"We may not be able to count on our institutions, but we must be able to count on one another" -L.D. Burnett

 

OCTOBER 15, 2020

“They were warned.

“As soon as I saw the September 28 email from the Campus Reform reporter writing to ask about my tweets, I forwarded the inquiry up my college administration’s chain of command to let them know what might be coming their way. I wasn’t sure if my dean had ever heard of Campus Reform, so I explained their place in the right-wing, astroturfed-outrage ecosystem, where dark-money donors pay student stringers small bounties for tips about ‘liberal professors.’ I told my dean that I was probably on the Campus Reform radar screen because I had recently published an article in Slate that was critical of the president’s ‘patriotic education’ initiative.

“‘Here’s what we could probably expect,’ I wrote to my dean. ‘Around 100 hateful emails, plus or minus, to my work email account; some outcry on social media that Collin College should fire me; perhaps some emails to [H. Neil] Matkin [the college president] or other college administrators. And after a couple of weeks,’ I said, ‘this will blow over and there will be a new liberal professor for them to target.’

“My warning was prescient, but my timing was off by a week.

“Instead of writing a story about how I responded on Twitter to Herman Cain’s needless demise by explaining what it means to say that Donald Trump is the head of a death cult — that’s what the reporter had originally contacted me about — she waited a little over a week before emailing me again about a different set of tweets. During the October 7 vice-presidential debate, I had posted that Mike Pence, who refused to stick to his allotted time, should ‘shut his little demon mouth.’

“The aspiring muckraker’s shocking exposé revealing that college professors had mean and snarky things to say on Twitter about the vice president appeared on the Campus Reform website on the morning of October 8 and was picked up, slightly reworked, on the Fox News website a little after 5 p.m., central time, on Friday, October 9.

“I received my first irate email from a stranger at 5:43 p.m. For the rest of the weekend, without ceasing, on my social-media accounts and through my work-email inbox, I was inundated by scores of obscene, vulgar, sexually explicit expressions of puerile rage. “Apparently, the injunction not to be a potty mouth during one’s free time applies only to professors. Everyone else gets to cut loose with the C-word, the F-word, the B-word, a few vaguely veiled threats, some scatological pronouncements, and several all-caps rants about the creeping fascism of commie, Nazi professors like me, who should be fired, or leave America, or be thrown in prison, or killed like a pig.

“I spent the weekend reporting harassing tweets, blocking trolls, and trying to figure out if some of the more menacing or enraged messages I received were from anyone who lived nearby or might pose a credible threat to my well-being. That’s how I learned, via some simple internet sleuthing, that a truly infamous writer of profanity-filled all-caps emails — a person who goes by the moniker of ‘Dame Jo the Queen of Troll’ — is actually a 73-year-old woman who lives about 20 minutes away from me and has chosen to spend the gentle twilight years of her life threatening and abusing journalists and scholars on the internet.

“I replied to a few of these malevolent missives, copying Matkin, my college president. I wanted him to see for himself the bilious vitriol that was flooding my work inbox, and to see how I was dealing with the nonsense and the noise. And keep in mind: The abuse and rage directed at me was nothing compared to the disgustingly racist, body-shaming, malevolent messages coming in to two other female scholars profiled in the Fox News piece, Sami Schalk and Sirry Alang. That’s because, while it’s hard out here for a cis white woman who dares to say things on the internet, it’s positively toxic out here for Black women who simply dare to exist in the world.

“In any case, I wanted my president to see what was happening to me, a valued member, I supposed, of the Collin College community. And so my weekend went, and Monday came around, and I was grateful for its coming. I expected that a college administrator, perhaps even the president himself, would be reaching out to me to check in.

“Well, the college president did reach out to me, though not personally or privately. Instead, he sent an all-faculty email that went out to every full-timer and every current and recent adjunct of the school — maybe 900 people? A thousand people? I don’t know; it’s a big mailing list. He said that because one faculty member ‘chose to post some political and other statements on her social-media accounts’ — as if that’s verboten — the college was now at the center of a social-media firestorm. While most messages coming in were demanding that my college fire me, Matkin said that ‘a handful’ of emails called on the college ‘to uphold ‘academic freedom’ and ‘free speech.’ The scare quotes around those two terms are hardly inspiring.

“In this all-faculty email, the president promised that ‘the college’s execution of its personnel policies will not be played out in a public manner.’ Then he shared the text of a public statement to be posted prominently on the college website that read very much like an execution of personnel policies, or at least of personnel character. Here’s a brief sample of how the college president framed the egregious damage done by my ‘hateful, vile, and ill-considered’ tweets:

“While this instance of unfortunate speech may be protected, incendiary comments such as these do not best serve our community, nor do they advance any positive solution. Hate and profanity are never welcome, especially during this time when we, as Americans, are searching for the best path forward for our Nation. Such comments make it that much more difficult for all who hold diverse views to come together, as our country so desperately needs. Notably, these comments are a setback to the hard work and dedication of our campus community and all that Collin College has achieved this year.

“You can read the statement here for yourself. But TL;DR: He threw me under the bus. The college president’s official response to illiberal calls demanding that the administration and the board engage in cancel culture and punish my exercise of free speech by firing me — including, apparently, calls from government officials demanding that I be punished for exercising my First Amendment freedoms (is that even legal?) — was to malign not just my writing but my character. I was stunned.

“But I should not have been surprised. For I, too, had been warned.

“I have been studying and writing about well-funded right-wing propaganda operations aimed at delegitimizing and defunding higher education for years. I’m writing a book about it. I have also been studying the rise of the corporatized academy, a phenomenon made freshly visible to me when my own college president kicked off this academic year with a video sharing his strategic vision for the ‘Amazonification’ of the school.

“So, I should not have been surprised that my own college president did not treat me like a respected scholar or a supportive colleague or a beloved and outstanding teacher. Instead, he treated me like a public-relations / customer-complaint problem to be solved and silenced by an all-faculty email and a mob-appeasing statement seemingly designed to have a chilling effect on the free expression of any other professor who might so much as think of offering a mildly controversial or mildly snarky opinion in the public sphere.

“My college president was probably not expecting me to hit ‘Reply All’ to his email within 10 minutes of having received it. I guess he doesn’t know me very well. I spoke up for myself, for the expectation that I would be treated with some minimal courtesy and professionalism by my employer, rather than being made an example of before my colleagues. And I spoke up too for my colleagues, because so many professors at my school are absolutely terrified to speak up on their own behalf. Can’t imagine why.

“In any case, my college administrators were warned of what would come when Campus Reform came calling, and I was warned, and now I will warn you — warn you, and call you to courage.

“First, the warning: What happened to me can happen to any of us. It doesn’t matter if you’re on Twitter or not. Any email, any recorded lecture, any live lecture that is surreptitiously recorded by a student, any donation to a political cause or a political party, any public comment or remark you make in any place, at any time, on any medium — any of those things can be distorted by the industrial engines of mass-produced, culture-wars outrage and turn you into the villainous professor du jour. This is the model: isolate, attack, destroy, and then move on to the next professor. The paid provocateurs will leave it to your institution, already trembling before the menacing hand of the market, to do the mop-up job.

“Maybe your institution will stand by you. Maybe your institution will be as clear on your fundamental right to free expression as the University of Wisconsin at Madison has been in the case of Sami Schalk, who was profiled in the same Campus Reform article with me. She has been facing extraordinarily vicious public attacks, but at least her university did not add fuel to the fire by opining on the content of her remarks or offering up a show of indignation and outrage. When Campus Reform contacted the school for comments about Schalk’s statements, Wisconsin simply said this: ‘When students, faculty, and staff exercise their First Amendment rights to express opinions, they are speaking for themselves, not the university.’

“But here’s the thing: Even if your institution won’t stand by or stand up for you, we will. All across this country, as our institutional affiliations and identities are dissolved in the acid bath of the ‘Amazonification’ of higher education, we are unmoored from what used to be stronger bonds of mutuality between scholars and their schools. But as we drift away from the wreckage, bobbing among the broken flotsam and shattered remnants of shared governance, we drift toward one another.

“We must become an institution to each other. Not because that’s how things ought to be, but because that’s where we are. We who have come to know one another through professional organizations or Twitter conversations or conference panels or research fellowships or Facebook pages or blogs are a growing band, and we should band together. We may not be able to count on our institutions, but we must be able to count on one another” (The Chronicle of Higher Education).

-L.D. Burnett 

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication. OPINION. L.D. Burnett is a professor of history at Collin College.