Violating Free Speech at SUNY-Fredonia

Over at Cliopatria, KC Johnson tells the alarming story of SUNY_Fredonia's denial of Stephen Kershnar's promotion to full professor, allegedly for "insufficient service," but by their own admission really because of several op-ed pieces he has written that were critical of university policies and administration. As KC writes:

This is as transparent an academic freedom case as is imaginable: a professor publicly criticized the university's "diversity" policies, and the university responded by citing that criticism to deny him promotion. Remarks in the Inside Higher Ed comment section on the case were chilling: Roger Bowen criticized not Fredonia but Kershnar, who tried to work out a compromise where his op-ed pieces would be pre-screened for accuracy; regular commenter "UnApologetically Tenured" fretted that the case could undermine support for the badly needed "collegiality" criterion. U.T. never said why he/she disagreed with Bowen and the AAUP that using collegiality inherently threatens academic freedom, but promised that he/she only wanted to use collegiality only to fire "malevolent," rather than benevolent, colleagues. How reassuring.

Professor Johnson also cites a New York Post op-ed, written by FIRE president Greg Lukianoff and FIRE program officer Robert Shibley, that captures the ramifications of the Kershnar case.

Whatever your politics, whatever your relationship, if any, to the academy, you should be outraged by, among other things, a state university's blatant disregard for the First Amendment and its callous willingness to violate the rights of expression and inquiry that are supposed to be so vital to a university's mission.