BY HANK REICHMAN

In a recent zoom meeting I had occasion to meet Monica Casper, dean of the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University.  Dean Casper mentioned that she had recently been the target of online harassment and controversy for some tweets she had posted.  Curious, I looked into the case and found an op-ed piece in the Times of San Diego by Peter C. Herman, professor of English literature at San Diego State, that commented on the matter, and not very favorably toward either Dean Casper or the San Diego State administration.  I won’t say what I think about the content of Dean Casper’s tweets–she’s entitled to her opinions–but Professor Herman’s take reflects an all too common attitude toward such controversies that merits analysis.

He begins with what appears to be a fairly honest and forthright description of the incident:

On Dec. 1. Monica Casper, dean of the College of Arts and Letters at San Diego State University, tweeted: “Just so we’re clear on the Right’s agenda — racism good, abortion bad, money good, women bad, capitalism good, sustainability bad, stupidity good, science bad, power good, equality bad, white people good, nonwhite people bad.  Stench, indeed.”

And a day later, Casper followed up with this observation about the Supreme Court: “Two sexual predators, a white lady, and some racists walk into a courtroom…”  Sure enough, the conservative media picked up the story.

First, on Dec. 21, The College Fix, a right-leaning online news site focusing on higher education, ran a story about how an “SDSU dean publicly criticizes ‘stench’ of conservative agenda.”  The next day, Fox News ran a more extensive story on their national site which has garnered, as of this writing, over 8,000 comments.

While SDSU did not respond to the first story, the university provided this statement to Fox defending Casper:

“It is important to know that faculty speech is protected by both the First Amendment and academic freedom principles, which are advanced by the American Association of University Professors,” the school said in a statement to Fox News. “At SDSU, we encourage all members of our community, including our faculty, to engage in open discourse, as it is our responsibility as a public institution to uphold and protect free speech. We know that open dialogue may introduce conversations about topics that are uncomfortable for some.”

So far, so good, although Herman fails to mention the torrent of abuse to which Casper was subjected online.  Still, we learn from him the specifics of what happened and that the university issued what should be a pretty standard defense of academic freedom and free speech.  Herman, however, isn’t finished.  He continues:

There is much to regret about Casper’s tweets.  For someone in her position to bluntly state that everyone who leans “Right” is automatically a racist who thinks that all “nonwhite people” are “bad” is hardly engaging in “open discourse.”

Casper holds considerable power over her faculty’s professional lives. After reading her tweets, how can anyone who even slightly disagrees with her, or holds a more nuanced position on, say, abortion, hope for fair and objective treatment?  And while one could easily charge Amy Coney Barrett with religious zealotry, dissing her as a “white lady” is, well, racist.  What does her skin color have to do with her legal opinions?

This, to be frank, is pretty ridiculous.  Coney Barrett is, after all, indeed “a white lady” just as Clarence Thomas is “a black man.”  So what?  Moreover, how often do we hear from not only people on the Right but people in the center and, most importantly, in the media about extreme views allegedly held by “the Left” without acknowledging that not every “leftist” would agree.  Is it permissible to imply that all Leftists wish to defund the police or believe that all white people are responsible for slavery, views frequently repeated by critics in both the media and academia itself, but not to suggest–in a tweet nonetheless!–that the Right harbors folks who think that racism is good?

Most important and troubling, is Professor Herman’s suggestion that because “Casper holds considerable power” over the faculty in her college her tweets imply that those who disagree with her (or just with these tweets?) can not even “hope for fair and objective treatment.”  If that were true, then no dean anywhere could hold any even mildly contested opinion for fear that faculty members who disagree might be entitled to complain that they could not be treated fairly.  It’s crazy!

In addition, as another conservative faculty member, Princeton’s Keith Whittington, wrote on this blog in reference to the truly racist right-winger Penn law professor Amy Wax, “professors are allowed to denigrate groups of people in such a way that students might fear that they will not be treated fairly in the classroom.  Professors are not allowed to in fact treat students unfairly.”  If that is the case, then it is surely also the case that a dean should be allowed to make controversial remarks that faculty members find offensive, but that dean should not be allowed actually to treat those faculty members unfairly.  And, of course, Herman musters not a shred of evidence that Casper has ever done that.  He doesn’t even suggest it.  Moreover, the fact that, as a faculty member in the college Casper administers, Herman himself felt free (as he should) to criticize his dean in a local newspaper would certainly indicate that he personally does not fear unfair treatment from her.  Of course, he has no reason to.

In Understanding Academic Freedom I wrote, “administrators with academic responsibilities … should be entitled to the same academic freedom rights as faculty members with regard to their extramural expression.  Such expression should only be relevant when it bears upon the individual’s fitness for the position.  Criteria of fitness for an administrative position, however, may differ from those for a strictly faculty position” (p. 107-8).  How Casper’s tweets bear upon her fitness to serve as either a dean or a professor of sociology (her discipline and her tenured position) sure beats me!

But the offensive “whataboutism” emerges when Herman gets to the substance of his argument, that “what’s most disturbing is the apparent bias of the university jumping to Casper’s defense when it refused to do the same for others.”  Here is that argument:

In 2018, shortly after President Adela de la Torre arrived, someone sought to discredit a conservative economics professor by digging up and publishing satires that this person published when he was an undergraduate over twenty years ago.  Rather than defending this distinguished member of the faculty and denouncing the use of ancient juvenilia to discredit him, the university responded by condemning the professor: “The language and sentiments expressed in these posts are counter to the values of any institution which supports the principles of diversity and inclusion.”

President de la Torre then tweeted her “personal statement” on the matter:

 

To state the obvious, nobody in the administration called for “open dialogue,” and asked for forbearance for his raising topics that may be “uncomfortable for some.”  Nobody said, this is ridiculous, he wrote these things two decades ago, they have nothing to do with his present work.

I know nothing of this prior controversy and Herman offers no additional links to information about it.  Statements other than those made by the professor in his youth may also have been in contention, but I’m happy to accept Herman’s version of the case.  That’s because I don’t think faculty members should be disciplined in any way for statements made many years ago, just as I don’t think they should be disciplined solely for extramural statements they may make today.  I also think university leaders are most often best served by not commenting on the content of controversial statements made by members of their faculty.  In that light, President de la Torre may well have been mistaken to do so in this earlier case.

That said, however, just because the president acted poorly (if we accept Herman’s account at face value) in an earlier case, does not mean that she should have repeated the error in this case.  I would hope that the president learned from the previous case that it is usually (but not always) best, whether the controversy comes from the Left or the Right, not to take sides but simply to emphasize that faculty members (and, in cases like this, deans) do not speak for the institution when they speak as citizens and that their expression is protected by academic freedom and, at a public university, the First Amendment.

Ironically, it appears that in the end President de la Torre actually did release a statement similar to the one she made about the economics professor.  Not long after Herman published his piece, she declared in a Twitter post of her own, “As we closed out 2021, a difficult year for many people, we know there are those who are hurt and unhappy about Twitter posts by SDSU Dean Monica Casper.  I will always stand by the right to free speech, but I do not condone or agree with what she said.  I do not support actions that seek to divide us or undermine civic discourse for any reason” (see news coverage here).

Herman continues with another “what about”:

In 2020, a University Senate committee entertained a proposal to revoke emeritus status (an honor which grants retired professors the right to use the library and other university resources) if an individual’s conduct “causes harm to the university’s reputation.”  Obviously, this was an attempt at disciplining faculty whose speech the powers that be did not like.

After much public scrutiny and articles in the San Diego Union Tribune and Inside Higher Ed, they decided to suspend, but not cancel, the idea.  In fact, the Academic Senate for the CSU is now considering a proposal that would allow for revoking emeritus status “in cases of serious misconduct or just cause that contravenes basic university or public policy.”

I completely agree that revoking emeritus status–or, for that matter, taking any sort of disciplinary action against a faculty member–merely for allegedly causing “harm” to a university’s “reputation” is a violation of academic freedom and reprehensible.  But, as Herman’s account acknowledges, the senate stepped back from that foolish proposal.  The proposal now being considered by the system senate sounds like a more reasonable one.  Certainly, a university must be able to regulate “serious misconduct or just cause that contravenes basic university or public policy” without fearing that such regulation would violate academic freedom.  And the way to do so is to provide effective due process and presumption of innocence protections.  San Diego State faculty members, whose employment is covered by the collective bargaining agreement between the AAUP-affiliated California Faculty Association and the California State University system, are entitled to such protection.  (Deans, however, are not, as they are management employees.  Dean Casper will be protected should she choose or be asked to return to her tenured faculty position.)

Herman’s conclusion, based on this flimsy evidence, is a classic example of argument by exaggeration:

In the past, nobody told anybody what to teach or the direction of their research.  Now, the University is nudging everyone into ideological conformity.  What assistant professor is going to risk their career by not saying what everyone knows is expected of them?  Who is going to risk saying that capitalism has its benefits, that for some, abortion is morally problematic, that dividing people by skin color is just not a good idea?  Who would be brave or foolish enough to think differently, especially after Casper has made her views entirely clear?

So it’s a bit rich that the university immediately jumps to Casper’s defense on the grounds of free speech and academic freedom.  Because increasingly, at SDSU, speech is not free.

This is absurd.  Let’s take the first sentence, “In the past, nobody told anybody what to teach or the direction of their research.”  Really?!!  Where?  More than a century of AAUP investigations says otherwise.  I also guess Herman wasn’t thinking of events in 1992 at San Diego State in which 111 tenured professors and 35 probationary faculty members were informed that “because of lack of funds or lack of work” they would be laid off.  The layoffs never happened, thanks to resistance by the faculty and their union, but the AAUP investigated anyway.  The investigation’s report noted,

It is unsurprising that in the wake of the disregard for the protections of tenure at SDSU charges of violation of academic freedom have been made: that intramural vendettas were settled, that departments were singled out for deeper cuts to reach outspoken critics of the administration.  We have not attempted to assess these charges.  We suspect, given the manner in which the decisions were made, that the allegations cannot be proved.  Nor, for that same reason, can they be disproved.  The disregard of tenure has placed the administration under a cloud of suspicion which, by the very methods it employed, cannot be dispelled; and that fact has contributed significantly to the atmosphere of distrust on the campus.

That was then, of course, and this is now.  But is San Diego State really “nudging everyone into ideological conformity?”  Herman offers not a shred of evidence that it is, other than a passing complaint about diversity statements.  I browsed through the university’s website, including Dean Casper’s “welcome message,” and found no evidence that either students or faculty were being compelled to take any position at all on capitalism, abortion, or race.

“Who is going to risk saying that capitalism has its benefits,” Professor Herman asks.  Well, I suspect, just about anyone.  (I am tempted here to quote at length from the remarkable paean to “the bourgeoisie” and capital found in the opening sections of The Communist Manifesto.)  The benefits of capitalism, I am more than certain, are extolled on a daily basis at San Diego State, and not only in its Fowler College of Business, whose mission is “to educate, engage and empower undergraduate and graduate students and transform them into effective business professionals,” a task kind of difficult to imagine if the faculty cannot speak of capitalism’s benefits.

Or take San Diego State’s Department of History, whose website promises prospective majors that studying History will provide essential skills “whether you wind up teaching, arguing cases in court, or making business presentations [emphasis added]” and that the department’s graduates can, among other careers, succeed as “business people.”  Can it be that the university’s historians think that all that required anti-capitalism Herman warns against is, well, ineffective?  I might also add that there’s an historian in the department who directs an “international business program.”  Maybe Herman thinks American business is no longer capitalist?

I will, however, sort of agree with Professor Herman’s final conclusion.  Yes, at San Diego State “speech is not free.”  Students, after all, do pay tuition, which is too high, and the state does provide tax money, albeit not nearly enough.

Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019.  His Understanding Academic Freedom has recently been published.