do you think there aren’t many people who feel the same way about Mrs. Bush? They were just being PC in not mentioning it.
Political correctness is just basic politeness. It just means not saying something at time when it might offend a lot of people. It means not saying what is correct, but only saying what is politically correct.
I would say it depends on what basis they are saying she should be fired. From a corporate perspective, or even a (local) government one, I can say that usually if someone is that much of an asshole they would, at best, but slapped about by HR. This has nothing to do with her 1st Amendment rights and everything to do with image. I would say the same if she was a conservative, a liberal, a communist or even a moderate…
How are students who disagree with her political viewpoint supposed to trust her to be fair when she says: “Either you are against these pieces of s— and their genocidal ways or you’re part of the problem.”
The problem BigT is the hypocrisy from the left. Those who badger, riot, and assault at public universities to suppress speech they don’t like now want to protect this troll of a professor with a concept they are quick to discard when it suits their purposes. Sad.
This may be a GQ question, and I don’t mean to hijack the thread, but I’ve always wondered: The First Amendment only says that “Congress” shall not prohibit free speech. What prevents state governments, city councils, public universities, and every form of American government not named “Congress” from banning free speech?
My assumption would be that it relies something on the logic that it’s the same thing for Congress to infringe free speech as it is for Congress to create an organization that infringes free speech. You can’t just let them avoid the Constitution by finding or creating proxies.
It’s mildly interesting to me that you left off the source for this claim. The article says:
She has since removed / blocked / privatized / whatever her tweets, so I can’t even verify that she tweeted that, let alone whether she actually received death threats. In any case, it certainly doesn’t appear to have risen to the level that police were warning her to stay away from campus over concerns for her safety, does it?
She should not be fired and I’ve said on social media that she should not be fired. The world already knows she’s a ridiculous person, isn’t that enough?
There’s a division on the right on issues like this: about a third of people are just as censorious as the PC left, another third are free speech defenders, and another third want to claim scalps simply to get revenge on the left or to send a message. The latter third have a point. For all that lefties love to make people lose their jobs when they say things they don’t like, as much as they like to boycott, in the real world this tactic hurts liberals more than it does right-wingers. So a lot of right-wingers argue to keep on doing it to them until they learn. So I also take the opportunity whenever a lefty on social media is defending Colin Kaepernick or Kathy Griffin or this professor, “Hey, why don’t we change the culture back to tolerance of offensive speech?”
Who wants to “riot and assault”? No one in this thread that I’m aware of, and no more than a barest fringe of liberals/leftists (and conservatives/rightists).
