I'm always happy to see a university protecting its professors' free-speech rights–but shouldn' there also be some basic standards of civility for professors in social settings?
Take the matter of C. Christine Fair, a "a Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor in the Security Studies Program within Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service," according to her Georgetown web page.
That's quite a title–and Fair seems to think it gives her license to harass and scream at, both in person and on Twitter, everyone whose views she disagrees with.
Fair saw alt-right leader Richard Spencer working out at her gym and decided the appropriate response was getting in his grill – and then bragging about it.
She wrote on Tumblr that she “exploited the full range of my first amendment [sic] entitlements” by cornering Spencer at Old Town Sport&Health, which is near Spencer’s think tank in Alexandria, Virginia:
First, I want to note that this man is a supreme coward. When I approached this flaccid, sorry excuse of a man and asked ‘Are you Richard Spencer,“ this pendulous poltroon said “No. I am not.” But of course he was. …
As a white woman, I find his membership at this gym to be unacceptable. I found his membership at this gym to be an unfair burden upon the women and people of color–and white male allies of the same. I also loudly identified him as a neo-Nazi who has said, inter alia, the below detailed things.
Now, Richard Spencer, who has stated that America ought to be a "white country," is definitely not my ideological cup of tea. But maybe it's because I'm a nearly lone conservative in overwhelmingly liberal Washington, I don't start yelling at how "unacceptable" I find the views of every crazy leftist I run into.
But I guess that being a Georgetown professor with a fancy job title gives you the right to yell insults from your claimed moral high ground at all and sundry, including people who aren't even involved in your political fracas:
Fair writes how shocked she was when Spencer called over a gym employee to intervene when this tantrum-prone person cornered him, because the employee is African American.
Even worse was when another gym patron “defended him and yelled at me for making a scene and threatned [sic] to call the police”:
I told her that when she googles this wretch, she should be ashamed of herself and apologize to me and every employee at this gym who must suffer the indignities of treating this man like a civilized person when he is orthogonal to a civilized person. He a hateful, white supremacist who has no place in this century..much less our gym.
I like the "orthogonal." Nothingly like showing a lowly gym employee who's the big-vocabulary professor. And it gets even better:
She can’t resist joking about violently raping him as if she were criminally hazing a Greek pledge:
Also..f[—] him again. With a giant strap-on and no lube.
Nice! And here's more:
In my book, this is a clear case of a hostile environment being perpetrated by the general manager, who is an indifferent, asinine white feller who demanded that I remove my “Puck Trump” hat a few weeks back while asserting the “right” of this Nazi to join our gym some two months ago.
She even threatened to organize a lawsuit against the gym on behalf of its employees, as well as a boycott, if it didn’t ban Spencer and fire the general manager who tried to protect a customer who did nothing more than work out by his lonesome, unlike a certain shrill elitist with no self-restraint.
The upshot was that the lawsuit-threatened gym promptly terminated–not Fair's membership, as you might think for making a foul-mouthed public nuisance of herself–but Spencer's. Now I'm sure that private clubs have a right to oust people with whose views they violently disagree, expecially if the clubs have minority employees who might be offended. But….
This isn't the first time that the "Puck Trump" hat-wearing professor has publicly bullied someone whose political stance she doesn't care for.
Shortly after inaguration day in January, former Georgetown professor Asra Nomani wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post explaining why she, as a Muslim woman, had voted for Donald Trump. Did she ever catch hell from Fair! The College Fix reported:
As reported by The Hoya [Georgetown's student newspaper], Professor Christine Fair really took exception to Nomani’s article, “first with a Facebook post and later with a, ‘flurry of really rude, dehumanizing, and disrespectful’ tweets,” according to Prof. Nomani.
“Yes. @AsraNomani I’ve written you off as a human being,” Fair tweeted regarding Nomani. “Your vote helped normalize Nazis in DC. What don’t you understand, you clueless dolt?”
Fair proceeded to chastise Nomani in a direct message for her daring to ask for civility: “You got a lot of media out of your vote. Can’t stand the heat? Don’t go into the kitchen. Also I have so little regard for you. Go enjoy the hell you’ve helped create.
“Also go f—k yourself.”
So far, according to Inside Higher Education, Georgetown has declined to discpline Fair over either incident. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education:
A Georgetown spokeswoman issued the following statement on Monday: “While we will defend the academic freedom of our faculty, the views of any faculty member are his/her own and not the views of the university.”
And as the Chronicle reports, Fair is now busy bathing herself in self-pity over a bunch of anti-Semitic (although she's not Jewish) tweets mocking her personal appearance, among other things, that she received from Spencer sympathizers. Yes, the tweets are pretty rude and hateful–although Fair herself ought to know all about that.
And as I said, it's good that Georgetown defend it's professors' freedom of expression, I'd like to know how long an obscene public motormouth of her ilk would last if she had a job in the private sector–as a corporate executive or law-firm partner, for example. Shouldn't there be a standard of professorial decorum fand civility or those who hold themselves out as mentors and examples for young people?