\n<\/p>\n
Jonathan Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University, was suspended from his job and is being investigated for posting on X after the US bombing of Iran, \u201cI hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops.\u201d Brown\u2019s expressed desire for peace was twisted by conservatives into some kind of anti-American call for violence.<\/p>\n
Rep. Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, noted that the interim president of Georgetown would soon be testifying before Congress and wrote about Brown, \u201cThis demon had better be gone by then. We have a Muslim problem in America.\u201d Fine was Gov. Ron DeSantis\u2019s choice to be president of Florida Atlantic University before the board rejected him. But his literal demonization of speech has a powerful impact.<\/p>\n
Georgetown quickly obeyed the commands of anti-Muslim bigots such as Fine. Georgetown interim president Robert M. Groves testified to Congress on July\u00a015, \u201cWithin minutes of our learning of that tweet, the dean contacted Professor Brown, the tweet was removed, we issued a statement condemning the tweet, Professor Brown is no longer chair of his department and he\u2019s on leave, and we\u2019re beginning a process of reviewing the case.\u201d<\/p>\n
Groves responded \u201cyes\u201d when asked by Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican, \u201cYou are now investigating and disciplining him?\u201d<\/p>\n
Georgetown\u2019s statement declared, \u201cWe are appalled that a faculty member would call for a \u2018symbolic strike\u2019 on a military base in a social media post.\u201d But why would this appall anyone? Faculty members routinely support actions that actually kill innocent people\u2014tens of thousands of people, in the case of professors who support Israel\u2019s attack on Gaza, millions of people in the case of professors who supported the fight against the Nazis in World War\u00a0II. And that\u2019s all perfectly legitimate. So a professor calling for an action against a military target that doesn\u2019t kill anybody should be the most trivial statement in the world.<\/p>\n
There is a good reason why universities shouldn\u2019t take positions on foreign policy\u2014because institutional opinions are often dumb, especially when formulated \u201cwithin minutes\u201d rather than after serious thought. Georgetown is making the worst kind of violation of institutional neutrality\u2014not merely expressing a dumb opinion, not just denouncing a professor for disagreeing with that dumb opinion, but actually suspending a professor for diverging from Georgetown\u2019s very dumb official opinion on foreign policy.<\/p>\n
Often, defenders of academic freedom have to stand for this principle even when addressing terrible people who say terrible things. But the assault on academic freedom in America has become so awful that even perfectly reasonable comments are now grounds for automatic suspension. Brown\u2019s position on the Iran attacks is very similar to that of Donald Trump, who posted praise for Iran after it did precisely what Brown had urged: \u201cI want to thank Iran for giving us early notice, which made it possible for no lives to be lost, and nobody to be injured.\u201d Unlike Trump, Brown never thanked Iran for attacking a U.S. base. So how could any university even consider punishing a professor for taking a foreign policy stand more moderate than Trump?<\/p>\n
Georgetown\u2019s shocking attacks on academic freedom have garnered little attention or criticism. The Georgetown Hoya<\/em> reported in a headline, \u201cGroves Appears to Assuage Republicans, Defend Free Speech in Congressional Hearing.\u201d<\/p>\n The newspaper\u2019s fawning treatment of Groves as a defender of free speech apparently was based on Groves testifying, \u201cWe police carefully the behavior of our faculty in the classroom and their research activities,\u201d and adding, \u201cThey are free, as all residents of the United States, to have speech in the public domain.\u201d It\u2019s horrifying to have any university president openly confess that they \u201cpolice carefully\u201d professors\u2019 teaching and research. But for Groves to claim that faculty have free speech \u201cin the public domain\u201d when he proudly suspended Brown for his comments must be some kind of sick joke.<\/p>\n Another Hoya<\/em> headline about the controversy declared, \u201cUniversity Review of GU Professor for Controversial Posts Prompts Criticism, Praise.\u201d While the campus Students for Justice in Palestine and the Council on American-Islamic Relations correctly defended Brown, the Anti-Defamation League declared, \u201cWe commend Georgetown University for taking swift action following Jonathan Brown\u2019s dangerous remarks about a \u2018symbolic strike\u2019 on a U.S. military base.\u201d <\/p>\n There is nothing \u201cdangerous\u201d about Brown\u2019s remarks calling for an end to war, or any other foreign policy opinions. The only danger here is the threat to academic freedom.<\/p>\n When Georgetown suspended lecturer Ilya Shapiro in 2022 for his offensive comments on Twitter, I argued that \u201cShapiro should not be punished before he receives a hearing and fair evaluation\u201d and added, \u201cA suspension, even with pay, is a form of punishment. In fact, it\u2019s a very harsh penalty when most forms of campus misconduct receive a reprimand or a requirement for education or changes in behavior.\u201d<\/p>\n I called upon all colleges to ban the use of suspensions without due process. Since then, suspensions have become an epidemic of repression on college campuses. An army of advocates once argued in defense of Shapiro\u2019s free speech. Unfortunately, none of Shapiro\u2019s outspoken supporters have spoken out with similar outrage about the even worse treatment of Brown by Georgetown\u2019s censors.<\/p>\n Georgetown\u2019s administrators must immediately rescind Brown\u2019s ridiculous suspension, restore his position as department chair, end this unjustified investigation of his opinions, apologize for their incompetence at failing to meet their basic responsibilities to protect academic freedom and enact new policies to end the practice of using arbitrary suspensions without due process as a political weapon.<\/p>\n John K. Wilson was a 2019\u201320 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including <\/em>Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008), and his forthcoming book <\/em>The Attack on Academia. He can be reached at collegefreedom@yahoo.com, or letters to the editor can be sent to letters@insidehighered.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jonathan Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal Chair of Islamic Civilization at Georgetown University, was suspended from his job and is being investigated for posting on X after the US bombing of Iran, \u201cI hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops.\u201d Brown\u2019s expressed desire for peace was twisted by conservatives into<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15013,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1798,2129,7280],"class_list":{"0":"post-15012","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-brown","9":"tag-defense","10":"tag-jonathan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}