TAMU Follow-Up: Professor Fired
And let's look at the catalog, shall we?
The President of Texas A&M has issued an additional statement (An Update from President Mark A. Welsh III) wherein we find that the faculty member has been fired, and wherein the only explanation is, again, deviation from the course catalog.
This afternoon, following full consideration of the facts related to this situation, I directed the Provost to terminate the professor involved, effective immediately. Please understand that these decisions were mine alone and were not made lightly. While I cannot provide all the details at this time, I will share the following facts.
This summer, a children’s literature course contained content that did not align with any reasonable expectation of standard curriculum for the course. After this issue was raised, college and department leadership worked with students to offer alternative opportunities for students to complete the course, and made changes to ensure this course content does not continue in future semesters. At that time, I made it clear to our academic leadership that course content must match catalog descriptions for each and every one of our course sections.
However, I learned late yesterday that despite that directive, the college continued to teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course this fall. As a result, I took the above administrative actions, and deans and department heads will conduct an audit of course offerings to ensure they align with the course descriptions.
Our students use the published information in the course catalog to make important decisions about the courses they take in pursuit of their degrees. If we allow different course content to be taught from what is advertised, we break trust with our students. When it comes to our academic offerings, we must keep faith with our students and with the state of Texas.
Let me be as clear as I can be based on the known facts: a human being, Dr. Melissa McCoul, formerly a Senior Lecturer at Texas A&M University, has had her livelihood taken away because politicians have decided that certain topics are verboten, and a student was empowered by those politicians to police the classroom.
Side note: Do we really want to allow single students to decide what appropriate course content is? And why is one student’s beliefs more important than other students in the room? Shall we have the class vote on each PowerPoint slide to determine what will be discussed?
This is not about a specific student; it is about the political class empowering individuals to subvert education.
Back to the specifics.
The punishment does not fit the alleged transgression, unless one assumes that any sociological or politically controversial topic is supposed to be controlled by partisan politicians. If you have gotten this far and still don’t see what the big deal is, please stop and think about this. If you are in favor of this, do you want Governor Newsom putting pressure on the UC and Cal State systems to fire faculty who say things that liberals don’t like? Do we want to live in such a country? (Sadly, many do).
Dr. McCoul has now lost her livelihood, and not only is it hard to get such a job in the first place, given the way the academic calendar and hiring process work, it isn’t like she can get a new one immediately. At best, a new job wouldn’t start until January, and probably not until August.
This is meant to send fear into the minds of every member of the TAMU faculty, and really to anyone teaching at a public institution in the state of Texas. Make sure you hew to the accepted orthodoxy, or else face the real prospect that your life’s work will be ruined.
Let me dwell on that last sentence, because it sounds like hyperbole. People who go into academia put their lives in a kind of weird limbo for four to six (or more) years after they have earned their undergraduate degrees (I, for example, took six and a half years: 4 of coursework, 1 year researching abroad, and 1.5 years to write my dissertation). In doing this, a person is foregoing years of earning to either scrape by or to go into debt. Once finished (if you finish, at least 50% of those who start don’t finish, with some programs seeing as high as ~70% not finish, which tracks with my experience in Government at UT) you go on a a brutal job market wherein there are simply not enough jobs (I think I applied to roughly 200 openings over a multi-year period, and that was 30 years ago).
None of that is to ask anyone to cry a river for the poor academics. But the point is that if you get through that gauntlet and get a job, you have a lot to lose. In my experience, academics as a whole tend to be a bit anxious and more than a little paranoid under normal conditions.
Take all of that, and a lot of professors will end up capitulating to the authoritarian force being rained down upon them from the White House and the Governor’s Mansion.
Threatening something precious is a classic authoritarian way to gain compliance. This is to point out that this goes beyond just a given job. Threatening people’s livelihoods is bad enough, and leads often to compliance, but we are talking here about taking away, potentially, a person’s hard-earned identities. Threatening that will definitely result in compliance.
I realize that generating sympathy for academics is hard to do. I am frequently reminded that while a lot of people do look back with fondness on their college experiences, there is also a subset of people who hold deep resentment of their professors. After all, who are they to stand up in front of a room and tell a bunch a people what the right answers are? Well, experts in their field, that’s who. But we are in a moment in which respect for expertise is ebbing.
Of course, not all professors are good at their jobs (shocking, I know!), and some can be arrogant assholes (I am sure I fit that description on occasion), but none of that means that we should applaud when authoritarian politics leads to the firing of one of them, with the implicit threat to fire anyone who crosses the line.
Whether one likes it or not, and despite whatever Executive Orders Trump has issued, not everyone neatly falls into straight boy/straight girl. Literature exists on such topics as a result. It is not unreasonable for college students to study such literature.
The idea that the government can dictate, in ironclad ways, the intellectual discussion of what is “normal” based on the preferences of those in power is fascistic. It is not in keeping with either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It also directly violates the foundational notions of a university.
Down the list is that this is an illustration of why tenure matters and exists.* Again, I don’t know the internal workings of TAMU, but typically, the rank of Lecturer, Senior or not, does not include tenure protection. Therefore, it is easier to fire someone, especially in a state like Texas that has weak employee protection laws. Tenure exists to protect faculty from the political trends and fads of the day. As such, Welsh is incorrect when he states in his letter,
This isn’t about academic freedom; it’s about academic responsibility. Our degree programs and courses go through extensive approval processes, and we must ensure that what we ultimately deliver to students is consistent with what was approved.
This is rank and utter nonsense that sounds good to a general audience, especially those looking for any thin reed of justification for all this, i.e., for people who want a way to ignore how this is authoritarianism at work.
Again, there may be some special Aggie sauce, of which I am unaware, as to how they do things, but my experience, and my general understanding of how these things work, is that there is simply no ground to stand on here for Welsh. Academic programs are not designed in such a way as to dictate individual lessons/lectures, especially not in the humanities. There may be examples in specific programs, like nursing, wherein there are more detailed requirements per course due to technical and/or accreditation elements that dictate curriculum. But even then, the notion that the content of one lecture, or even lectures, is likely to have violated the “approval process” for courses is absurd.
Even courses that have standardized syllabi and student learning outcomes will not be identical in every way. Going back to my experience as an undergraduate, it was pretty damn obvious that if you took the exact same course from two different faculty members, even if they had a common syllabus, the courses were not going to be identical. Anyone who went to college knows that Dr. Jones’ Western Civ class is not identical in every way to Dr. Smith’s. James Joyner and I both taught American National Government at Troy University for several years concurrently, and while the courses were congruent, they were hardly identical.
Let’s talk about catalog descriptions. My best guess, based on the reporting and looking at the TAMU catalog, is that this is the course in question.
ENGL 360 Literature for Children
Credits 3. 3 Lecture Hours. Representative writers, genres, texts and movements. Prerequisite: Junior or senior classification.
I defy anyone to tell me that that catalog description precludes a discussion of children’s literature that addresses gender issues. That it was a fireable offense for violating that extremely (and purposefully) vague course description to discuss the role of gender in children’s literature is laughable (to put it kindly).
By the way, in my experience, most students don’t even read the course descriptions in the catalog; instead, they go solely by a combination of: What do I need for my degree, when is the class, and maybe the title sounds interesting?
There are likely additional details to this story, but I suspect that all that they will show is that this is about enforcing the orthodoxy that the Trump and Abbott administrations want, and none of it is about following the catalog.
A conclusory note: it never ceases to amaze me how so many people whose positions in life are directly related to the degrees they earned (often at elite institutions) are so resentful of higher ed.
*I would note that the Dean and Department Head lost their admin duties, not their jobs. I am sure they both have tenured faculty positions. Still, losing those positions will mean losing income, and again, the goal here is to use fear to generate compliance.
As I’ve noted before, ambiguity in book bans, allowed medical procedures, and SCOTUS temporary orders is a feature, not a flaw. Instructors, and tenured profs, will be self-regulating on the side of caution in Texas. As intended.
So much for the hand wringing concerns of the Right over “cancel culture.” —- not to mention their brouhaha over academic censorship.
TAMU administration is merely falling in line with a despotic President Trump and his despotic governor who has a state attorney general who has spent years dodging his own misdeeds including those of biblical proportions.
Professor Melissa McCoul has been scapegoated and martyred for their corrupt political crusade. (Might this be called “ethics cleansing” , or ethics erasing?) I wish her well, and a professorship where reason is appreciated.
Wait til people like Dr. McCoul begin to be arrested and tried on spurious charges.
It has been a long time since I was a tenure-track faculty member. If I still were, and teaching STEM classes, CS classes, math-like classes, I would be sorely tempted to slip in a little content about gender.
For instance, there is a long tradition of describing protocols as exchanges between parties A and B, except they are called “Alice” and “Bob”. I would be very tempted to write, “Alice (she/her) and Bob (they/them)” in this situation.
When they fired me, I would sue them. I would start a GoFundMe. I would call reporters. Yes, it would suck. I would probably have to move. I bet I could find some place in a blue state to hire me, though.
Of course, Dr. McCoul wasn’t looking for any of this. I wish her the best, regardless of how she decides to respond.
I wonder if the AAUP is going to do more than issue statements about how “deeply concerning” this is.
Her most recent CV, still on the TAMU site, describes the course thusly:
That does seem to be a theme. Among her other courses, by her own description:
and
and
All bold mine
There’s clearly a strong ideological agenda here, which is bold for an untenured lecturer. But it’s not like she was hiding any of it.
I do think a student who signed up for a “Literature for Children” class described as “Representative writers, genres, texts and movements” would reasonably surprised that it had “a special focus on diversity in gender, sexuality and race” taught from a decidedly ideological perspective. And it’s quite possible that this all skirts the very unwise laws Texas and other states (as well as Trump DOE policy) against this sort of thing.
Under circumstances, I think it would be prudent for TAMU to hew to more vanilla selections for general studies coursework. But surely firing was an absurdly over-the-top measure absent more information than we’re being provided.
@James Joyner:
Or, she has a specific research agenda. I don’t think calling it “ideological” is appropriate.
My comparative politics course focused on democratic institutions. That is my area of expertise, and focusing on my expertise is not, in my view, an ideological choice.
I think it is a mistake to assign gender or other approaches to these subjects as “ideological.”
Also: if publicly available documents show this is her area of interest, that rather undercuts the Welsh’s argument that students can’t know what they are getting into.
I think this was a course for majors, but if you have found otherwise, could you point me in that direction?
@James Joyner:
Agreed.
And hence the authoritarianism of it all.
@James Joyner: I’ll add that my courses often used Latin American examples and not African or Asian ones because that was my area of expertise.
Why is a focus on gender by someone who studies gender an ideological statement, if that is their area of expertise?
Can we just have normal academic freedom?
I don’t want the dumb lefty censoriousness of the last five+ years to be replaced with dumb right-wing censoriousness.
And it’s not just here – on the occasional times I dip into places like Twitter/X, there is the same kind of organized group harassment of wrongthink, only now coming from the right – someone says or does something bad, and there’s a legion of right-wing accounts wanting to make them viral and ruin their lives.
The people who really care about free speech, and not as a selectively used ideological weapon, seem to be rare and diminishing.
@Steven L. Taylor: It’s one of many courses that satisfies the Language, Philosophy and Culture requirements of the core curriculum. Certainly, it’s avoidable. But, as you note, students are often just looking to plug holes in their schedule to check off degree requirements; they’re unlikely to study the reputation of the professor.
@Steven L. Taylor: I would wager that just about every professor who specializes in race, gender, and sexuality does so from a leftist perspective. And, indeed, if one were teaching such a course with the perspective that homosexuality is a sin; there are only two sexes and they are assigned at birth; or that slavery or ethnic cleaning of the American Indian was morally justified, you’d be canned forthwith.
@Andy: Completely agree.
@Andy: You’re mentioning a bunch of chatter on twitter in the same breath as the state of Texas coming in and firing a person because they mentioned gender studies. Seriously? That is like a caricature of both sidesism.
@Andy:
All curation of content for the purposes of reportage in history or journalism, or really anything, has to run the gauntlet of human bias, filters, volume limitations, and ignorance. It’s how we’re built. The internal dynamic process of thinking relies on so much more . than what we perceive as “reason.” Even the seemingly dry “reportage” of scientifically derived empirical data is subject to our imperfect process.
Which is precisely why we need all “minds on deck,” free of censorship, with open discussion.
Crowdsourcing knowledge and expertise is one of our best human strategies. Yes, the resulting debate can be tedious.
But the reactionary Right’s widespread censorship in our universities, in our health institutes, in our science academies, and even the coercion of public media networks and corporations, essentially shoots us in our communal brain for the sake of imposed ideological totality and consolidation of political power.
In my entire education all the way through university, I never once recall any teacher or professor attempting to censor content or quash disagreement from the students. Except one time, and that was by a self identified hard conservative professor who went on to a career in reactionary politics.
All of which has led me to conclude (along with many others) that the most valuable function our learning institutions provide, is to teach students to think discerningly, a process, not memorize a bunch of factoids that everyone now has at their fingertips.
But rightward leadership in this country, behaves as if thinking is the last thing it wants socialized into our populace. A real disaster for sustainability and survival.
@James Joyner:
That would be establishment of religion and also teaching falsehoods. The first if barred by the first amendment, the second is contrary to the purpose of education in the first place.
I think this goes contrary to civil rights laws.
@James Joyner:
Not looking like that anymore.
@James Joyner:
And I would wager that most economic profs who teach about the market, or are public choice scholars, do so from a rightward/libertarian/pro-market approach.
There are fields of study that are more likely to be coded or linked to specific ideological perspectives in ways that would affect teaching and especially affect course content.
But I would wager that most of the time the econ prof wouldn’t be labeled “ideological” if her syllabus had “from a free-market perspective” the way gender is evident above.
@Andy:
As a general matter, yes, please.
But let’s not both-sides this. Having the president threaten funding and having people lose jobs in this manner because of government pressure is, in no way, what some on the left did/even tried to do.
There are orders of magnitude different topics.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yup. They’re literally saying that if Trump says there are two genders, then you can’t even talk about how gender is expressed by straight people. This is basic stuff which people experience and talk/write about. This is like Trump saying modern art isn’t art, so it’s illegal to call it art and you can get fired for showing a slide of a Rothko. And if you are moved by a Rothko, that’s also illegal. Oh yeah: that people believe a Rothko is art through their own experience equals indoctrination. It’s fascism aimed at people who think ‘curiosity about the world’ is a lefty value. That is the academic reason why you can’t teach being gay is a sin or slavery was morally justified. For both, the only way you can justify the belief is by not having any interest in slavery or gay people.
The lefty censorious was more centered on changing ways of dealing with what people agreed about. When I was a college, a rich frat would throw a Gangsters and Hos party, complete with 40s. Virtually everyone sentient knew that they were being racist jerks. Half the frat guys would admit that, and say that it’s not that big of a deal for anybody else. And maybe they were right. Now, you might have a few problems with the university doing that.
Some commenters at LGM are asserting that Dr. McCoul is a trans woman, and that is the real reason for the push to fire her.
This seems plausible, however these assertions don’t have any citation at all to back them up. Maybe someone took that conclusion from looking at low-res video? That’s kind of a big problem.
After the dust up over the summer semester, TAMU should have updated their course manual as follows:
I think would have cleared up goals and expectations for all involved.
@Lucys Football:
You should pay closer attention. The Twitter chatter and the Texas firing are both being conducted by the same “side” and are complementary examples of the same thing – the right-wing’s attempt to enforce its own culture war norms.
And yes, I also think it was bad when lefties did the same things to try to enforce their culture war norms. I generally am opposed to that kind of censorious behavior and moral bullying. If that makes me “both sides” then guilty as charged. If one’s principle in the matter is that it’s fine when my side does it and it’s terrible when my political enemy does it, then that certainly avoids the “both sides” charge – but it is also meritless and without principle.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It’s like the memory of the last decade+ has faded into the mists.
Lots of professors were fired for not towing the line on progressive norms to say nothing of various famous and not famous people. The federal government has often threatened funding to enforce its own changes in policy and interpretation of the law. The Obama admin explicitly threatened all federal funding for schools that didn’t adopt its standards for Title IX regarding sexual harrassment accusations, and transgender student policy, as just one example. The Biden admin embedded equity into grantmaking, requiring grant applicants to adhere to DEI standards and include it in research.
If you want to argue that what Trump is doing is more blantant and probably worse – then fine, and I’d probably strongly agree with you in a lot of cases, but we can’t pretend that the left didn’t do and try very many of the same things, because that would be factually untrue.
@Andy:
Absolutely, using federal funding to protect vulnerable people is exactly the same thing as using federal funding to encourage persecution of vulnerable people. No difference whatsoever at all.
@Andy:
This is probably an argument about nothing at all, given that you also say you think this is strongly worse.
However,
This has absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what is taught in the classroom. None. It was directed at administrative procedures, not curriculum. To those of us affiliated with higher ed, this is a very, very important distinction.
Addressing what is taught in a classroom is a major escalation. At a government-funded institution.
There is something to be said for principles, and not prevaricating to falsely pretend that two things that fall under the same principle actually don’t.
Either one believes in free speech and academic freedom or one doesn’t. If one is arguing that certain kinds of limits on that principle are not a big deal because the other side’s are worse, then that is a rhetorical argument and not a principled one. And I get it – some of you just can’t tolerate any criticism of the left or Democrats, especially compared to the right. Even though I agree with you 90%+ on Trump and MAGA cult on the right – and that is especially true regarding speech and academic freedom – many of you just can’t tolerate the mere mention that your side is pretty shitty on that principle too. So instead of disputing me on the principle, the rhetorical dodge of the “both sides” complaint comes out in force.
If you want to debate and list all the reasons why one side is worse than the other when it comes to violating a principle, then fine. In a lot of cases, I would agree. There are differences of degree. And there’s the temporal difference – The GoP is in power, and they have the ability to do things right now that require that power. At this moment, they are the primary free speech threat.
But that’s not my point here. I was merely lamenting about the wild swing from one extreme to another. That’s an argument from principle. I am OPPOSED to censorious behavior on principle, and I have long been critical of the many examples of both the left and right engaging in this. For quite a while, it was the left primarily engaged in this, and I said so, and right now, I am just as opposed to the right taking up the same playbook and running with it. If one wants to dismiss that as “bothsidings” for saying that “I don’t want the dumb lefty censoriousness of the last five+ years to be replaced with dumb right-wing censoriousness” then you are missing the point which is about the princple of free speech and academic freedom and not about attempts to bend the narrative to prove that one side or other other’s violation of it are worse.
Either you believe in free speech or not. If you want to challenge me on that, then feel free to tell me why your desired limits on free speech are special and justified.
@Jay L. Gischer:
It was an example off the top of my head about a recent administration threatening federal funding to enforce new rules on schools. And my understanding is that many of the Title IX requirements did alter curriculum, at least until the courts struck them down.
That said, I would agree that this is potentially a significant escalation, and I oppose it completely.
As I indicated, the pendulum has swung way too far. I’m less interested in whether the current swing is further to the right compared to the previous swing to the left, than in the fact that it shouldn’t be swinging so wildly at all. The current hostility of the Trump administration and associated right-wing actors to free speech principles is the clear and present danger and needs to be vigorously opposed. Full stop!
But I’m not going to pretend that we didn’t just go through a period where many professors (and others) were being fired or forced to resign for similar reasons, except the ideology and politics were different.
@Andy: Honestly, I can think of people in industry that were fired, some of those firings were in the tech area and I was not especially happy about them. Yes, I think some stuff got out of hand.
Yes, I remember first seeing rhetoric (in 2008 or so) where some people wanted to censor the right. I was unhappy about that then, I’m a bit more nuanced now, but still unhappy.
(The nuance is that I think that a state-sponsored institution should never fire someone, or restrict an invited speaker in any way. Private institutions have more latitude. I don’t endorse it, but it’s a reality. Just like our hosts get to edit content, so should a private institution.)
AND, I am not familiar with firings of professors for course content reasons, though. Especially not from state-sponsored institutions. I am pretty sure that I would have held my nose and voiced unhappiness with such a decision. Academic freedom is so important that it is worth suffering for.
@Jay L. Gischer: One follow up that demonstrates why academic freedom is so important:
For the first decade or more of its life, quantum theory, and quantum mechanics, were described by many other scientists as “That Jewish thing”. They thought it was bogus and silly, right up to the point where it made a bomb possible.
This happens all the time. Back in my day, most Economics departments had a faculty member on staff who was well-versed in Marxist theory. Not because they endorsed it, but because it was important to know something about it, given how significant it was in the world of the Cold War.
I know y’all agree, I just want to flesh this out.
@Andy:
Given that I worked in higher ed at the time at admin level, and was writing here also, I was paying attention.
Citations, please.
I would especially like examples wherein a student, citing the president, and backed by a state legislator, got someone fired.
I would especially like to see examples of where the law was used to ban specific ideas form being taught.
First, enforcing Title IX is enforcing the law. Trump is making up his own rules as he goes.
Second, trying to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion is not the same thing as firing someone for teaching something the president doesn’t like.
Third, as it pertains to grants, there is absolutely nothing in comparison to the Trump administration’s attempt to deny already granted funds to major scientific research projects to get those universities to kowtow to him.
Not all threats about funding are created equal, BTW. Schools were also “threatened” to lose Title III funding (I think it was during the Biden admin, but could have been the first Trump admin) if they didn’t ensure through proper auditing that students were only taking courses within their degree programs.
That is a legitimate kind of “threat.”
Trump threatening Columbia unless they change their curriculum is entirely different.
Surely you see this?
@Andy:
Citations, please.
I am not saying that out of 4,000+ universities, there aren’t any examples of unjust firing over ideology over, say, the last 20 years. But you need to provide more than this.
And I am confident that there are no examples that are directly analogous to this story.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I haven’t created or parsed the list to determine who was fired or sanctioned for personal public statements, vs classroom speech, vs objections to administration, vs. whatever speech-related stuff. There are lots of examples, however, from public schools.
While I can see that there’s a distinction for getting fired for curriculum, to me, this case with Dr. McCoul looks entirely pretextual. IOW, failure to follow the curriculum is the excuse for the firing, but not the real reason she was fired. There’s a long history of pretextual actions, unfortunately.
I think that, like many cases from the last couple of decades, McCoul has a very good, winnable lawsuit over her firing and should pursue it aggressively.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I would encourage anyone who can to donate/volunteer for FIRE, who are doing more than just about anyone in aggressively defending against these assaults on speech.
https://www.thefire.org/
“Things that liberals don’t like” is doing a heavy lift here. Do I want our public institutions in Cali to feel pressure against allowing dissemination of Holocaust denial or Bell Curve racism? Yes, I do. This is why I left Georgia and work hard to pay the premium necessary to domicile in Cali.
When California’s swings too far into leftist caricature, voters have mechanisms dial it back. Seen it before, will see it again, because the world is not static. Renegotiation of cultural norms is an inevitable part of living in a ever-changing world.
I do think every successive generation’s marketplace of ideas has the right to determine what speech is appropriate and what is intolerable, including Texas taxpayers through their elected officials. I don’t think it’s particularly scandalous for a professor to be let go on those terms.
The big deal here is that either a majority or plurality Texas voters keep electing the kinds of leaders who’ve made an anathema of anondyne opinions on the facts of sex and gender. Having the right to do so means the remedy is also in the hands of the people of Texas: they can elect serious, responsible adults instead.
Until such time, the best and the brightest should perhaps avoid working and learning in Texas. This is partly why there’s 50 republics in the US, not to mention international institutions more than willing to exploit America’s self-inflicted brain drain.
If the people of Texas prefer their colleges teach Evangelical religious bigotry rather than facts and critical thinking, that’s a choice Texas is making. I think it will hurt Texas long term in all sorts of ways. But I don’t live there and don’t plan to, so…good luck to Texas.
@Andy: I just looked at the website you linked. I want to give it a fair assessment. I see that they have a statement out about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, which happened today. So they are up to date. They keep up with current events. Good for them.
I see that FIRE supports Harvard’s lawsuit to claw back funds impounded by Trump. Good for them. That’s a good sign.
I cannot find any mention of TAMU, or of Dr. McCoul. This is not a good sign. One wonders what’s up.
Perhaps gender is too hot of a topic for FIRE?
@James Joyner: James, you describe McCoul has having a strong ideological agenda. I think in some way that’s correct.
AND, trans people exist. They are real. This is not ideology. This is something happening in the world. It’s empirical. I know you know this. I don’t really want to get into it with you, but there is a constant assault these days of “there’s no such thing as trans” and framing any discussion of their existence and history as “ideological” I expect and hope you wouldn’t want to participate in that.
Seriously, Native American tribes (some not all) celebrated “two spirit” people as shamans, people who were special. Trans people have always been with us. This is not some left-wing invention.
Texas A&M isn’t an elite institution, but it’s huge, well-known, and very *Texan, with close ties to a Texas state government run by zealots such as a governor who said that finding blame (and therefore cause) for the deaths of dozens of young people in a flash flood was for “losers”, and a corrupt attorney general who was overwhelmingly impeached by the state legislature but skated on the conviction vote. It seems that some of its alumni, many in positions of power in the state, are resentful over perceived notions that the University sometimes strays from their cultural expectations.
*In addition to its origin as a land grant institution making it very Texan, the University has remarkably few outsiders in its large undergraduate population. From its most recent common data set, Texas A&M has 1% nonresident (international) undergrads and 4% other out-of-state undergrads. Compare this to some other large state universities:
U of Alabama: 1% nonresident undergrads, 59% other out-of-state undergrads.
Ohio State U: 7% nonresident undergrads, 21% other out-of-state undergrads.
U of Illinois-UC: 15% nonresident undergrads, 13% other out-of-state undergrads.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Ok, I can do a quick search to pad the ones I know. This isn’t a comprehensive list. Most of these were firings-in-fact or suspensions. The list is bigger if you include people who were sanctioned but didn’t lose their jobs.
I’m not going to parse every detail for you, though. I’m not your personal research assistant. Since you are the one claiming that this is a special case that rises above all the others to be materially different in terms of the underlying principle at stake, it’s up to you to show that the specific details here meet that standard more than the others.
Charles Negy, Joshua Katz, Allan Josephson, Gordon Klein, Bret Weinstein, Garrett Felber, Suzanne Jones, Lora Burnett, Steven Salaita.
Note that some of these are right-coded speech firings, since which side is affected seems to matter to some people here.
Trump is using Title VI in the same way Title IX was previously used. Is using Title VI not enforcing the law? The Title IX changes were, IIRC, eventually struck down by the courts – we’ll have to see if the same happens to Trump’s Title VI effort.
You assume the best of intentions on one side and the worst of intentions on the other. This is a doubly bad argument, considering speech protections are not supposed to be contingent on subjective opinions of intent. One either believes in free speech or one doesn’t. If you think it’s fine or less bad because you think the censor’s intentions are good, then IMO, you don’t believe in free speech. Finally, free speech is most crucial for unpopular opinions, and a few years ago, not repeating the catechism of DEI was unpopular, and now the opposite is true. My view is that whatever your opinion is on DEI, you ought to be able to voice it, especially if you’re an academic.
And if you don’t think this has been a problem, then I would point you to the surveys of professors that show a majority fear being sanctioned for various real or imagined thought crimes. That was true before Trump, and it’s still true now.
There is no pendulum swing. None.
We all know what is happening here. Whatever the excesses, mistakes, and stupidity of leftist academics and administrators, however censorious or smug their statements were, whatever their decisions about promoting this person or publishing that article, they weren’t in league with the forces of authoritarianism and fascism on the march. There won’t be a pendulum left to swing after all this is done. How anyone would believe otherwise, given the evidence of their own eyes…But that’s the story of the last decade, isn’t it.
These are the people who erased Colin Powell and the Tuskegee airmen.
These are the people who don’t want ethnicity to be a consideration in clinical trials that the federal government funds.
These are the people who have been talking openly about crusades and wars designed to crush the opposition, not merely to rebut, but to erase any differing opinions from the public sphere.
These are the people for whom “religious freedom” is the license they want to grant themselves to oppress other non-Christian believers and non-believers alike.
These are the people…But we all know the list. No need to enumerate it further.
Whatever truth there is about cancel culture, leftist intolerance on college campuses, the bilious pronouncements of dumbass professors…It’s all moot now.
But please, continue to relitigate which family member was the bigger asshole last Thanksgiving, while the house burns down around us.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I would not jump to such conclusions. If you spend time looking at the whole record, you’ll find that it is not true. FIRE Tweeted about McCoul’s firing a couple of hours ago, so I would expect something to appear on their website soon.
@Andy:
No, you are a person making a series of strident claims.
It is not unreasonable to ask for evidence.
I will look at your list, but a list really isn’t evidence.
@Andy: I am going to try and reset, as these conversations often get too unwieldy.
The case in the OP is about one person getting fired and two losing admin positions (and therefore, almost certainly income). This happened because politicians are directly interfering with what is being said on college campuses, including being driven by a state legislator, and ostensibly, state law.
The entire thing is even more inflamed by the involvement of the president and his already demonstrated willingness to arbitrarily withhold large sums of research grants.
I would really love it if you could find an equivalent example if you want to make you both-sides case.
This seems fair.
@Kingdaddy: Agreed.
@Andy:
I have not defended any of the things you are citing.
I have challenged your position that what you have cited is equivalent to what is in this post.
I haven’t even written about what you are talking about, which is especially true since I am going to have to research a list of names to figure out if they fit or not, and what position I will take.
I will add: I am less concerned, at the moment, about what Obama did, given that he left the office in 2017. There may well be plenty of things to critique, now in the abstract about Obama (or Biden or Bush or Clinton or Bush or whomever).
But the problem in the now is happening, well, now.
And whatever All Other Presidents did, or what a handful of leftist nimrods may, or may not, have done, they did not do the kind of damage currently being done to American higher education by the Trump administration.
I guess I have another writing assignment to stick in my mental queue.
@Andy:
Did you even do the research on that list? There’s 4 people who are fired for just tweeting or saying something political. 3 of these 4 are liberals. The other guy said something very anti-trans and anti-science.
The others? All problems of their own making. Weinstein resigned because he was disliked so intensely. That’s obviously his problem, not the university’s. The rest: severely unhinged and unprompted remarks about George Floyd followed by evidence of sleeping with students and for another covering up a sexual assault against their TA. And another guy managed to suggest regarding Floyd’s murder that maybe white students from Minneapolis had more of a claim to emotional trauma than black people at large, all in a derisive email to a group of black students who may–get this–have been genuinely affected by what happened.
Free speech does not give you the right to behave as you want in your workplace. And it doesn’t give you the right to have the last say on what you say or write to others. If you want to write a nasty email to a group of students, go ahead. But free speech gives them the right to read your words as they see fit. They posted thee email and everyone read it the same way.
It’s weak/HR/litigatory stuff. Some of these guys were fired and others weren’t. But it has nothing to do with firing a professor who is trying to teach a real concept in a class based around that concept.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yes, let’s reset, but back to the beginning. I originally wrote this:
That was a general lament about how the pendulum has swung. It wasn’t a treatise regarding a direct comparison or a claim of absolute equivalency regarding this particular incident. That should have been pretty obvious? Yet, you and others jumped in with the “both sides” as if censoriousness was only a right-wing phenomenon. And then you proceeded to evolve the conversation into a debate about how bad this particular instance is compared to others.
If you don’t agree that we had a period of left-wing censoriousness and now we are in a period of right-wing censoriousness, then feel free to lay out that argument. I think both are bad and am not much interested in drilling in the way you want to – which to adjudicate this particular case in comparison to others. That was never the point of my original comment.
When I pointed out this was hardly the first time a professor had been fired, you demanded citations. I gave them, but that wasn’t good enough, and then you moved the goalposts and demanded not only citations but a specific example that is exactly comparable in detail to what’s happened to McCoul. This, IMO, is an isolated demand for rigor. Furthermore, it is making a demand to for an argument I’m not making.
I have not, you will note, claimed that this particular case is exactly equivalent to any other. My point all along has been about the big picture, consistent with my original comment and follow-on comments about the overall principle. I find that all these incidents, including this latest one, fall into the same general bucket of unprincipled attacks on academic freedom and free speech.
I think the bucket analogy is useful. My point is that the fish in the bucket are all in there for the same reason as a violation of a core principle. You accuse me of “both sides” and instead want to argue that one particular fish in the bucket is worse than all the rest. Fine, you’re entitled to your opinion, but don’t claim that there are no lefty fish in the bucket or claim that that the principle that the bucket represents isn’t important.
Again, I get that you want to have that argument, but it was never my point. And the reality is that he claims here are being made by you – you are the one that is singling this particular situation out as special and fundamentally different from all the other fish in the bucket to the extent that you’ve read into a banal lament and your both sides charge that I was arguing specifically that it isn’t. Furthermore, it’s not my job to disprove your assertion, it’s your job to argue for it. I’m not going to accept your isolated demand for rigor to prove anything to you, especially on and argument I’m not making.
To be perfectly frank, I’m willing to accept the idea that this case is exceptionally or historically bad. I’m not yet convinced that’s the case, but I think there is a case to be made. But that debate doesn’t mean that the bucket doesn’t exist or there are other fish in it. And while you may personally be worried more about this particular fish, I’m more worried about the bucket and how fast it is filling up, the point I keep making that gets ignored.
This isn’t anything new for OTB. The “both sides” rhetorical gambit comes out whenever I bring up matters of principle that happen to have even the tinyest implicit criticism for their side and a perfect example is my first comment that everyone has objected to with the stridency you see in me.
And now that Charlie Kirk has been assassinated, it will be interesting to see how all the reactions change. Even though the facts of what happen are not yet settled, people are already settling into familiar narratives and assuming this was a political assassination. The right is already ballistic and I’m seeing lefties “both sidesing” by pointing out all the Democratic political figures that have been attacked and killed. And that’s fine – we ought to remember the total scope and scale of political violence as well as free speech. If you are against political violence, like I am, you shouldn’t waste time trying narratively characterize the other team’s political violence as worse than yours. Anyone who wants to start ranking the killing of Kirk in terms of terribleness compared to similar events is part of the problem IMO. Lots of people on the right are doing that right now and claiming this particular act is especially and historically bad. I’m in the same place as I am with free speech – Killing people for their views or politics is bad, full stop. It’s all in the same bad bucket and like free speech, I’m more concerned with how many fish are in the bucket and how fast it is filling up than whether someone thinks one particular fish is especially bad..
Honestly, this whole “debate” has been an unpleasant chore. I especially and continually find it annoying that I constantly have to write hundreds of words to dispell what I think are – charitably – bad faith and strawman comments. Perhaps I ought to start hounding people in a similar way and force them to address the strawman I erected. Or maybe I will just fuck off from here, because in the current environment this bullshit isn’t worth my time. And with the Kirk killing, things are only going to get worse.
One last thing:
@Steven L. Taylor:
Yeah, and I never disagreed with that, and you ought to know from my other comments that I have said on multiple occasions that what Trump is doing needs to be actively and aggressively opposed. I agree with most here that most of the things he’s doing are historically bad. But that 10% or whatever disagreement cannot, it seems, go unpunished. Any comparison to anything Democrats have done must, it seems, be attacked with the “both sides” rhetorical bullshit.
History is history. No one is asking you to parse the history of free speech violations. Nobody is asking you to deeply revisit the Obama or any past administration. But you and others here won’t even allow a mention in passing of part of the history of free speech or whatever without the stupid “both sides” rhetorical defense. You can’t even seem to admit that the hostility to speech coming from the left over the past decade plus was even a problem.
@Modulo Myself:
No shit Sherlock. Most of the victims of cancel culture in universities were liberal. This may come as a shock to you, but the vast majority of university professors are on the left side of the spectrum. But I guess that makes it ok in your eyes? You seem to have incorrectly assumed that I don’t care about liberal-on-liberal free speech violations – well that’s a wrong assessment. Same bucket of fish, and I don’t care if it’s a liberal or a conservative who gets put into it or who does the putting.
Yeah, I’m going to fuck off from OTB for a while. Otherwise, I am going to start being very mean and that is not good for me. So feel free to have the last word to whoever is left reading this.
@Steven L. Taylor: But this is supposed to be a general studies English course, not a Gender Studies course. There are certainly plenty of leftist economists who teach general studies Economics courses. Yes, scholars bring biases. But building a whole course that’s supposed to be something else into that is problematic.
It would be next to impossible to teach Intro to US Government without bringing one’s views of Trump into it on a daily basis. But if the whole course was built around defending or extolling Project 2025, students would be right to complain.
@James Joyner:
I would note, again, that the coures catalog states that it requires junior or senior status to take. While yes, it can be used for the Core Curriculum at TAMU, I think that such context suggests it isn’t the typical gen ed course (especially given the long list TAMU allows). In other words, this doesn’t strike me as a class that students just causually wander into.
Indeed. But my point is that you are, in my view, unfairly characterizing what is obviously her research interest as ideology.
This is simply not the same thing. There is a realm of gender studies within literature that had its own academic literature. Moreover, there are books written for children by LBGTQ+ persons that can be studied.
One can legitimately debate the course content, but that debate should be had within the English Department, for the most part. (And sure, others may be involved as well, such as whatever committee selects courses for the core).
I realize we likely agree on all that.
I suspect we also agree that none of this should be a firing offense and that POTUS shouldn’t be cited as a reason for a professor ro stop teaching, nor should a state legislator be hounding the university in that manner.
Our disagreement is that I don’t think it is fair to dismiss gender-related studies as ideology.
@Andy: I understand that you are frustrated, as I was frustrated. And the Charlie Kirk thing was certainly stirring my emptions as well.
But at the risk of you never reading this, let me note two things
1. I did start researching your list last night in a good-faith effort to try and understand your point, for whatever that is worth.
2. Let’s go back to my original comment.
In my view, I was making a reasonable request. I did agree with you general sentiment.
I made a plea for examining the magnitude of the current event, which I believe to be the marker of something wholly different than what you are describing.
Taking your critique wholly seriously, that there was an unreasonable leftist censoriousness going on, it was limited to a series of bad decisions made by individual administrators. This is not a good thing, nor am I defending it.
But if my neighbor sets my house on fire because I offended him, that’s very bad.
But if the state government is targetting me to have my house burned down because I said something the government has decided is not allowed, that is a whole different ballgame.
Side note: I am doubtful that McCoul is going to get her job reinstated, win a multi-million dollar settlement, or get a pretty good think tank gig when this is over (which happened several of the names on that list I got through last night). Maybe I will be proved wrong.
@Andy:
I mean, you were talking about the pendulum having swung to the left and now it’s swinging right…Did you ever think that maybe the pendulum didn’t swing to the left if people being canned for free speech were being fired for their anti-Israel views?
I’d like to point out you treat people here with an incredible amount of derision. How many times do you sneer about virtue signaling and moral purity regarding the concerns of others? How often do you demand your principles be treated as some sort of pure good? Physician, heal thyself, I guess…but it’s a very bad way to go around treating people.
@Steven L. Taylor: Yes, we agree that this was not a firing offense (unless there’s a whole lot we don’t know) and that this is a matter for the English Department Chair, not the University President
We mildly disagree on the nature of the course, but we’re both conjecturing from limited evidence. My guess is that, while it’s an upper-division English class, its likely target audience is Gen Ed students, particularly Education majors, rather than English majors. Regardless, while I think a session or two about gender and/or sexuality would be appropriate, no reasonable student would sign up for it thinking that would be the major focus.
We disagree more strongly on the ideology issue. Women’s Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Black Studies, etc. are not viewpoint-neutral in the way that the broader Humanities and Social Sciences are. Yes, Economics professors likely lean more conservative/libertarian than English professors for a variety of reasons but there’s a diversity of viewpoints within the disciplines and their top-tier journals. That’s just not true in most of the Studies departments, where ideology is disguised as scholarship. A conservative Queer Studies professor is essentially an oxymoron.
@James Joyner: There is a deeper conversation to be had here.
My main bone of contention is to suggest that certain areas of study should automatically be derided as mere “ideology.”
Further, I think that is especially true when we do so, at least in part, because they are studies that challenge orthodoxy on gender, race, sexuality, etc. I think it is too easy to hew to a self-interested view of what is “normal” versus it being “ideological.”
I do agree that some folks in academia can be ideologically driven. No question. And I prefer, actually, that something like race or gender be studied in the context of a specific academic discipline, like sociology, rather than being in a “Studies” department, but I am open to discussion on that point.
As such, based on what I know, I prefer that this case be one focused on literature in an English Department.
I think that the study of gender as it relates to children’s literature is legitimate, and I also think it likely that she is motivated by personal beliefs, maybe even ideology, to do so.
But I think that this is not that different than a lot of right-leaning economists I have known over the year. I think it is the exact same thing.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I believe gender, race, and sexual orientation are all legitimate variables in social science and legitimate topics for the humanities. But all of the related Studies approaches begin with a set of ideological assumptions.
Agreed.
Sure. And I would have no objection to her offering a Gender In Children’s Literature elective that spells out the broad lens through which the course is constructed. Highjacking a broader Children’s Literature course that’s part of the General Studies curriculum to do so, though, is highly problematic. It’s not only self-serving but does a disservice to the students, who ought to be getting exposed to the Canon in these courses.
We just disagree here, but I’ll concede that your time as Dean gave you more broad and recent exposure to academic economists than I have. But I’d be shocked if they were gearing survey courses to literature that supports their ideology to the exclusion of key schools.