Um... tenured professor, forced to resign for being an asshole? That can happen?! Well, fuck!
Ciccariello-Maher is a different kind of asshole from yours truly, but it should go without saying that I find even the concept of this disturbing on several levels. He first stirred up trouble with a tweet (there's your first sign of trouble right there) joking about wanting "white genocide."
You may notice from the picture that, um... dude's white. He had to have been joking. There's a line from Frank Zappa's Trouble Every Day. It goes: "I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white." This was back around some race riots. Ciccariello-Maher was trying, and failing to do the Zappa thing.
Still, don't fuckin' type that. As a fellow asshole and sufferer of foot-in-mouth disease, I have some sympathy for Ciccariello-Maher. Depending on when you read this blog, you might get a harsher joke or two than later readers. If I am in a particularly caustic mood while typing, I may type something that is brutal even for me. And then take it down because... that was going too far, even for me. There would be no point in just another bland, dry, dull political science blog, so I make this my own, but there is such a thing as going too far.
Calling for "white genocide..." sorry, Georgie, but that's going too far. If even I can tell that it's going too far, it's going too far.
Ciccariello-Maher is a lefty provocateur. He is very far left, and very provocative. I've looked through the tweets that have gotten everyone's hackles up, and I get what he meant to say, and why people got upset. My politics are kind of weird, or rather, very weird, but I do make an active effort to look at things from the perspective of anyone making a good faith effort. I don't really see a point in getting into any more specific conflicts, except to point out the disturbing fact that a tenured professor has been pressured to resign.
But I will rant about twitter, because fuck twitter. Making a joke about "white genocide" is pretty fuckin' stupid and dangerous. You know what might help? Aside from not doing it? Having more than 140 characters. And 280 still ain't enough.
There's an old adage that if you have to explain a joke, it isn't funny. And, the white genocide joke needed explanation. Therefore, it wasn't funny. However, a long-form essay on genocide and reversal of skin color could at least have made it more clear what his intentions were. (Try Book 3 of NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy!)
Would that have prevented a backlash? Perhaps not. Ciccariello-Maher makes a lot of comments that seem precision-guided at peoples' raw nerves, like one about being made nauseous at deference to soldiers. I don't know if there is any way to say all of those things without causing a backlash.
That leads to another disturbing element here.
ACADEMIC FREEDOM! The rallying cry of the scholar. We have tenure so that we can say what we think is important to say without fear of punishment.
Or, not.
Drexel University did not fire George Ciccariello-Maher, though. Tenure worked, in that sense. He resigned amid a public backlash, death threats, etc. Universities, though, do not exist in isolation, and professors-- some of us, anyway-- are human beings. Protests and public pressure can work. In this case, public pressure brought by, in some cases, white supremacists. There is a list floating around, that attempts to target professors with left-wing biases. I'm not going to give you a title or link to it. Please don't search for it. Don't give those fuckers any publicity, or clicks.
Regardless, I hold free speech as a vital principle. Not just a legal technicality, but a principle. It is one of the few policy positions I will take publicly. Even in academia, we are not as protected as we should be.
Back in August, an executive at Google wrote a memo dealing with sexism, and got fired. I posted this. I asked readers to think about what would happen if someone got fired for writing a bunch of lefty stuff.
Well...
