Glenn Reynolds should not be disciplined

He is being punished; he has to live with himself.

I was eagerly waiting to comment that it was a good thing that he hadn’t written that he wanted to see protestor’s heads on sticks, but sadly the OP already made that connection.

I’m OK with the USA Today sanction (tho if that were his primary employment, I may have felt differently). But on the main point, this seems exactly right.

Agreed with everything you said Henry. I’d only add that since the University of Tennessee is a public institution there are serious 1st Amendment concerns at play here. Public employees have lessened 1st Amendment rights when acting in their official capacities, but in this case, as you said, this tweet has no nexus to his employment.

“It seems to me a bit rich that they should be getting skittish now.”

Let’s be clear: Reynolds has no more a right to have his columns published by USA Today than you or me so his suspension would not violate any free speech or other rights that he has (there may be a contract issue, I’m sure their contracts are worded so they have the upper hand). But it is already predictable that right-wingers far and wide will denounce this act as censorship and what not, and too many liberals are too clueless as to what freedom of speech does and does not entail to not jump on the BS-wagon.

Let’s be clear: Reynolds has no more a right to have flip burgers for (insert company name here) than you or me so his suspension would not violate any free speech or other rights that he has (there may be a contract issue, I’m sure their contracts are worded so they have the upper hand)

Answering @7
http://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2016/09/22/university-tennessee-professors-twitter-account-suspended-over-charlotte-posts/90825720/

“Twitter briefly suspended Glenn Reynolds’ account after he responded to a tweet from a TV news station in Charlotte that showed protesters on Interstate 277. “Run them down,” he wrote.
…
He posted to Twitter shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday that his account had been unblocked after he agreed to delete the offending tweet.”
There is also a statement by Reynolds at the end of the new article.

Isn’t the suggestion that motorists “run down” protestors an incitement to first degree murder? There may be no law against this incitement, but it seems that emotional clowns of this sort shouldn’t be teaching students.

My intuition here is different. I think I agree in principle that you shouldn’t punish people on the job for things done on their own — but the interesting point is the degree to which his tweet reflects “incitement to violence” as a form of dangerous speech not necessarily protected by the 1st amendment.

I think it does. And curiously, my sense of the magnitude of the offense is related to the number of twitter followers you have. Some random kid/internet-troll tweeting something inappropriate to 5 friends does not seem like a big deal. But advocating for “Run them down” when you have millions of followers seems closer to the “fire in a crowded theater” moral constraint on free speech.

I”m unsure, though. Is that a reasonable approach? The louder your voice, the more constrained you are required to be and the less 1st amendment protection you have? Could be, I think.

Bottom line, I’m on the other side here. I think Reynolds should be sanctioned and possibly even removed from his academic post to reflect the fact that his stature there gives additional weight to his voice which he has shown to use irresponsibly consistently and without remorse and which therefore reflects poorly on his employer and their educational mission as a consequence.

Full disclosure: I am a tenured academic and think it would be fair to hold myself to the same standard even though I am aware that the definition of “dangerous” speech is unnervingly slippery. My faculty handbook specifically doesn’t protect me from a felony conviction outside of the office, as a point of distant reference.

Paul, would you say the same about an academic that shares your values?
E.g. (assuming that you are from the left) someone that calls for revolution? Or armed resistance against occupiers?

Moreover, IANAL, but I am pretty sure your first-amendment analysis is flawed: see e.g.
https://popehat.com/2012/09/19/three-generations-of-a-hackneyed-apologia-for-censorship-are-enough/

“Holmes’ famous quote comes in the context of a series of early 1919 Supreme Court decisions in which he endorsed government censorship of wartime dissent — dissent that is now clearly protected by subsequent First Amendment authority.”

Bravo, Henry, this is excellent.

@layman

It is not about tenure per se. The same principle that Henry is defending should apply to for a cashier at Walmart. Obviously a cashier at Walmart does not enjoy the protection that tenure offers. But whatever one may think of tenure for professors, there are some aspects of tenure (i.e. the freedom of not being fired for things you say off the job) that should be spread more widely to other jobs as well. Taking this freedom away from professors may make the distribution of this freedom more equal (almost nobody has it) but it is hard for me to see how it would be an improvement.

tom: “Taking this freedom away from professors may make the distribution of this freedom more equal (almost nobody has it) but it is hard for me to see how it would be an improvement.”

I quite agree – that’s why I said it was a silly reaction.

That said, is there nothing Reynolds (or anyone) could say that would warrant discipline?

My intuition runs counter to Henry’s here.

This part of the OP seems to me to assume away the problem:

Reynolds isn’t, as far as I can tell, acting as a scholar when he blogs or tweets, and I don’t think anyone with two braincells to rub together could mistake his blogging and tweeting for scholarship. It’s opinionating – often extremely nasty opinionating in my opinion – but that’s it. Unless Reynolds puts it down as part of his employment activity in his annual report, I can’t see how it’s connected to his role at the University of Tennessee, and even if he did, it would seem to me a stretch.

I don’t know how Reynolds characterizes his blogging in his annual reports to his academic employer, but I would be surprised if his high public profile as a writer of opinion — much of it built on his blogging and now tweeting — was not featured in some wise.

Reynolds has made himself a public figure with the aim of influencing the public discourse as part of his chosen career as an academic lawyer. I do not think it is at all inappropriate that his publishers (Twitter, USA Today) or his academic employer (which presumably encourages service to the community and explicitly includes establishing a public profile to comment on issues of public import as an option) to take notice when he crosses a line and violates norms.

In this case, Reynolds has apologized for his tweet, which ought to be taken into account — in fact, inducing such apologies is a useful function of the threat of sanction. People make mistakes and such apologies are useful in themselves, but I doubt that they are ever entirely spontaneous or unconditioned on the threat of sanctions. I do not think it would be at all a bad thing if the University “investigated” and issued some kind of reprimand for this instance or, better, for certain patterns in his rhetoric which are reprehensible for undermining public and social values that the University is pledged to support and reinforce.

A complete suspension of judgment or blanket immunity does not seem to me to be a sustainable or useful principle.

Yes. In order for there to be censure of any kind, a reasonable person would have to assume that Reynolds really does want to see protesters who block roads ‘run down.’ We live in a world where Swift would have been sanctioned/removed for writing ‘A Modest Proposal.’ On Henry standing up to defend someone he detests: Kudos, especially during this rather more testy time.

In order for there to be censure of any kind, a reasonable person would have to assume that Reynolds really does want to see protesters who block roads ‘run down.’

And, a good test of this is what Reynolds says upon reflection and upon getting a reaction. In this case, Reynolds has apologized, which is exactly the behavior the threat of sanctions can induce. I don’t think I would want to try Reynolds’ brand of crazy in a world of blanket immunity.

This particular incident seems directly parallel to Erik Loomis’s “head on a stick” rhetoric. It is overblown and unhelpful, but shouldn’t get you fired from your job.

As a more general principle, while there are some very few cases where outside action reflects on your ability to lead (or perhaps be a PR flack), for the most part we should strive for a world where one’s outside legal behavior doesn’t get you fired from your job. (I might even extend it to some forms of unrelatedly illegal activity but for the sake of a clean statement of principles…)

It is the same problem with the Clementine Ford/Michael Nolan Facebook instance. Progressives fought against morals clauses for a reason.

“a tweet that doesn’t have anything obvious to do with his employment as a law professor.”

Do you believe that professors of law should be inciting unlawful behaviour?

“… expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position.”

implies that an opinion that “clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position” is grounds for dismissal. Reynold’s “extramural utterance” advocating unlawful activity clearly demonstrates unfitness for a position as professor of law.

I have questions, too, about “people should not be punished on the job for stuff they do off it” in a world in which ordinary people are routinely fired or denied employment on the basis of drug tests and credit reports.

Try whistleblowing and, assuming you are not jailed which is a big assumption in high profile cases, see what that does for your career and employment prospects.

This is how most racist violence in the U.S. happens, by the way. Only a tiny minority of the worst racists set out to kill people. Most of the shootings and so on happen because frightened white people decide that an angry black person is an immediate threat to them in some way.

And, then they lawyer up and get off because the law is shaped by people like Glenn Reynolds.

Manta 9: You are the one missing the point here. Writing for USA Today isn’t Reynolds’ day job. He’s not depending on it for a living. USA Today is offering him a platform to speak. They don’t have to, and they have the right to not offer that platform. If they decide that Reynolds’ writing insane tweets is proof that he’s not a good choice for columnist of a respectable newspaper, they are perfectly within their right. That decision is also not punishment or retaliation for non-work related protected speech like it would be if Walmart fires a cashier because of a critical tweet.

Of course if they were an actually respectable newspaper, they wouldn’t have offered that platform to an asshole in the first place but that’s the liberal media for you.

If someone, god forbid, did attack protestors with a car

This did , in fact, happen although in Ypsilanti, MI rater than Charlotte, NC:

http://www.mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/index.ssf/2016/09/no_one_injured_as_car_drives_t.html

I hope he can keep his uni job, but I’m extremely okay with him losing his USA Today job, in the sense that I’m bitterly opposed to any legal regime or set of norms in which someone hired for their opinions cannot also be fired for their opinions. The decision to not hire someone because they have the wrong opinions is also a kind of censorship, a form of censorship that becomes more powerful if we decide that the people who do get hired can or should never be fired.

May I speak briefly from another country? In the UK there are laws aimed to prevent incitement to racial hatred or to violence, and people are prosecuted under those laws from time to time. Just now police are supposed to be investigating some of the many post-Brexit hate incidents (though with what effect is not clear). Then, too, following the urban riots in London and elsewhere some years ago a number of people who seemed to incite to rioting online were given custodial sentences. And a chap who made an unfunny joke about blowing up an airport because of some inconvenience to him found himself on the same wrong side of these laws.

Some of these verdicts were way over the top, yes, and stupid. The judges slid down that slope all too easily. But I find it hard to deny the principle of there being some legal constraint on hateful, and especially inciting, speech. And what about Germany, with its laws against promulgating specifically Nazi opinions and symbols?

Still, I doubt that the Tweet by Reynolds would be prosecuted in the UK (can’t say about Germany, if the tweet were aimed at Jews), though he might be found culpable if the situation seemed very volatile, as it apparently seemed to the judiciary during those riots in the UK. And in the UK Reynolds’ position would probably protect him, however repellent he might seem.

HOWEVER. What about the AAUP’s position offered above? “The controlling principle is that a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position.” I gather this guy is employed in a law department. Does this seem like the sort of thing a professor of law should be saying in public? Is this not a reflection on his qualification to represent the profession of law … and, for that matter, his institution? I will go with Henry’s idealism, since it seems a good general principle to defend against arbitrary constraint on political expression. This probably also means that the expression of casual and habitual prejudice, however loathsome, should fall under the heading of moral failing rather than legal transgression. But still, a moral failing is a failing. As I recall, in Oxford many years ago it was discovered by interested parties that the only grounds on which a particular professor could be censored or dismissed was ‘moral turpitude’. Is there not some equivalent — if equally vague and speculative — principle operating in US universities that might suggest at least some form of censure?

I second much of what Henry says here. I’ll also add this: Aren’t we getting exhausted with round after round of a professor saying something, even something terrible in this case, only to have a university, which should be dedicating its increasingly scarce resources to things that matter, launch an investigation of that professor? It just seems like an absurd waste of time all around.

#10 Reynolds has no more a right to have flip burgers for (insert company name here) than you or me so his suspension
have employee rep check the negotiated contract (employee union benefit)

I should have added: a few days of discomfort of the fear uncertainty and doubt variety is in my opinion about the right degree of punishment.

CR: “It just seems like an absurd waste of time all around.”

This is the current mode of politics. Can’t do anything about actual problems, but can sort of maybe censure somebody unless they’re too high up on the food chain.

As has already been pointed out in this thread, freedom of speech was fine until people used it to oppose the draft, after which use of freedom of speech became the lever which was used to destroy the Wobblies and a whole lot of other left organizations of the early 20th century. There is no way to censure Reynolds and not make it marginally worse for everyone else, so what remains is laughing at him and making jokes about heads on sticks, which is a lot more fun anyways.

My terminal degree is from UTK, which already has enough of a reputation as a mere”jock school” (as someone I once met at a conference remarked when I mentioned my degree was from there) to justify issuing chips as well as hoods to be placed on grads’ shoulders, and has had to suffer the added indignity of Reynolds’ use of its name in his by-line for far too long. The single biggest public service Twitter has provided is a near-instantaneous forum for outing celebri -pundits’ biases as they self-importantly talk to themselves and by-the-by a faceless audience. So Reynolds is likely deeply racist. Not a shock, but pretty clearly a confirmation. No news forum should give him a voice unless doing so is just as a profitable shill for the like-minded. Oops–I guess that explains USA Today.

But the OP is right. His views are despicable. But he needs to be evaluated as an academic only by his professional conduct–not his questionable use of free speech. It’s at least logically possible that a KKK member could also be an adequate professor.

But I guess those rights do protect non-conservatives some of the time, so I should resist the temptation.

You could just be silent when it’s a conservative in trouble. If you speak up for both sides and person B speaks up only for people they agree with, you wind up with more voices on one side than the other, which isn’t what you want if you want equitable treatment.

“I thought what I wanted to say had already been said” is an adequate response if pressed.

@40 is exactly right. Reynolds is a very long way from contrite. The original tweet is, indeed, provocative and can be seen by anyone familiar with the full range of political discourse on the web.

@52 This is very poor from you Alan. Reynolds’ publications and standing on his side of the political divide is at least as solid many other libertarian/conservative academics. Whatever your own biases against Reynolds, his long history of arguing for limits on government authority in general and surveillance and police powers, in particular, is at least equal to that of many civil libertarians on the left.

You do little to enhance the reputation of your alma mater by making a huge leap to declaring ‘Reynolds is likely deeply racist.’ Phil Ruston taught at my undergraduate university while I was there. It doesn’t get much worse than that. But I’m not about to allow that clown to define the school when many other better scholars also taught and worked.

Henry is right. Reynolds is a mendacious hypocrite. That just makes him one of a great many. The difference is he’s a prolific blogger with a wide following.

@57 I make no such concession.

The responsibility to bury Reynolds, if that is a truly worthwhile goal, lies entirely with his peers at the UT who are are producing the scholarship to balance that account. I’m not aware of any campaign by his peers at UT to have Reynolds excommunicated.

You could start one!

Cheers, Alan.

Nothing, btw, is more likely to motivate Reynolds’ readers, many of whom do not support Trump, to get out the vote and for teh Donald.

Reynolds is holding his nose, as he did with Romney, McCain, and Bush. Support for Trump in the instapundit world is lukewarm, at best, and the tone of the blog is almost NeverTrump.

You should get out more.

The path for Hillary would be easier, imho, if Cruz were the nominee. He’s nuts and may yet get his run, tho’ I doubt it.

Nap time

The workplace principle as presented here seems to suggest that if Glenn Reynolds took a courtroom case and suborned perjury, it should be deemed irrelevant to his work as a professor of law. Or, if another member of the legal community, a police chief, for instance, had tweeted the same after hours, too, it should be deemed irrelevant to his day time job as an enforcer of law.

Given the context of the events, this was in fact analogous to crying “Fire!” in a crowded theater. If that dude had tweeted about a head on a stick when there was a mob at the other man’s door, it might be analogous to this situation. Did he? At any rate, the only question about the university is whether it should be content to follow the police’ lead in regarding this as an acceptable thing in a crisis.

If Reynolds had tweeted that protesters should take out some cops, would there have been an original post?

@65 “Making calls for racialised violence” More expert analysis from the resident dunce.

Let me guess, you wrote the comment without actually looking at the, you know, evidence as in the actual tweet, which is actually Reynold’s response to a WBTV report from KeithLamontScott.

If, on the other hand you actually took the time to read the tweet before deeming it a ‘call for racialized violence, ‘ congratulations! That would be so not you.

Either way, you’re got some heavy lifting to do to find anything remotely ‘racial’ in the tweet. Unless, of course, you asserting that all protesters are either black, or people of color.

Not one of the BLM protesters who shut down Heathrow was.

Reynolds likes nothing so much as ordinary citizens, (that would be all) taking ‘personal responsibility’ for their own safety. Thus, Reynolds argues his ‘perfect modern couple’ would be same-sex, pot-smoking partners, armed to the teeth.

Reynolds is one step away (maybe less) from being a law professor/blogger cum survivalist. All races, creeds, genders are encouraged to build their own bunkers and prepare for the end.

Don’t you people know anything?

I see various kind of rights involved in this kind of situation
1) The right of R. to say whatever he wants in his free time (as long as he makes clear he’s not talking for his employer, and it’s not some special situation like lawyer, doctor, etc.)
2) The right of random guy A to read R. opinion, without having to worry that it is really the opinion of his employer (assuming honesty on the part of R. : heh!)
3) The right of R.’s employer not to have to police what R. say in his free time

On the other side, we have
4) The right of random guy B. NOT to read R. opinion
5) The right of the employer to dictate what R. in public (and maybe also in private)

How to concile best these rights? It’s quite easy for me: I don’t give a damn about 5) (i.e., an employer that wants 5) can go f* himself); about 4) it’s also very easy: B simply needs not to read R. tweets or opinion eds or blogs (I managed quite well till now, so I am pretty sure B. can do the same).
So it remains only to protect the rights 1), 2), and 3).

Not sure why you’re disturbed? I’m in the “university shouldn’t discipline” him camp (caveat that I am not aware of all of applicable university faculty policies, but I don’t think the policies should be such that he would be disciplined in any case), but that’s not the same as “university shouldn’t investigate issue.”

Again, I wonder, is there anything ostensibly non-work-related Reynolds (or any academic) could say that would warrant an ‘investigation’ or ‘discipline’?

An in-dept discussion here about related matters, by a lawyer
https://popehat.com/2013/09/05/ninth-circuit-clarifies-first-amendment-rights-of-public-university-professors/

Pretend you are a black UTK law student. You face the choice of either skipping a key elective class or taking the class from Glenn Reynolds, a man who has twice targeted black protestors in the national media: first by dog-whistling that black activists shouldn’t vote* and then tweeting in favor of their deaths.

Care to guess how many black students want to place their dignity and GPA in the hands of a man whose public statements have now sparked two race-related controversies?

Whatever the truth of his attitudes, Professor Reynolds’ public statements have led him to be perceived as hostile to black and female students (“men’s rights” is one of his pet issues)**. After the Mizzou article, black students refused to take his class. I think we can all agree that his nationally-known (apparent) advocacy in favor of killing black protestors will not vary this trend.

This isn’t the typical academic free speech debacle. The controversy in question doesn’t revolve around a professor’s arguable—or even nonsensical—political positions or partisan academic work. Without qualification, Reynolds advocated running over black protestors. Once the statement’s inappropriate nature was explained to him (because apparently its offensive content was invisible to its author) he refused to disown it, issuing a non-apology only when his income and media influence were threatened.
Can we really place the onus on black students, requiring them to take this man’s class, suffer a racially motivated harm, and then prove it, before Reynold’s can be disciplined?

I applaud your willingness to speak out on behalf of someone whom you genuinely dislike and I dislike the idea of Reynolds getting fired. But I think discipline is in order, even if it takes the form of relegating him to niche, specialty interest courses.
* Article here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/11/11/raise-voting-age-25-yale-missouri-protests-political-debate-column/75577468/. While not as nationally recognized, this was a huge controversy on campus.
** https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/?s=teach+women+not+to+rape Delightful.

Here is the discussion of law in Guth’s case:
https://popehat.com/2013/09/20/university-of-kansas-professor-david-guth-suspended-for-repulsive-anti-nra-tweet/

Under applicable law — sometimes called the Pickering/Connick balancing test — the applicable questions are (in over-simplified form) (1) was this a statement on a subject of public interest (in which case it is entitled to protection), and (2) how does University of Kansas’ need to maintain discipline and harmony balance with Guth’s interest in free speech. As I suggested recently, recent caselaw establishes that the interest in free expression is particularly powerful in the college environment.
Guth’s tweet is on an issue of public concern. It’s made by a professor, in a context where the interest in free expression is at its maximum… The analysis might possibly be different if Guth singled out students or colleagues at his university, or directed such speech at a controversy at his university, or said something exposing KU to significant litigation risks. Then, at least, KU might argue that it is disruptive of local harmony or discipline. But this seems to be disgusting speech on a straightforward national political dispute … Unless KU can make a very strong showing that this impedes discipline and harmony in an environment where unbalanced political rhetoric is commonplace, it shouldn’t be able to discipline him.

You know there could be a little more attention to what it’s like to be a tuition-paying black student at a University that has bestowed honors on a person who has suggested that once a white person feels threatened by black protestors temporarily blocking a road, he has the right to drive through them!

From the link in the OP it seems that this honored law professor has implied that it would be wrong to deprive any white person of being being able to do anything to minimize the risk of any harm that he imagines a black person may inflict on him even if this risk-reduction maneuver ends in the loss of a black life. All white people can now claim to be suffering Reginald Denny’s post-traumatic syndrome and plow down black people as they see fit, according to Reynolds.

This thread could stand just a bit more attention to what it might be like to be a black student at a campus where a law professor honored by the University has said that a white person who simply imagines himself threatened by a black protestor can legally and morally kill that black person with impunity.

Otherwise, Crooked Timber will not beat back its hard-earned reputation in minority communities for being a pride parade for the ethically impaired, the compassionately deficient, and the altruistically atrophied.

Are we really supposed to be really upset that this University is listlessly going through some fairly cheap steps obviously not to fire this most honored faculty member but really to signal to the tuition-paying black students that the University will make a bit uncomfortable a Prof who has used the elevated status it has given him to put his imprimatur on open-hunting season on black people.

This review by the University will probably be nothing more than the collegial guidance to this monster that even the 1st Amendment lawyers agree the UT Administration has a right, if not a duty, to provide.

Obviously the University is trying to help just a bit the black students who are vomiting out of existential sickness on their way to class by putting some distance between itself and Reynolds.

But of course, says the Crooked Timber “brain trust”, let’s not have the University carry out this symbolic review to make the black students feel a bit safer being there. And in fact the brain trust here makes no alternative recommendations to help black students weather this storm and ensure that their speech is not effectively chilled due to suffering a loss of confidence in their bodily integrity, given how a respected Prof’s words are steeling the confidence of the white supremacists at this particular campus. There is by the way a rather robust history of white supremacy in the Volunteer State.

And then we are told that it would be a terrible thing if USA Today, seeing that the toxic stuff Reynolds has doubtless written and will write can no longer have plausible deniability built into it, decides that it can no longer feature his writing.

Well obviously it’s a good thing if USA Today terminates his column. And as TM has tried to explain people here Reynolds’ rights have not thereby been violated.

“so a law professor cannot advocate civil disobedience?”

I don’t think advocating running over protestors is civil disobedience ?!?!

ZM. that’s what you were claiming, not me:
“doesn’t want its law professors publishing Tweets telling people to BREAK THE LAW. If his job is a law professor, telling people to BREAK THE LAW is kind of related to his job…
If he was a practicing lawyer he couldn’t tell anyone to BREAK THE LAW or he would be disbarred, I already looked up rules about this in California. Its something that can get practicing lawyers struck off.”

@75

An example: 9am Glenn’ Reynolds’ writes:

Guys lets meet at 7:30 on the corner of Oak and Main. We’ll form a caravan and head to Ash and Grand St. where the protesters have been gathering. Let’s run over some protesters! Greg…u know those antlers u have on the front of your Ford? Bring those.”

At 1:30 pm developments ensue and the protests don’t occur. DA etc…decide not to press charges for incitement to violence. But University still fires G’ R’ under the policy u cite.

Manta,

Yes, but civil disobedience is a different category than telling people to run over protestors – civil disobedience is to encourage law reform. The university would have to take that into consideration, but telling people to run over protestors is pretty different and just advocating plain criminality (although I don’t think it was serious as far as I can tell)

ZM, I am trying to say that your reasoning applied consistently would imply that a law professor could get disciplined for encouraging people (in his free time) to do civil disobedience.

From what you wrote, it seems that that is exactly the case for lawyers (that is a lawyer that advocates civil disobedience could get disbarred): do you confirm?

Manta,

They might have to just give advice about what the laws are in relation to the civil disobedience etc I think.

“The ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct address some of these questions directly in Model Rule 1.2: “A lawyer shall not counsel a client to engage, or assist a client, in conduct that the lawyer knows is criminal or fraudulent, but a lawyer may discuss the legal consequences of any proposed course of conduct with a client and may counsel or assist a client to make a good faith effort to determine the validity, scope, meaning or application of the law.”

http://abaforlawstudents.com/2016/09/23/how-does-a-lawyer-handle-civil-disobedience/

Glen T. apparently can’t imagine that the rules which he advocates could be applied to people whose politics that he agrees with too. An eye for an eye really does make the whole world blind.

Layman, Reynolds run his car above someone? I wasn’t aware of this news.

The funny thing is that Glen T. seems to claim to be a socialist.
And, like any good socialist, he’s advocating giving less rights for employees in USA than they have now.

Manta @81 The analogy is pertinent, and prior misuse is entirely irrelevant, as are your opinions about BS. Your apparent belief that Reynolds would have had to be physically present on the streets to be in an analogous situation is absurd. Also, your courtesy is largely imaginary.

I believe the OP and everyone else supporting Reynolds would have noticed the relevance if Reynolds had tweeted something about throwing rocks at the cops. But I do not believe he would have won such vigorous support (and posters’ applause for supporting him,) if he had.

Glen Reynolds has a dual role, which is what makes this confusing. As a professor, he’s supposed to be invisible and harmless. As a popular pundit and fringe member of the elite, he’s supposed to advocate for killing people.

I think that strict separation of his responsibilities could square this circle. As a professor, he won’t advocate killing people. As a pundit, he won’t be invisible and harmless. Everyone should be satisfied.

I really don’t understand people who want the university to do the job of police and tribunals (see @14, @48, etc.) : *if* (and it’s a big if) R. tweet was breaking the law, it should be investigated: NOT by the university (or his employer), but by the police; and decided: NOT by his employer, but by a judge.

This is absurd.

An employer has every right to terminate employment: for any reason or no reason at all, as long as it does not pertain to race, gender etc.

We also have the right to terminate marriages, civil unions, or relationships for any reason. This is rightly regarded as progress for individual rights. No one should be trapped in a relationship that one does not want to be in, and that includes employer and employee relationships as well as marriages.

This is a constitutional right by the way: freedom of association requires, inherently, freedom to not associate to remain meaningful.

Practically speaking, this has to do with branding. Crooked timber did not give a flying f about Mozilla sacking their CEO for donating money to a political cause. You were right then, wrong now. Any action you take publicly as an employee of an institution that damages its brand is more than enough justification for termination. As it should be.

Live in the real world please.

There have to be non academics here that have hired and fired. I can’t be the only one.

Manta,

Your education has completely failed you. The first amendment concerns actions on the part of the government. Your wife can divorce you for supporting Trump or joining the KKK. The government cannot arrest you. Notice the difference?

Or is this an artifact of having a lovely, brilliant, and internationally diverse commentariat? Your understanding of the constitution is completely, 100% incorrect.

A company or institution has the right to terminate employment. In fact, it is illegal to not act in the fiduciary interest of the owners. You have your morality play backwards.

If an employee is making public comments that decrease your share price of hurt the owners’ interests, it is morally obligatory to fire them.

Cheers

I’ll repost the analysis by an actual lawyer (and expert on 1st amendment issues):

https://popehat.com/2013/09/20/university-of-kansas-professor-david-guth-suspended-for-repulsive-anti-nra-tweet/
and
https://popehat.com/2013/09/05/ninth-circuit-clarifies-first-amendment-rights-of-public-university-professors/

Please read it, and tell me where in your opinion does not apply to this situation.

I was addressing the more generalized claims in the thread, of which there is a clear and wrong belief that companies do not have the right to terminate employment based on the actions of an employee outside of work. In fact, that is in the OP. And it is wrong.

As to your comments about shame, let’s not descend into ad hominem attacks. I certainly do not hope you are fired and I hold no ill will towards you whatsoever. We should be able to disagree without rancor or malice.

That being said, we agree that public jobs are bound by the first amendment. However, it is clear in the thread that more generalized claims were being made. And these claims are wrong.

Anonymous, if you read the OP more closely, you will see that it agrees with your claim that employers (usually, in USA) have the right to fire workers for what they write

“As Chris, Alex Gourevitch and Corey have argued at length, the lack of job security across much of the US means that employers can threaten your job to discipline you for things they don’t like, including punishing activities that have nothing to do with one’s employment.”

Now please reread the rest of the OP, and try to understand what it’s saying.

Anonymous, it’s not my fault if you write
“I was addressing the more generalized claims in the thread, of which there is a clear and wrong belief that companies do not have the right to terminate employment based on the actions of an employee outside of work. In fact, that is in the OP.”
which, of course, is the OPPOSITE of what the thread claims.

“The OP clearly makes a point that people should not be fired for things they do outside of work. Can we agree on this point? ” Sure, now you have actually stated the position correctly.

Lumping work with marriage (as you did before) does not make much sense (except in the narrow legalistic sense): e.g., in most of the western countries you are free to divorce, but in many western countries you are NOT free to fire your workers on a whim. One right does not entail the other.

@115 “only limited by specific antidiscrimination laws.”

Oops, thx Manta.

But even so…why shouldn’t limiting freedom of association for anti-discrimination extend to discrimination against “opinions and statements made outside of work”?

Sure, in a future possible society, the cause of Liberty might flow the other way, but in today’s world the cause for freedom from workplace coercion trumps the “freedom” of an employer to protect her “brand”.

Ah, by the way, if you think writing “Live in the real world please.
There have to be non academics here that have hired and fired. I can’t be the only one.” and “Your education has completely failed you.” is compatible with ” I’ve responded cordially and politely”, then you are sorely mistaken.

If you intend to apologize, I can do the same and we can try to actually discuss cordially and politely; if not, I do enjoy smarm and sarcasm, so no problem with me.

Apology accepted, and I also apologize for being aggressive.

My framework is that trying to reason by logic from first principles is doomed to fail, for two different reasons
1) logic reasoning requires absolute precision and lack of ambiguity: this precision is probably not afforded by human language, and surely is not present in the USA constitution
2) even a “tiny” contradiction will destroy the whole edifice (“ex falso quodlibet”).

Moreover, I am not from USA, so, while I admire some of the principles in the USA constitution, saying things “freedom of association is in the USA constitution” is not a particularly convincing argument with me.

Finally, I am giving examples from outside USA because I want to show that (some of) the principle exposed in the OP can work in practice.
For instance, one does not need to assume “freedom of association” to decide that marrying whoever ones want is a right.

Extending @118, why anti-discrimination laws should include only “sex, age, etc.” and not political opinions?

I would even argue that freedom to express one political opinions is quite fundamental to the a true democracy.
(If I am not mistaken, this is actually the case in a few countries, where you cannot fire someone for being of a member of a party or similar: can other people confirm?)

@manta:

If you intend to apologize, I can do the same

Apologies don’t work that way. I mean, you’ve probably spent your entire life thinking that, for whatever reason, but they don’t.

An apology is when you’ve done something wrong, you’ve accepted that you’ve done something wrong, and you’re admitting that you’re sad about it. “I did this and I’m sorry”. I did this and I am “sorry”, saddened. Because it’s entirely based on your own emotional response it can’t be conditional or dependent on others’ actions; somebody saying they did something else wrong won’t actually change your emotional responses to your own actions, will it?

Now, you said “say” sorry, not “be” sorry, and the two are different. But if you are sorry but you’re not saying sorry… well, you’re misrepresenting something [your internal emotional state] to gain rhetorical advantage in [this honestly pretty petty] debate, no? “Lying to preserve conflict unless the conflict can be resolved on your terms with you on top” is not a misrepresentation, and needless to say that’s not very nice at all.

So yeah. Conditional apology -> worse than bullshit. If you’re wrong, adult up and admit it. If you were rude, adult up and admit it. Unconditionally, because conditionality is just crap. Self-defeating, too, but if you care about that then, again, it’s not actually sorrow you’re feeling.

[stages of grief go denial then bargaining, right? Same thing.]

B9,

I don’t follow. If we are not profitable, we do not exist. If an employee offends a JV partner, then yes we will cut him loose. The welfare of our employees is predicated on the fact that we are profitable. Would we hire a racist xenophobe to oversee our foreign ops? Should we have to?

If we operate under a legal regime that says we have to keep employing people that offend our partners, then that is a legal regime that makes little sense.

If a local restaurant has a waiter that is racist, sexist, and xenophobic should the restaurant be forced to keep him? That’s just terrible customer relationship management.

I’ll tell you what that would actually accomplish: we would conduct an insanely thorough background check and anyone who held strong political opinions would not be hired in the first place.

This is already a somewhat widespread practice. Put women’s feminist league or black panther member on your resume and see if you get hired. We don’t need to make this even worse.

This sounds familiar.

Something about all within the state, nothing outside the state…..

Yes, if you believe everyone and everything is community property belonging to the federal government then it does indeed have unlimited sovereignty over all aspects of life.

Or, just for the thrill of it, we could say there’s a spectrum from anarchism to communism. And where one lies on that spectrum informs their opinions about rights vis a vis man and the state.

@ 128

RE: racist waiter: I agree that where an employee’s speech (in their strictly-construed function as an employee) has predictable, immediate, and direct impacts on the business, they should be liable to employer discipline. Outside of that…we as a polity should support the principle of freedom of speech and freedom of association above any potential “harm” to and “need” of a particular institution.

Yes, if a citizenry were to face material calamity unless it win the favor of institutions beyond its control, the cause of survival would understandably take precedence over these principles. Servants do not have the luxury of offending their masters. But this is not the situation that presents itself. No person’s welfare is dependent upon any particular firm being profitable so long as safety nets and widespread, diverse opportunities for employment exist.

Furthermore, if employment law were to reflect the principles I advocate, then no hypothetical JV partner can post-facto fault your firm for obeying the law as it existed when the partnership was begun. It becomes a cost of doing business, a cost that is eminently bearable for the polity at large, if not -in an extreme case- one particular domestic firm. The polity does not serve the firm’s existence, but the reverse.

Freedom ain’t free, but the cost isn’t prohibitive.

@126 Collin Street

“If you intend to apologize, I can do the same
Apologies don’t work that way. ”

And yet it seems that we are getting a more “civilized” debate.
Funny how reality sometimes differ from one’s ideas…

“Because it’s entirely based on your own emotional response…”
Says who?
But let’s drop the topic: I am not interested in your ideas on what is an apology and what is not: suffices to say that I am not in the least interested in your emotional response.

@127 b9n10nt hits the nail on the heads: the assumption (in USA) that a firm is responsible for its employees utterances is (one of the) causes the firm to HAVE to police the utterances of its employees: “We honestly don’t care about privately held opinions. It is when they interfere with our fiduciary duty that it becomes an issue.” .

The assumption is due to the fact that, by default, a firm CAN police its employees.
If you change the default, you free both the employees and the employers.
(Of course, there are employers and bosses that like to dictate every aspect of their workers life…).

Saying to run over people isn’t a political comment, its not protected speech, its like calling “fire!” in a crowded building apart from I don’t think he was serious and no one ended up getting hurt.

@136

I was quoting @125:
My point is that, even assuming arguendo his premise and framework, the consequences are still be pretty bad.

“…activities that have nothing to do with one’s employment. ”
It’s obvious that the OP has not gone to law school. As a 3L, I can say training in character, decorum, and professionalism is as much a part of the law school experience as learning anything in particular about the law. If I had a famous blog and posted what Reynolds posted over the weekend, I’m a 100% sure I’d be called into the Dean’s office on Monday. Having a famous law prof that violates the norms of civility and professionalism essential to training future lawyers undermines the law school’s core mission, and makes him unfit for employment.
Maybe this isn’t a firing offense, but it’s definitely at least worth a suspension.

“Saying to run over people isn’t a political comment”.

This is a clearly wrong statement. Any known understanding of what “political” means includes the ideas and practices of a community over of what to do with public demonstrations of discontent by the people. Dr. Reynolds made a quite traditional statement on the subject, one with a long history even if it`s not common in today`s parlance.

May I suggest that if the acts of speech that should not be protected are both context-driven and dependent on the harm caused, which precludes the idea of curbing speech through political domination in the workplace, it is still absolutely rightful to question, within a community of teaching and learning, why does a law professor believes running over people is a moral civil action against political protesters, and how does that relate to his understanding of the law. This is not to say that he should be sacked for his tweet, or receive any kind of workplace disciplinary threat. It is just to remember that what he has said is related with his chosen profession, and thus his speech does not fit in the same category of, say, a shoemaker who organize political rallies for the KKK. He holds a position of power, and his speech is not to be dissociated from that position.

People keep mention non-USA law, so I have to ask–is there a jurisdiction where it would be illegal for a newspaper to fire a regular opinion columnist because that columnist expressed an offensive opinion outside his columns?

USA Today gave him that job because they wanted him to express his *own* opinion and attach his name to it (thus there is no distinction between his “on the job” and “off the job” opinions), and it should be entirely within their rights to decide they no longer want that opinion or that name.

If you passed a law requiring newspapers to keep columnists in situations like this, seems like the rational thing for a newspaper to do would be to fire all of its regular opinion columnists and only print freelance op-eds. In fact, that’s a general problem–if you set up any situation where there’s asymmetry between the criteria you’re allowed to use for hiring and the criteria for firing, then that’s an incentive for employers to switch from permanent employees to temporary ones. You shouldn’t be allowed to fire a janitor for their political views, but you *also* shouldn’t be allowed to refuse to hire the janitor for those views.

Re property rights. I do not know where you are going with this. I assume it is based on a philosophical framework, in which rights do not exist except at the tolerance of others. That might be true, although I have no idea what road that would go down.

Communism to anarchism spectrum would be my initial framework for rights of an individual vis a vis the state. If you’d like to use a different one I do not see how that alters the argument.

The fact is, as far as my experience informs me, that a business is by nature risk adverse concerning politics. Yes, there are idiotic exceptions: hobby lobby, Etc.

Staking out a political stance typically has large downside risk and little potential benefit.

If you make it impossible to fire employees for political speech, then we will respond by never hiring anyone that has a history of political speech. We will simply look into their background and not hire them.

If you put the burden of risky speech of employees on us, we will find a way around it. And mitigate our risk as much as the law allows. And a world where Democrat Club at University X is a disqualifier from employment is not a world I would like to live in.

I’m sure you could say this would be illegal also, but the truth is we do not and never will have to give reasons to not hire someone.

Cheers

PS: when we give money to politicians we don’t care about their speech. We give to the person we think will win. No one cares what side the politician is on. It’s about access and favors.

If it’s a toss up we will even give to both sides in the same election.

50: “As has already been pointed out in this thread, freedom of speech was fine until people used it to oppose the draft”

Really? Sedition laws? It is my understanding that freedom of speech was always contested (and probably will always be).

“This is the current mode of politics.” Nonsense. What is true is that debates about (mostly imaginary) suppression of speech takes way too much space on CT. But CT is not representative of “the current mode of politics”.

Manta 9 and 43, am I getting you right: You seem to argue that the so-called liberal media have an obligation to publish and disseminate the views of right-wing extremists and that refusing to do so amounts to a violation of free speech? I don’t know how else to make sense of your argument.

Manta@146:
Unless university rules require it, I wouldn’t wait on an indictment to start an investigation and I certainly wouldn’t make disciplinary action contingent upon a conviction. He’s a cancer. Excise him.

Kidneystones@150:

I’m saying that U of T should hold Reynolds accountable using the administrative processes they have in place. What I’m hearing is that some would prefer he not be subject to investigation and punishment by the university because they could imagine a scenario where the results would not be to their liking. I acknowledge that concern but believe we’re better-served by holding people accountable to community rules. Giving people like Reynolds a pass enables misanthropic behavior. What he did went well beyond violating decorum. (He did not say “Change the law so that it’s legal to run over protesters.” That would be protected speech.) He urged people to engage in violence against their fellow citizens. He needs to be held to account. Suppose he had urged people to sexually assault protesters rather than run them over? Would you give him a pass on that too?

148: “It didn’t have any obligation to hire him”

But they do have an obligation to continue publishing his columns forever? They can’t change their judgment regarding his suitability as a columnist? They can’t decide to replace him with somebody who is a better fit, or has more to say, or sells better?

What exactly is your point?

Manta@146:
“Unless university rules require it, I wouldn’t wait on an indictment to start an investigation and I certainly wouldn’t make disciplinary action contingent upon a conviction”

You are claiming that he broke the law: the only valid method to establish if that is true or not is via the legal system.
And for good reasons: terrible as the judiciary may be, the alternatives that have been tried are quite worse; especially if the alternative is a university committee composed by amateurs.

TM@154

“They can’t change their judgment regarding his suitability as a columnist?”
Of course they can: yours is a non-sequitur; replace everywhere “columnist” with “burger-flipper” and you will quite easily see there are plenty of good reasons why a fast food joint may want/need to fire a worker, that don’t involve what the worker tweets in his spare time.

Chris G, . “some would prefer he not be subject to investigation and punishment by the university because they could IMAGINE a scenario where the results would not be to their liking”

See @15 Kiwand for a list of imaginary people.

I didn’t realize you were trolling, TM: shame on me.

Pure trolling. Shame on the spell check.

Of course they can: yours is a non-sequitur; replace everywhere “columnist” with “burger-flipper” and you will quite easily see there are plenty of good reasons why a fast food joint may want/need to fire a worker, that don’t involve what the worker tweets in his spare time.

Presumably one of the main reasons that USA Today hired him in the first place was his popular blog. The offending tweet was from the twitter account of that same blog. (I have no idea how much revenue said blog generates, but I’m not sure it’s any more “spare time” than his newspaper column was.)

Even if that weren’t the case and the tweet was from his personal account, the opinions he expresses publicly have obvious relevance to his suitability to be paid to express his opinions. There’s no “special profession”, just a simple principle that if political opinions are explicitly part of your job–the word “opinion” is in the very name of the thing your produce–then you can be fired for your political opinions. Or even more simply than that, if it’s okay to refuse to hire someone for a job based on their political opinions (which you’ve already admitted in the case of Reynolds) then it should be okay to fire them for that same reason.

Do you understand yet?

Anyway, I am arguing from my egoistical point of view: if I read an OpEd on a newspaper by someone famous-ish for something different than writing OpEd on newspapers, I would like to read the opinion of the writer, not of the newspaper owner.

Consumatopia, of course they would be in their right to fire him: just like it is in the right of almost most employers in USA to fire his workers on a whim.

Analogies can, conveniently, lead you wherever you want them to go. I would have hoped that people here could resist the urge to interpret words in the most narrow and literal fashion possible. Because, once you do that, you have to conclude that Eris Loomis (writing that he wanted to see heads on sticks), was literally advocating decapitation; that people calling for tumbrels after the financial crisis really did want to bring back the guillotine; and that people in the crowd under the NY stock exchange during the crisis really did want financiers to jump to their deaths from high ledges.

Now, if someone was actually organizing the running down of protestors, or actually doing it, that would be vehicular homicide, or an actual crime, with an actual arrest and trial associated with it. Which would be different from a few words in a tweet.

That’s the difference between common sense and making a mountain out of a molehill. And no one is fooled when extremists try to invent reasons why it’s OK to fire people who disagree with them politically.

@170 – agreed. I’m just making the point that you don’t need to take everything that everyone says literally, which appears to be the puzzling standard that a lot of folks are using here. This is the sort of thing that gets twelve year old kids arrested in middle school by armed guards because they mouthed off in frustration, and it’s not a standard to aspire to.

BW: “As for the argument that getting Reynolds fired makes academics who become prominent for expressing leftish notions more vulnerable, I think this is naïve at best.”

Insofar as legalism has any force, and insofar as it bears on this case, viewpoint-neutral legalism is generally better for the left than a realistic and cynical view of the legal system as it actually is. By holding to a fantasy you may get people to make real some small fraction of a fantasy.

As for a tit-for-tat response in which one side goes after Reynolds in response to Reynolds going after Loomis, the disadvantages are legion. First, people would have to pretend to care. Second, having pretended to care, they’d have to pretend not to care about the innumerable more serious and vicious encouragements-to-violence that elites make all the time, or at least pretend that those aren’t so much more serious as to make this one ludicrous in comparison. Third, since pretense slowly becomes reality at least in the sense that it affects people’s mind-set, people would slowly become people who actually did care about this in a serious way and thus destroy their lives and any hope of a creative and interesting existence.

“As for the argument that getting Reynolds fired makes academics who become prominent for expressing leftish notions more vulnerable, I think this is naïve at best. Such a principle of truce works only as long as you can prove that you have sufficient power that a truce is worth it to the other side.”

I understand that you have that as a general principle, but it is especially wrong here. There is already a liberal principle, enshrined into law and common in contracts that academics get special treatment. What you’re suggesting is that we tear it down just for Glen Reynolds and then hope that the precedent doesn’t get applied to lefties.

Now I would additionally argue that we ought to extend it to other jobs, because academics aren’t really a special flower. But that is a different issue.

179: “Surrender pre-emptively, on principle, as the OP advocates, and what you get is the rightward ratchet cum descent into the crapification of the discourse. The Right smells fear and weakness; it doesn’t give store credit for a failure to complain.”

Consumatopia, Manta will say the same thing over and over again. It’s pointless trying to argue.

um, that wasn’t me, I didn’t say anything about surrendering and I don’t think Reynolds should be investigated or disciplined at University of Tennessee.

I think that’s more a matter of academic freedom (and First Amendment issues because he’s at a state school) than workplace freedom, though. If Reynolds were, for inexplicable reason, working at some sort of liberal think tank instead of being a professor and his employers suddenly discovered Instapundit then I think they should be able to fire him.

For that matter, if an elementary school teacher was found to be tweeting literal Nazi stuff, or if that woman who made the infamous alligator tweet had a job involving children, then, yeah, they should probably be fired or at least disciplined.

Some political views really are disqualifying for some jobs.

BW: “Blanket immunity is a fallback position for weakness. Pretending as RP put it msy be the we can accomplish, but it is just pretending, not real principle.”

Real principles get made into reality against entrenched interest because of solidarity and similar kinds of social mechanisms, which let people work together. Pointing out fake solidarity is one of the things I do a lot, because fake solidarity doesn’t actually work. It’s deployed as a way of making oneself feel better by rhetorically shaming someone else, but it doesn’t actually do anything.

There are three kinds of solidarity being rhetorically deployed in this example. One of them is academic solidarity: professors should not be disciplined because then things will get worse for all professors. One is liberal solidarity: conservatives who say bad things should be disciplined because otherwise they’ll attack liberals costlessly and things will get worse for all liberals. One is general worker solidarity: people should not be disciplined for what they say outside of work because then things will get worse for all workers.

I think that the second and third of these are fake solidarities. The first, a kind of craft guild solidarity, does exist to some extent. Depending on the second or third for anything important is setting people up for a fall if they are not actually privileged people and actually need support.

The fake solidarity of #2 can manifest as the complacency of the crook and the cheat.

The problem is that people really do have legitimate disagreements about what productive social cooperation looks like. We have to design the system to accommodate disagreement beyond just liberal and left.

I don’t disagree. I am not asserting that I have the one right answer to what constitutes productive and equitable social cooperation in all circumstances. In that, I am no doctrinaire socialist, if I may be permitted a libel of those to my left.

What you may be missing is that the idea of “legitimacy” is itself a liberal monopoly, upon which liberal hegemony over other political ideologies is founded. The liberal political master strategy over many, many decades has been to design the system on exclusively liberal principles and to operate the system in ways that accommodate vested-interest conservatives and reactionaries as hypocrites.

A recurrent problem is that people can also have “illegitimate” disagreements and comfortable liberals, enjoying an easy life and the benefits of their own hypocrisies, may find their backbones missing in action. And, ideologically, it is easier sometimes to defend a null of no policy at all against either an authoritarian status quo or even an emergent authoritarianism than to press the messy details of a case for discrimination and management with a public purpose.

But, I will hold with considerable confidence that I can find some reliable bounds for legitimacy and that justice requires policing those boundaries, not always shrugging one’s shoulders and pretending it doesn’t much matter.

@191 Sebastian H
“We have to design the system to accommodate disagreement beyond just liberal and left.”

Who is this “we” you re talking about?
Sure, many people want to do it (and they got at least in part by things like the 1st amendment); but some of the people you are arguing with here have no interest in accommodating different viewpoints: see @95 @186
For some reason, they think that giving workers less rights will move politics leftward: and that’s the only think they care about, not actual workers.

hyperbolic tweets

See, there’s a reasonable case to be made that they aren’t hyperbolic; “run them over” isn’t an established idiom like “heads on pikes” is. If it isn’t hyperbolic — if a law professor is in fact advocating for lawless action — then, well, I think that sacking becomes something worthy of consideration, but that’ll need an investigation obviously. And to determine whether or not it is hyperbolic, again, will require investigation.

I don’t think that the possibility that a law professor might be determined after investigation to have advocated for potentially-lethal assaults and sacked or even disciplined on that account is a reasonable thing to be upset about. But there’s nothing else to be upset about, is there? Reynolds hasn’t been sacked.

I agree that if he is CONVICTED at a trial about his tweet the university should consider action.

“Sure, many people want to do it (and they got at least in part by things like the 1st amendment); but some of the people you are arguing with here have no interest in accommodating different viewpoints: see @95 @186
For some reason, they think that giving workers less rights will move politics leftward: and that’s the only think they care about, not actual workers.”

Was there some kind of post re-numbering issue? I see no resemblance between what you just wrote and my post which is currently @186. I said nothing about moving politics leftward.

@200 Consumatopia
“Was there some kind of post re-numbering issue? I see no resemblance between what you just wrote and my post which is currently @186. I said nothing about moving politics leftward.”

The renumbering is annoying; I should have quoted more from the original posts to make the references recognizable in case of renumbering: sorry for the confusion.
To clarify: while we do disagree about how far workplace protections should go, as far as I can see, you never claimed that actually existing academic freedom (or 1st Amendment protections) should be WEAKENED.