about those two UT professors

[cab67]

These are the ones who've filed a lawsuit complaining that they're not allowed to give failing grades to students who get abortions or are part of the LGBTQ community.

A lot of people here are calling on UT to fire them. That's not going to happen based on what we currently know. There may be (and, in my opinion) should be consequences, but termination won't be one of them.

I'm a UT alum - PhD 1997. While I was there, the Texas state legislature set up an outcry about the "broken" tenure system, and how the state's public universities had to "fix" it. The result was fairly benign - post-tenure review systems were beefed up, allowing administrators to do something if a professor was genuinely not doing their job, but tenure itself remained intact (as it should have been). But I clearly remember an incident that happened right after all of this.

Legislators kept repeating the same mantra - "We're not doing this to punish instructors who push the 'wrong' ideas! Freedom of Speech!" None of us actually believed them, but that's what they kept saying. It was, they said, about making sure instructors were doing their jobs.

As soon as the dust started to settle, a controversy arose at UT-Austin. A law professor expressed admiration for a book entitled The Bell Curve, which argued that Black people had lower IQs for genetic reasons, and that lower average academic performance in the African American community was unrelated to poverty. It was complete hogwash and was heavily refuted almost as soon as it came out in print, but a few right-wing "intellectuals" took it seriously, as this particular law professor evidently did.

Right away, some of the legislators who claimed tenure reform had nothing to do with ideology threatened to go through UT-Austin's budget with a pair of tweezers unless something was done to fire this professor.

These threats came from both the left and the right, though I assume a lot of those on the right had more to do with not alienating Black voters than actual concern that a racist was teaching law at their flagship campus. But whatever the reason, it flew in the face of what they'd just spent months insisting they weren't going to do.

I don't remember exactly what happened to this particular law professor, but he wasn't fired.

The issue is this - tenure is supposed to protect freedom of inquiry. That goes for those of us working on topics the right wing dislikes. In my case, that's climate change and evolution. But it also protects speech rational people find abhorrent. This will be taken into consideration by any administrator who might get involved. Administrators know they'd face the south side of a lawsuit alleging violations of the professors' First Amendment rights and probably breach of contract, and this would be a costly affair they'd most likely lose.

Moreover, given the threats public universities face - and this is acutely true in fascist Texas - no university president or Board of Regents would allow a professor to be fired for expressing right-wing views. It's not a matter of right and wrong at that point - it's a matter of Realpolitik. They have to balance maintaining a campus that welcomes and nurtures everyone with not having a bunch of ignorant blowhards do real violence to their ability to do so.

Believe me - I am NOT, in any way, supporting what these professors have said or are doing. I, for one, would do what I could to marginalize them on campus. If I was a member of a governance body (e.g. Faculty Senate), I'd either propose or support a motion to censure them. If I was in the same department, I'd advise students to avoid their classes. If I was a member of the development committee, I'd make sure donors were aware that they're extreme outliers who don't represent rational human thought, much less the views of the department or institution.


All that said - although the two professors on this lawsuit are probably safe from dismissal given what we currently know, I've been in Academia long enough to know they won't go unpunished. At the very least, their department chairs and/or deans will try to limit their contact with female and LGBTQ students

They might also decide to look closely at their end-of-term teaching evaluations and the grades they've assigned in past semesters. Finding evidence of bias against certain student groups would be cause for further sanction that could, potentially, include termination - though that would usually only happen if a professor was warned once and didn't change course.

Moreover, one of them got his PhD in 1980, meaning must be close to retirement. That would, at least, minimize the damage he can cause in the classroom.

Again - I'm not speaking in defense of these two piles of cicada shit that walk as men do. Just explaining why firing them is very, very unlikely to happen.