Dulce et decorum est...

Ronnie Green, Chancellor of UNL, has an oped in today's Lincoln Journal Star. To say I find it unimpressive would be to put it mildly. Oddly, I think I miss having a lawyer at the helm.

This comes on a weekend where graduate student Courtney Lawton was thrown to the wolves over the little spat between her and a Turning Point USA recruiter on Union Plaza (a traditional public forum). Courtney was a bit rude. Not rude by Dublin standards, but probably more than she should have been. I think the great gurus in Varner Hall decided that they couldn't fire her over what the courts would likely find protected political speech, but they could opt not to hire her again, and so they did. Those on temporary teaching assignments have always been vulnerable.

Ronnie thinks we need a debate about free speech. This is my response.

UNL is bound by the first amendment. There isn't a whole lot of debate to be had. The jurisprudence is well established. They might be able to make some time, place and manner rules -- we should really get those on paper, anyway -- but if Green thinks he can enforce some sort of code of politeness on the faculty, he's likely to be sadly mistaken. We get to engage in political speech, and when we do, we get to choose how we express ourselves.

I suppose we could enact some sort of ban on extraneous discussion in the classroom, and I don't have a particular problem with that, except it involves policing teaching to a degree we never previously have. Nobody wants to have to convene a star chamber because some teaching assistant threw a little shade on Donald Trump (or Nancy Pelosi). Also, in my field it would be easy to keep politics out; suppose however the subject were 20th century American novels or the origins of poverty? How do you separate those from politics?

Even in chemistry; I often talk about Fritz Haber and the development of chemical warfare. Haber, before WWI, developed the major chemical process we use to make ammonia fertilizers. Huge benefit to humankind. He also directed the German chemical warfare effort in World War I, leading to the deaths or maiming of millions. They gave him the Nobel Prize in 1919, for the Haber process, ignoring his war activities. There was (justifiable) outrage from countries like the US and Britain. That's politics.

The final savage irony: Haber was a blindly patriotic individual, but much of his family was Jewish, and perished in the Holocaust, a mere quarter century after he'd sold his soul to win the war for Germany. Think a Nazi student might be offended by mention of the Holocaust?

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