More Censorial Hijinks in the Kirk Shooting Aftermath

Darren Michael

Regular readers of this blog will understand that Curmie is likely to take the side of theatre professors against The Man unless they’ve done something really appalling.  So it should come as no surprise that when Curmie heard about the case of Darren V. Michael, who was fired by Austin Peay State University for posts on social media, he set fingers to keyboard rather promptly.  You will, one hopes, forgive Curmie for choosing this particular manifestation of institutional censorship to highlight.

Michael had been employed by APSU since 2007, and is referred to as a “professor” in all the accounts Curmie has seen.  That may be simply a term for a faculty member at a university, but it seems to be applied as an academic rank, meaning that he almost certainly had tenure.  What he appears to have done would be protected speech even if he were a part-time adjunct, but tenure carries with it an even broader protection… or, rather, it does at institutions that aren’t run by partisan morons.  And the fact that APSU is a state school means that the First Amendment applies, irrespective of what the administration might think.

OK, so what did he do?  The university won’t say, specifically, only that he “reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death. Such actions do not align with Austin Peay’s commitment to mutual respect and human dignity. The university deems these actions unacceptable and has terminated the faculty member.”

The local news, both TV and newspaper, covered the story, but didn’t dig very far.  KZTV makes no attempt to determine what Michael said or did; ClarksvilleNow.com mentions that Michael reposted a headline from a 2023 Newsweek article: “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.”  The irony that it was Kirk himself who suffered because of the nation’s infatuation with guns ought certainly to be worth noting, and no reasonable person would suggest that it’s other than protected speech.  (This is not to suggest, of course, that everyone out there is reasonable.)

Primetimer did a little better in their coverage.  First, they identified Michael’s remarks as “insensitive,” which they no doubt were, although that’s a damned low bar to clear before a right to censorship kicks in.  They also found a post on X by T.R. Sartor (@dripchud), which includes a meme of a conversation between two well-known fictional characters:  “‘Is he dead yet?’ asked Piglet.  ‘No,’ said Pooh.  ‘Fuck,’ said Piglet.” 

OK, that’s perilously close to celebratory, if it hasn’t in fact crossed the line.  But Curmie notes two things.  First, that meme has been around since the first Trump administration, and the pronoun in question has always referred to POTUS.  Indeed, Michael clearly intended that reading: Sartor’s post is on the 10^th, the day of the shooting, but the meme had been posted six days earlier. It’s completely irrelevant to the Kirk assassination except as an indicator of Michael’s general political philosophy.  It’s certainly crude and more than a bit tasteless, but, importantly, it’s still protected speech.  There is no “true threat,” no “intentional incitement to immediate violence.”  Oh, and the often over-zealous Secret Service didn’t show up on Michael’s doorstep.

There’s also, of course, the matter of timing.  Michael’s post of the Newsweek headline was on Wednesday evening.  He was fired Friday morning: not a lot of time in there for due process.  [EDIT, just as Curmie was formatting: the university has changed the dismissal to a suspension, admitting they hadn’t followed due process.  Go figure, right?]  Rather, this was a typical over-reaction by a narcissistic and authoritarian university president, one Mike Licari.  He claims that APSU suffered “significant reputational damage” because of Michael’s posts.  Well, that’s utter crap.

APSU, after all, is named for the segregationist Tennessee governor who is best known nationally for signing the bill outlawing the teaching of evolution, leading to the famous Scopes “monkey trial.”  Of course, those positions were considerably more acceptable a century ago than today, but still there’s a sort of “only in Tennessee” feel to the whole business. The university accepts virtually everyone who applies, and it graduates only 27% of its students.  While Curmie is confident that there are some excellent faculty and students there, APSU is not exactly going to be confused with an elite institution.  There is not a lot of “reputational damage” to be done.

You know what does cost the school, though?  An idiot president who fires a tenured professor for posting something ironic online.  As far as Curmie can tell, there was no accompanying text to Michael’s post, no “Hate begets hate.  ZERO sympathy” like what got an assistant dean at another Tennessee state university fired.  (Hers was protected speech, too, of course.)  Unless there’s something we don’t know about, nothing Michael did was enough to spawn a raised eyebrow, let alone a dismissal without due process... or a suspension, for that matter.  (Also, of course, Curmie’s willing to bet there aren’t a lot of people in Clarksville, TN with the skillset to teach what had been Michael’s classes, either.) There is no such thing as free speech if a state employee can be fired for saying something someone in power finds distasteful.

Oh, Curmie sees that look on your face, Gentle Reader: “Curmie’s a liberal, so he’s going to side with them.”  Nope.  Curmie was a career educator and remains a passionate defender of free speech: of an Israeli guest lecturer at Michigan State most recently, of a law professor at Ohio Northern who opposed his school’s DEI policy, and of a conservative prof at North Carolina State, to name but a couple of cases.  There are plenty of examples on both sides of the political fence.  For the past couple of weeks, the oppressors have been almost exclusively on the right.  That will change in time: not because they’ll stop being censorial, but because the left will find their opportunities.  Alas.

One thing is certain: there are some university administrators out there who are about to get sued.  That brings us to the best Facebook comment Curmie has seen in a while.  The honor goes to Leslie Skrzypczak, responding to a story about l’affaire Michael posted by Cape Cod Women for Change: “They’ve tried to reach him for comment but his lawyer’s eyes were twinkling and they laughed and laughed.”

What she said.

On the Dilemma of House Bill 719

Politicians are, in general, an unsavory lot.  They’re more about winning than about doing the right thing, and winning is often defined not by accomplishing something good, but by embarrassing the opposition.  This applies to those on both sides of the aisle, of course, but, at least recently, the GOP has dominated the field.

Charlie Kirk was, of course, a master of the form: “debating” (i.e., arguing with) college kids, interrupting them, and releasing deceptively edited videos designed to make himself look smart but especially to make the other side look stupid.  Most of his stuff was straight out of the James O’Keefe playbook.  However much his acolytes (and MAGAs who’d never heard of him until he was shot) might choose to lionize him as a champion of respectful disagreement, free speech, and Christian virtues, he was none of those things. 

True, he was longer on smarminess than on Trumpian reckless vituperation (Gentle Reader, can you believe what 47 said about hating those who disagree with him politically?), but that doesn’t change the fact that if you weren’t a white cishet Christian (preferably evangelical) male, he had no respect for you.  He pretended to care about Constitutional values, but, for example, openly despised Muslims (so much for freedom of religion).

Now, in addition to the rest of the multiple hagiographic indulgences, we get House Bill 719, introduced by the creepiest and most sycophantic of GOP Congresscritters, Mike Johnson himself.  It is, of course, a trap.  The string of “whereases” includes a series of descriptions that bear little resemblance to reality: “respectful, civil discourse,” “respect for his fellow Americans,” “commitment to civil discussion and debate,” “worked tirelessly to promote unity,” and so on. 

Of course, equally if not more importantly, there were no such encomia to, say, Melissa Hortman, and certainly no recognition that literally every study of political violence, including the report of the Cato Institute (!) shows the preponderance of such attacks come from the right.

Still, the average person could stomach most if not all of this out of respect for the dead.  The real problem is the resolution:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(1) condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination of Charles “Charlie” James Kirk, and all forms of political violence;

(2) commends and honors the dedicated law enforcement and emergency personnel for their tireless efforts in finding the suspect responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk and urges the administration of swift justice to the suspect;

(3) extends its deepest condolences and sympathies to Charlie Kirk’s family, including his wife, Erika, and their two young children, and prays for comfort, peace, and healing in this time of unspeakable loss;

(4) honors the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk, whose steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty; and

(5) calls upon all Americans—regardless of race, party affiliation, or creed—to reject political violence, recommit to respectful debate, uphold American values, and respect one another as fellow Americans.

Yeah, no.  Curmie doesn’t want to know anyone who doesn’t support the odd-numbered parts, at least assuming a secularized definition of “prays” in #3.  #2 is a little more problematic, as Kash Patel’s FBI bungled the case enormously, detained two innocent people, and only got around to Tyler Robinson when his family turned him in.  If they hadn’t narked on him (Curmie does not mean to suggest that they were wrong in doing so), the killer might well still be at large.  Still, this is the kind of generic praise that often accompanies this kind of resolution.  Curmie would still vote for the bill except for #4.

Ah, #4.  Curmie, and he suspects that he is not alone in this, does not “[honor] the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk,” who was, in Curmie’s opinion, one of the most reprehensible human beings on the planet.  He did not have a “steadfast dedication” to any of the three items listed: “the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth.”  This statement goes beyond the pro forma fluffing of the deceased and enters into the realm of outright prevarication.

Moreover, the unmodified phrase “Biblical truth” should never appear in a resolution in the House of Representatives.  Never.  Ever.  Use it on the floor if you must, but not in a bill.  Of course, if “Biblical truth” is defined to be the actual teachings of the Bible—you know, Gentle Reader, welcoming the stranger, feeding the poor, stuff like that—then it would indeed be welcome.  Fat chance of any of that happening in Trumpistan, of course.

But the bill forces those who have not quaffed the neo-Fascist Kool-Aid either to vote for a resolution that specifically and mendaciously idolizes a despicable person, or to be seen voting against a measure condemning political violence.  Even a number of otherwise intelligent conservatives are pretending that this dilemma doesn’t really exist, and are therefore hurling metaphorical brickbats at anyone who didn’t vote for the resolution.

That’s because they cannot (or choose not to) believe that it is possible to hold two thoughts simultaneously.  But one really can believe that illegal immigration is a legitimate issue (it would be less of one if Trump hadn’t scuttled a bi-partisan bill that would have at least somewhat stemmed the tide because he’d rather have a campaign issue than attempt to solve a problem) and still oppose ambushing people at apparently routine meetings to renew work permits or even to finalize the paperwork for citizenship.  Due process still matters, and ICE’s deliberate avoidance of confronting the real “worst of the worst” is craven, dishonest, and, alas, predictable.

It is possible to despise Hamas and everything they stand for and still think that innocent Palestinians shouldn’t be intentionally starved to death by an authoritarian bigot like Bibi Netanyahu.

It is possible to regard Charlie Kirk as a horrible person and still condemn his murder and his murderer.

How does Curmie know these things?  Because he’s describing himself.

Of course, Curmie also saw a meme shortly after Kirk’s assassination urging Democrats in Congress to introduce the “Charlie Kirk Gun Control Bill,” just so the Republicans would have to vote against it.  The difference is that the suggestion was intended to be ironic if not humorous, and no Democratic pol did anything more than indulge in a sardonic smile.

Hypersensitivity, But the Right Result at Michigan State

Roy Horovitz

You can’t tell the players without a scorecard, but Curmie’s best guess is that this particular attempted suppression of free speech on a university campus comes from the left, as the right-wingers who were chanting “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville a few years ago are now chest-thumping supporters of Israel, up to the point of branding criticism of the Netanyahu regime or the Israeli military as anti-Semitic and demanding punitive action against those who disagree.

The good news is that the scheduled lecture, “Welcome to Theaterland: The Theatrical Scene in Israel Today with Roy Horovitz” at Michigan State University went ahead as scheduled on September 12.  (You can read a little about Horovitz and the topic of his lecture here.)  Apparently, the fact that Horovitz is Israeli was enough to try to silence him (well, sort of…), however, as there was a bill passed overwhelmingly (!) by the General Assembly of the Associated Students of Michigan State University (ASMSU) demanding its cancellation. 

Of course, the ASMSU had no authority to prevent the presentation, and they knew it.  They didn’t even go public with their proclamation until the day of the event (and it received no press coverage beyond the campus, at least that Curmie can find, until several days after the speech went forward).  This would seem to be the proverbial tempest in a teapot, except…

No one would deny that the situation in Gaza is both complex and disquieting.  Curmie has made several attempts to make sense of it all, especially here, here, and here.  Emotions are high on both sides, and not without reason.  Curmie struggles to find anything positive to say about either Hamas or Likud.  But the barbarity inflicted on an overwhelming innocent Palestinian population is indeed outrageous.  To that extent, ASMSU has something of a point.

But, Gentle Reader, you will note that there are two qualifiers in the previous sentence: “to that extent” and “something.”  Taken as a whole, the bill is problematic in the extreme. 

First off, it assumes that inviting a guest speaker who happens to be Israeli is somehow “harmful to Palestinian, Arab, and allied students and is ignorant to the current global context.”  “Harmful”?  Really?  How?  Even if Horovitz was taking a stance on the situation in Gaza, which he wasn’t, it’s difficult to imagine how anyone with a modicum of maturity could feel threatened, let alone harmed.  And to suggest that literally anyone in a position to invite speakers to a university would be ignorant of the context is absurd.

The ASMSU claims that they “obviously believe in freedom of speech”… well, except, you know, Gentle Reader, when they don’t.  But their real issue is that “the university... has adopted a stance of neutrality on the issue.”  Exactly which issue that is—the situation in Gaza or the decision to invite Horovitz—in unclear from the reporting.  Either way, the MSU administration got it right.  Miracles do happen.

Moreover, the principal argument against Horovitz’s appearance is that he is “IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] personnel.”  Seriously?  First, he’s former IDF.  More significantly, with very rare exceptions under extraordinary circumstances, literally every Israeli adult has served in the IDF, willingly or otherwise.  Curmie quotes Beloved Spouse: “who doesn’t know that?” 

You don’t believe in free speech if you don’t think it applies to those whose ideas you cannot support, or even if you find them offensive or “hateful.” (Donald Trump and Pam Bondi, please take note).  If you don’t think Mr. Horovitz should appear on your campus, you have a number of options, the foremost being: don’t go.  There are several means of protest, too, because your speech is as protected as his is.  But you look silly, and indeed hurt your own cause, if you want to deny him the opportunity to speak and your primary objection is that he once (perhaps against his will) was a member of a military outfit that subsequently engaged in some pretty questionable acts.  It’s rather like cancelling a WWII vet because of My Lai or Abu Ghraib.

The bill, in other words, is a silly amalgam of paranoia, petulance, and virtue signaling.  Of course, if the ASMSU statement was a little… erm… over the top, the response from a coalition of campus Jewish organizations is not above criticism.  Yes, they’re right on the basic issue, that the “legislation directly violates the purpose of our student government which should represent all students and foster an open exchange of ideas.”  But it’s a stretch to suggest that the “safety and belonging of Jewish students on campus.”  Again: “safety”?  The reason to oppose this bill is that it’s stupid, not that it’s in any way threatening.

In brief, then, words like “harmful” and “safety” overstate the case on both sides… or at least Curmie hopes so.  If encountering a perspective other than one’s own causes damage beyond mild perturbance, then the fragmentation of society into rigidly defined camps borders on the inevitable.  Curmie may have criticized some aspects of FIRE’s recently-released report on free speech on university campuses, but that doesn’t mean that the findings aren’t a cause for concern.  In particular, students’ unwillingness to even listen to opposing viewpoints is deeply disturbing.  Couple that with hypersensitivity on all sides of virtually every issue, and the ability of educational institutions at every level to fulfill their mission is imperiled.

Curmie does not impugn the motives of either set of students—neither the ASMSU nor the coalition of Jewish organizations and their allies.  They’re speaking out against what they perceive as an inappropriate action, and even if Curmie thinks they’d benefit considerably from a thicker skin and a diminution of hyperbole, they have every right to do so. 

A couple of nights ago, Curmie and Beloved Spouse streamed an episode of the British crime drama “Professor T.”  Our hero, both brilliant and quirky (isn’t that always the case?), is a police consultant whose real job is as a professor of criminology.  In the latter persona, he closes the episode with an intriguing discussion of how easily empathy can morph into hatred.  That seems both relevant to the situation at Michigan State… and chilling.

(By the way, the original Belgian version of “Professor T” with Koen De Bouw in the title role, also available for PBS members to stream, is even better than the British show.  If you’re willing to read subtitles, Gentle Reader, Curmie recommends it highly.)

"Lola" and the Week's Headlines

Curmie was 14 when the Kinks released their classic song, “Lola.”  It was the perfect age at which to revel in the delicious naughtiness, certainly for the time, of a title character who “walked like a woman and talked like a man.”  The most quoted lyric from the song, no doubt, is “Well, I'm not the world's most masculine man / But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man / And so is Lola.”  There’s a hint of ambiguity there: is Lola a man, or is Lola also glad that the narrator is a man?  Not that those ideas are mutually exclusive, of course.  Any way you look at it, that sequence had a considerable impact on a rather sheltered lad in the throes of puberty.

The sequence that sticks in Curmie’s mind the most, though, comes a little earlier in the song: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”  That word “except” has continued to intrigue for well over a half century.  Lola, whatever terms of sexual identity might be used to describe her, becomes the narrator’s bulwark against the confusions of the world.  There’s a lot to unpack there.

Curmie has always liked the song, and he’s pretty sure he owned it on 45 back in the day, but it has seldom crossed his mind for decades except when it comes around on Spotify or the local classic rock radio station.  But it has risen to the top of his consciousness of late when encountering two Facebook posts.

The first was this one, by Aaron Terr, the Director of Public Advocacy at FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression.  His excoriation of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s boast that “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”  is impressive:

The Attorney General is just flat wrong here…. She’s not the first politician to say that hate speech isn’t free speech, but this is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.  She really should know better, and this is the type of thing that’s going to chill public debate.  It’s going to make people afraid to say things that the current administration might consider hateful, lest they actually be prosecuted for it.

Curmie notes that a representative of FIRE (accurately) calls Bondi a politician rather than a lawyer and makes the obvious point that the Attorney General, of all people, ought to know the freaking laws she’s supposedly upholding.  Bondi is either profoundly ignorant or too big of a political hack to care that she’s advocating the evisceration of Constitutional protections.  Or both, of course.

But it’s what Terr says next that intrigues Curmie:

What’s also incredible about this video is that usually the argument that hate speech isn’t protected speech is something that you would hear from the left side of the political aisle.  But now we hear a top Republican official saying it.  And I think that just goes to show that censorship rationales, once they’re on the table, they’re a loaded gun just waiting to be used by any political party that takes power.

Terr is right about this, too.  Curmie has made the point repeatedly (most explicitly here and to a lesser extent here) that neither of the two principal political parties in this country are much interested in upholding First Amendment protections.  But whereas the right was more likely to engage in political censorship (books in libraries or in school curricula, for example), it was generally the left that sought to deny constitutional protections to hate speech.

Now, we’re living in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, with the GOP, and especially the MAGA wing thereof, bellowing from the proverbial rooftops about how hate speech should be prosecuted.  Bondi is worse than most—hardly surprising, that—but even she isn’t the most insane right-winger out there.  Remember this guy, an actual Congresscritter Curmie mentioned a few days ago?

Right now, the same people who cheerfully described moderate Democrats as “communists” for arguing that someone who works a 40-hour week ought to be able to afford to pay for essentials, or that programs that help the general population (FEMA, Medicaid, the CDC, the FAA, etc.) ought not to be sacrificed so those poor destitute billionaires can get a tax cut that balloons the national debt—these people are getting righteously indignant that anyone would dare call a racist, sexist, jackass like Charlie Kirk, well, a racist, sexist, jackass.  And they want people fired or even arrested for speaking their truth.  Most of what they’re objecting to isn’t even hate speech by any reasonable definition, but we’ll antiphrastically let that pass for now.

The other Facebook post Curmie wants to mention was this one, which Curmie reposted on his page a couple days ago.  It reads, “Reminder: Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said homeless people should be put to death by lethal injection and they didn’t even take away his morning donut.  The obvious context was the propinquity of Kilmeade’s comment and the firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC for his on-air comments about the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What Kimmel actually said, of course, wouldn’t as much as raise an eyebrow on a reasonable observer.  There were some jabs at both President Trump and Vice President Vance, but the killer, apparently was this: “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”  That, Gentle Reader, is simply a statement of fact.  Trump blamed “radical left political violence” long before there was any evidence either way, and there remains little if any evidence from a credible source that Tyler Robinson was indeed influenced by leftist politics.

Was Robinson a leftie ideologue?  We still don’t know, and for these purposes it doesn’t matter.  There was, at the time Kimmel was on the air, some evidence emerging that perhaps Robinson was a Groyper, and the fact that his grandmother says his politics were shifting to the left could simply be deflection (“we’re a Trump-loving family, so the assassin in our midst obviously wasn’t like us”).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might even suggest the possibility that Robinson was pretty much a Nancy Reagan Republican: dismissing the concerns of others until, in his case, he entered into a same-sex relationship, and Kirk’s homophobia was placed in a different perspective.

The point is that for these purposes, none of this matters.  (Nor does it matter that Curmie has never found Kimmel even moderately amusing.)  Did the MAGA world make a concerted effort to place the blame on someone other than themselves?  Of course, they did!  It doesn’t matter if they were “right” about Robinson’s motivations; they just didn’t want him to be one of theirs.  (To be fair, the left was spinning just as hard in the other direction, but that doesn’t change the fact that Kimmel was absolutely accurate.)

It’s also worth mentioning that Kimmel, like a host of leading Democrats, expressed shock and horror at the news of Kirk’s death, calling it a “senseless murder” and condemning those who seemed to be celebrating it.  Contrast that with the deafening silence (well, there was that one bit of sneering from Mike Lee) of every Republican you can name about the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband by a right-wing nut job.

Note: the key words here are “nut job,” not “right-wing.”  What MAGA in general is attempting to do is to define the entire group—liberals—as guilty in Kirk’s murder because Robinson might have been a leftist with respect to one particular aspect of his politics.  This is the scam JD Vance is trying to pull off, with outright lies about the relative frequency of political violence perpetrated by the left and the right.  C’mon, JD, only the stupidest MAGA believes that “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the Far Left.”  Even the report of the hard-right Cato Institute calls that claim bullshit.  Well, that’s not exactly a direct quote, but you see the point, Gentle Reader.

But Curmie reverts to his inner Confucian.  Even if there is some correlation between affiliation X and action Y, we can’t assume that one implies the other.  Curmie quotes himself from a post in 2013 about that gunman in Aurora, Co, at the opening of the new Batman movie.  Just substitute “Robinson” for “Holmes” in the following:

The fact is, Gentle Reader, this guy Holmes doesn’t represent me even if we’d vote for the same person or worship at the same church. If he turns out to be an atheist, that doesn’t mean that atheists are the problem, any more (or less) than Baptists are the problem if that’s what he is. His politics can be from the left, right, or center, and he doesn’t represent any of the good people some of whose views he shares. Even if he had help, he’s a lone wolf. Our society lives on, saddened but intrepid.

OK, one more point, since Curmie knows there are people out there ready to rant about how corporations have a right to hire and fire whomever they choose.  Yes, that’s true, even when Nexstar and Sinclair, the two distributors who refused to air Kimmel’s show in the future, are notoriously and rather proudly right-wing.  It’s the intervention of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr that’s the real problem.  Carr, appointed in the first Trump administration, has apparently now gone full sycophant, as anyone who wants to stay employed in that administration is likely to do.  Oh, and an administration so openly venal is going to be a lot more amenable to proposed mergers and such-like if you, ABC, suck up appropriately.  Not all bribes are monetary; some just censor alternative voices.  As the singer in “Lola” says, “I got down on my knees…”

Anyway, Bobby Schroeder, a valued longtime reader of Curmie’s page (and a conservative, by the way), responded to Curmie’s post of the meme about Kilmeade, with this: “ABC comedy is more conservative than Fox News?  What in the hell is happening in this world?”

And that prompted Curmie to respond with the line about the “mixed up, muddled up,  shook up world.”  And here we are, Gentle Reader.

About Those Course Evaluations...

Curmie was tempted to write a follow-up to his post about the reactions to the murder of Charlie Kirk, but realizes that there is little to be gained by doing so.  Conservatives will continue to pretend that only liberals perpetrate political violence (tell that to the cops attacked on January 6, to Paul Pelosi, to Josh Shapiro, to Gretchen Whitmer, to Melissa Hortman’s family…), that Charlie Kirk was a “moderate,” that Tyler Robinson was heavily influenced by the radical leftist ideologues in the Engineering Department at Utah State University during his single semester of (online?) attendance.  And on and on.

The vast majority of the readers of this blog, however, already know that paranoia, stupidity, and mendacity are in a death struggle to be the defining characteristic of the likes of Donald Trump, JD Vance, and Dinesh D’Souza.  They also know that reasonable conclusions require evidence, but also that evidence does not cease to be evidence just because, taken by itself, it’s inconclusive.  There’s nothing new there.

So, where to turn for another topic?  Well, Curmie mentioned course evaluations in passing in his piece about FIRE’s less-than-impressive trumpeting of their free speech rankings.  And then, this morning, a Friend of Curmie posted a link to an article in The Atlantic with the portentous title, “How Teacher Evaluations Broke the University.”  And who is Curmie to ignore such a sign from the universe?

Rose Horowitz’s article is more than a little predictable: linking course evaluations to grade inflation and lowered standards.  And, of course, there’s commentary on bias: “Course-evaluation scores are correlated with students’ expected grades. Studies have found that, among other things, students score male professors higher than female ones, rate attractive teachers more highly, and reward instructors who bring in cookies.”  People in Curmie’s (former) line of work have seen literally dozens of variations on the theme over the years.

What’s curious, however, is that there is seldom anything suggested that looks like a potential solution to the problem.  So: Curmie to the rescue.

Let’s start with something basic: course evaluations have two purposes which are sometimes in conflict.  One function is to help faculty determine what aspects of their courses are or are not working.  This is useful.  Curmie made some changes based on suggestions made by students on course evaluations: increasing the number of exams so that there would be less material covered by each one, for example.  Sometimes there’s a question about “why did we have to read X?”  Well, because X is really important, and it’s important that you actually see what it says instead of just having me talk about it… but maybe I’d better spend a little more time explaining to students why that’s true.

One of the biggest weaknesses in student writers is in their failure to link the evidence to the conclusion.  Often, adding a single sentence, or even half a sentence, would improve an essay considerably.  But professors are not immune from making similar errors or omissions, and a brief comment on a course evaluation can indeed improve the quality of instruction in future iterations of a course.  Of course, faculty are, and should be, free to ignore suggestions they consider unhelpful.

The other reason course evaluations exist is the one that’s potentially problematic: the evaluation of faculty, especially regarding retention/tenure/promotion decisions.  No, 19-year-olds, even taken as a group, should not be primarily responsible for whether Professor X has a future at the university.  But that doesn’t mean that students should have no input.  So, what to do?

Suggestion #1: take course evaluations offline.  Back in the day, course evaluations were completed in class.  Curmie often had a colleague teaching in the same time slot down the hall, so with 15 or 20 minutes left on the last day of class, we’d switch rooms: he’d pass out the survey in my class and I would in his.  Sometimes, if the schedule demanded, the department admin would do the honors.  Anyway, the result was that if there were 25 students in a class, we’d get at least 22 or 23 responses.

Shifting to online meant that filling out a course evaluation became a choice, and we’d get the formula Curmie mentioned in the piece linked above: “If there are 20 students in a class—5 loved it, 3 hated it, and a dozen thought it was OK, you’ll get two positive responses, three negative responses, and two ‘meh’ responses.”  Yes, you can incentivize filling out the online form, but Curmie could never figure out how to make that not seem like a bribe for completing the eval or a penalty for not doing what the student might reasonably consider a waste of time.

Suggestion #2: stop pretending to an objectivity that doesn’t exist.  Assigning a numerical score to a question that requires an obviously subjective response is inherently problematic.  Curmie would get rid of those number scores altogether: have students write a paragraph each about what they thought the strengths and weaknesses of the course were.  Prompt them with ideas about relevant topics: knowledge of material, availability outside class, keeping the interest of students, etc., but don’t ask about every item individually.  And insist on specificity.  Don’t insist on an answer to whether a faculty member keeps regular office hours if the student never tried to go to them.  If a student’s only complaint is that the course was too difficult, that’s significant.  If the complaint is about turn-around time for essays or exams, how long did it take?  And so on.

Suggestion #3: actively compare course evaluation scores to grades.  Yes, Curmie thinks that 1-5 scale should go the way of the rotary phone, but it’s unlikely to do so, so here’s what Curmie did when he was called upon to review a colleague’s RTP documents: take the average score on that overall instructor rating and subtract the average grade in the class.  So, for example, a popular professor might get a 4.5 on that 5-point scale, and the average grade in the class might be exactly a B.  4.5-3=1.5.  That would be an excellent score.  Over 1: good.  0-1: OK, maybe.  Less than 0: terrible.  Yes, this is a quick and dirty analysis, and it shouldn’t be used in isolation, but it does at least discourage buying good evaluations with undeservedly good grades.  Our client is the society.  We need people with skill-sets, not just degrees.

Suggestion #4: when considering a major decision—one involving promotion or tenure as opposed to simply retention—the students who really matter aren’t the ones who just finished the course: they’re the ones who took that course a year or more ago.  You took the introductory course from Professor X: how prepared were you for the advanced course?  You’ve now graduated: are you ready for a job/internship/grad school?  You’ve been out five years: tell us how Professor X prepared you (or didn’t) for your current career path.

Suggestion #5: administrators need to grow some cojones.  Years ago, student opinion factored into decision-making only on rare occasions.  Generally speaking, the only time it mattered was when the senior faculty, department chair, and dean were leaning towards a favorable result for a faculty member, but student opinion was overwhelmingly negative (the converse of that didn’t apply: overwhelming support from students never reversed a tenure denial).  But if administrators are now placing too much emphasis on course evaluations, that’s on them, not (or certainly not exclusively) on the assessment device.

Suggestion #6: look for other means of assessment of faculty.  Curmie always got at least good (i.e., positive), sometimes excellent, course evaluations.  But what mattered to him, and what should matter to decision-makers, came not from student opinion, but from student success: his former students’ success in more advanced classes, including in grad school; their pass rate on the state content exam for prospective secondary school teachers; their subsequent lives as artists, teachers, administrators… but most of all, as citizens.

There are indeed some problems associated with course evaluations.  There are, as noted above, some things that would lessen the harm while keeping the advantages.  But the real problem is that lazy and feckless administrators don’t have a clue how to process the information they have available to them.  A lot of programs are rather like the Augean stables, and there’s no Hercules in sight.

Reacting to the Reactions about Charlie Kirk's Assassination

A few quotations from the Dear Departed

Curmie was going to write about the assassination of Charlie Kirk as part of a larger discussion about the rule of law, also discussing things like the attack on that Venezuelan boat, the co-opting of the National Guard to <checks notes> spread mulch and pick up trash, and the absurd SCOTUS ruling allowing ICE and DHS to forgo anything in the same area code as obeying Fourth Amendment protections, enabling those assholes to engage in practices that far exceed mere racial profiling and would be called unconstitutional by anyone except a political hack supporting authoritarianism.

That essay may yet be written, but the response to the killing of Kirk has taken on a life of its own, both among the yammering politicians and the complacent media.  We haven’t seen this level of coverage since the murder of another loathsome rich guy, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson… and most of that was about how Luigi Mangione, the (technically still “alleged”) killer is a rather handsome young man.

Noteworthy in the previous paragraph is the fact that the intervening attacks on Minnesota legislators and their spouses, leaving two people and a family dog dead and two other people seriously injured, received far less coverage: some, but nowhere near as much.  Those murders were, of course, clearly politically motivated, and we knew that early on.  The relative lack of coverage is attributable at least in part to the fact that the victims weren’t obscenely wealthy.  However liberal the media are alleged to be, the fact is they’re all controlled by the uber-rich, and those folks think wealth translates into importance… and that killing a rich dude is far worse than killing a poor one.

Please note, Gentle Reader, that Curmie is in no way endorsing any of these murders.  He is not “celebrating” the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.  Well, at least until and unless the right-wing ideologues are successful in their attempt to make Kirk into a “moderate” and therefore even more of a martyr.  He was neither, of course.  His sole attribute was his ability to sell every conceivable variety of hatred as if it were a heavenly elixir.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of murder mysteries, and we not infrequently watch a film or a TV show in which the victim is a truly horrible person, thereby providing potential motives for a number of suspects.  When this occurs, one of us (usually Curmie) sometimes adopts an exaggerated Texas drawl and proclaims that the deceased “wanted killin.’”  But we’re well aware of the fictiveness of what we’re watching.  Real life is different, and no one, not even Charlie Kirk, deserves to be shot in cold blood.  There may be little in the way of mourning at Chez Curmie, but there is precisely zero celebration.

It now appears that the suspected shooter, Tyler Robinson, did have a political, or at least quasi-political, motive.  He disagreed with Kirk on some issues.  But no one knew that when the invective started to fly.  To be fair, it was a reasonable guess, but it didn’t at the time come close to a certainty.  Moreover, although Robinson is said to have become more political of late, he is not registered with a political party and has not voted recently.  He seems to have grown up around guns, and he comes from a Republican family.  [EDIT: It now appears that Robinson may have thought Kirk was insufficiently right-wing for Robinson’s taste.  Yes, the shooting was political, but not in the way it was described by Trump, et al.  Go figure, right?]

Curmie has long decried the media’s prioritization of getting the story first over getting it right.  One example was that attack at a cinema in Aurora, CO; another was the (perhaps staged) attempt in Butler, PA, about which Curmie suggested that the motive may never be known, but “perhaps there’s a latter-day Jodie Foster to impress out there somewhere.”  And, of course, DJT has always been quick to blame someone unlike himself, evidence be damned: witness his screed on New Year’s Day against “criminals coming in” when the New Orleans terrorist actually turned out to be a Texas-born Army vet.

Let’s take as given that Robinson was the shooter and that the reason for the attack was that he objected to Kirk’s politics.  That rationale would have been a reasonable, even probable, surmise before Robinson’s apprehension.  But it was certainly insufficient to claim as fact.  There was the possibility of a “false flag,” of an internal division in the right-wing power structure (Kirk had been accused of insufficient obeisance to Dear Leader, after all), or the gunman had some other motive altogether.  Curmie even saw a post that suggested that since it would take military-style training to be able to shoot that accurately, and since the military is comprised mostly of conservatives… well, you get the point, Gentle Reader.  Yes, that’s a rather strained argument, but until this morning it was at least possibly accurate.

Of course, the vituperation started emanating from the White House long before any real information became known.  Donald Trump, in his usual reckless manner, bypassed any attempt at national unity and blithely accused the “radical left political violence,” and deplored “demonizing those with whom you disagree.”  A more ironic and hypocritical utterance has seldom if ever occurred in all of human history.  Demonizing political opponents is, of course, Trump’s stock in trade, to the extent that when someone else does it, we’re surprised he doesn’t sue them for copyright infringement.

Of course, all this hand-wringing and pearl-clutching casually ignores the attacks on Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, and Melissa Hortman, and the kidnapping plot aimed at Gretchen Whitmer.  But it’s only those on the left we need to worry about, correct?  What utter bullshit!  True, we expect this kind of crap from the usual suspects: Trump, Vance, Miller, Musk, Loomer, Mace, et al.  They are uniformly devoid of actual ideas (or at least good ones) and have nothing but rage and self-righteous hypocrisy to offer.  But it is terrifying that even once reasonable conservatives are buying into this nonsense.  (There’s a reason Curmie abandoned Ethics Alarms, for example.)

Name a nationally-known Democrat—Obama, Biden, Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdami, the list goes on and on—and you’ll find a message of sorrow, empathy, and sometimes outrage about the murder of Charlie Kirk.  Of course, some of them may have been pro forma or even insincere, but Curmie’s challenge on his Facebook page remains: name a prominent Republican who offered similar sentiments over the death of Melissa Hortman, who was an actual legislator as opposed to a talking head. 

One more thing crossed Curmie’s mind when he woke up in the middle of the night.  A little over 50 years ago, Curmie was a freshman in college, taking a course called “Political Ideals.”  One of the key differences identified in that course was the tendency of conservatives to think in terms of the individual and liberals to think of groups with something in common (race, gender, economic class, etc.).  It’s an over-simplification, but it isn’t, or at least wasn’t, inaccurate.

But when it comes to these attacks on politicians or quasi-politicians, those characterizations no longer hold.  There is little if any attempt by liberals to blame all conservatives for the deaths of Hortman or the torching of Shapiro’s home, but all of a sudden all liberals are responsible for Kirk’s death.  There are even insane, and yes, Curmie does mean that term literally, rantings from the likes of Congresscritter Clay Higgins, who wants to violate the First Amendment and censor both individuals and corporations because some people think Charlie Kirk wasn’t all that great a guy, after all. 

We’re already seeing a variation on the theme, as the list of people—teachers, state university administrators, restaurant employees, writers, coaches, even firefighters— fired or suspended for what clearly should be protected speech is long and growing.  FIRE, which Curmie criticized only yesterday, is actually all over this one: here’s a list of literally dozens of incidents, already (!).  This is, as FIRE’s headline rightly points out, the embodiment of “cancel culture”: you know, Gentle Reader, that horrible plague the right always complains about… except, of course, when they’re the ones doing it.

But we aren’t talking about the jobs report, or Russia attacking Poland on Trump’s watch, or the Epstein files, so at least there’s that.

There are problems here, and the solutions aren’t easy.  The political right will cheerfully abandon the 1st and 4th Amendments to bolster the 2nd, but the kind of gun control labelled by liberals as “common sense” wouldn’t have saved Charlie Kirk, at least if, as seems likely, Tyler Robinson was indeed the perpetrator.  He had no record of mental illness or criminality, and the weapon was neither a handgun nor a semi-automatic rifle. 

It is sadly ironic that one of Charlie Kirk’s most famous lines was “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”  But even calling attention to that quote is seen by some of the more fragile snowflakes of the right as a firing offense.  Yet another reason Curmie is glad he’s retired.

Note: one particularly unfortunate outcome here is that the Tyler Robinson Foundation, named for a different young man, will probably take a hit because of this because, in the words of a beloved former student, “people are stupid, y’all.”  The TRF is a charity offering support to families dealing with pediatric cancer.  Seems like a great cause, especially if you’re also a fan of the band Imagine Dragons, who have been involved with the foundation since its inception. Maybe send them a few bucks if you’ve got some to spare, Gentle Reader?

FIRE's Failure and Curmie's Happiness in Retirement

 

One of the more troubling survey results.  Probably.

If FIRE, the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression is known for anything by the general public, it’s for their annual Free Speech Rankings of colleges and universities.  The new (2026: apparently they’re like model years for cars in this regard) list dropped this week, and it reveals some troubling information.

Nearly 2/3 of the 257 colleges and universities studied received a failing grade from FIRE, and none got better than a B-.  Of course, if what you want to do is to show the need for your organization, you’re likely to paint a rather gloomy picture of the status quo, so perhaps a grain of salt is called for.  Still, it’s chilling that FIRE President Greg Lukianoff’s could comment that, 

Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture's deep polarization.

A third of college students surveyed agreed that violence is acceptable, at least “rarely,” to stop speech.  A majority said they would oppose their school’s inviting any of six controversial speakers (three from the left and three from the right) to campus.  Note: these are not specific individuals, apparently, but hypothetical people who are quoted as saying something controversial, e.g., “children should be allowed to transition without parental consent” or “transgender people have a mental disorder.”  You get the picture, Gentle Reader. 

Of course, some of this gets into areas of fungible definitions.  Is grabbing and restraining someone who is inciting violence (i.e., engaging in non-protected speech) perpetrating violence against that person?  Or is the term limited to punching out someone you disagree with?  Does “rarely” mean “only in extremely rare circumstances” (such as just described) or just “not very often”?  And what is meant by “invite”?  Is that my tuition money that’s being spent on bringing in this person whose views I abhor, or is it the Young Republicans/Democrats/whatever footing the bill?

Similarly, it’s also difficult for a university to legitimately be blamed for students’ reluctance to discuss controversial issues in entirely social atmospheres outside the classroom.  If, for example, a student hears another student advocating a position on abortion or the conflict in Gaza which is radically different from their own, choosing not to express a contrary view may be appropriate if that decision comes not from fear but from simply not wanting to be bothered. 

Similarly, Curmie has three different responses to those who disagree with his posts, both here on the blog and, considerably more frequently, on the Facebook page.  (No one has really taken issue with anything he’s posted on BlueSky; that bridge will be crossed if/when reached.)  Usually, the comment simply remains with no counter-argument.  Curmie isn’t afraid of detractors, but sometimes they’re just not worth the trouble.  Sometimes, Curmie responds with a clarification or further argument.  Rarely (there’s that word, again), he’ll ban someone.  (He hasn’t done that in several years.)

For all this, FIRE’s work, whether arguing against speech codes, protecting research from government interference, or working to eliminate loyalty oaths (including towards DEI advocacy), is unquestionably a net positive, and the free speech rankings contribute towards this utility.

FIRE is, to be sure, enormously and not infrequently smugly proud of their work, and Wednesday’s webinar to hype the new rankings showed that off.  Curmie does not begin to profess to any expertise in surveying, data collection and analysis, and the like, but he does come by his soubriquet honestly, and there was more than one instance in which his eyebrow raised in skepticism. 

A couple examples, paraphrased to what Curmie was hearing (perhaps not what the speaker thought he was saying).  “Well, we have this totally subjective green/yellow/red light analysis, and we’ll give you points if you’re green and take them away if you’re not…. We don’t really pay any attention to the good things you’ve done unless you pro-actively tell us about them before the rankings come out….  If you sign on to the Chicago principles, you get points for that; actually following them is (apparently) of less importance….”

The whole process seems to be an attempt to make a fundamentally subjective analysis seem objective.  Curmie has been guilty of the same; he’s not pretending otherwise, but he at least tries to let the audience in on the extent to which the evidence is or is not trustworthy.  And he’d definitely be interested in how self-selecting respondents were.  He knows how course evaluations work, after all.  As soon as they became optional, they lost pretty much all credibility.  If there are 20 students in a class—5 loved it, 3 hated it, and a dozen thought it was OK, you’ll get two positive responses, three negative responses, and two “meh” responses.  How FIRE’s methodology addresses this problem would be worth knowing.

More problematic was the avoidance of the proverbial elephant in the room.  That’s a particularly apt expression, since the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party, which, at least in states like Florida and Texas (there are others, no doubt), is the greatest threat to free speech on university campuses. 

As many readers of this blog know and others will have surmised, Curmie is a retired professor at a state university in Texas.  That makes him both a little more knowledgeable and, admittedly, a little more biased in his interpretation of what is transpiring.  But he finds it difficult to understand how a student’s willingness or unwillingness to discuss controversial subjects in a purely social setting is more relevant to free speech concerns than is a professor’s ability to determine what should and should not be taught in a course in their area of expertise.

This summer, Greg Abbott and his simpering acolytes in the Texas legislature passed SB27, which is as anti-intellectual, authoritarian, and generally reprehensible a piece of legislation as Curmie can recall, anywhere, ever.  Curmie hopes to write a longer essay on this, but let’s just say that articles like the ones linked here and here pretty well reflect Curmie’s thinking. 

The bill strips faculty of the right to elect their own representatives, de facto grants state government the right to overturn any decision made at a state university, and gives whatever local authority remains exclusively to the president.  The president is appointed, often unilaterally, by the regents, who are appointed by the governor.  In the over two decades that Curmie has been affiliated with the university from which he is now retired, not a single regent has not been a hard-core Republican.  Indeed, their political affiliations have often been trotted out as if they were credentials for the job.

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, “Wait!  That’s not all!”  SB37 is, more than anything, an assault on academic freedom and, by extension, of freedom of speech.  Political hacks are scouring every syllabus, looking for anything that might challenge right-wing ideology or even suggest that different points of view might not only exist, but reasonably exist.

And now we circle back to that webinar, in which viewers were encouraged to submit questions.  So Curmie did so.  He can’t reproduce his question verbatim, but it was something like this: “In an environment in which state legislatures are exercising what amounts to absolute control over curriculum, why are you surveying only students and not faculty about free speech issues?”  His question was ignored, while the moderator cheerfully moved on a softball questions from someone she identified as her friend.  OK, there were probably more questions than could have been accommodated in the time frame, and the answer to my question, pretty much “it’s hard to do that,” was sort of hinted at in response to a different question.

But it wasn’t the avoidance of Curmie’s question that really stood out.  Someone asked about the news out of Texas A&M, where a single narcissistic and reactionary student circulated a surreptitious video of challenging a professor for including a discussion of verboten (by Trump/Abbott) topics like gender identity and transgender people.  A grandstanding pol got involved, and soon the professor was fired, the dean and department chair demoted, and the president at the very least under fire.

Edicts about what can and cannot be taught in a university classroom are clear violations of academic freedom and evidence of authoritarianism. Firing a professor without even the pretense of due process is illegal, or at least would be in any state with a governor or state legislatures that weren’t so proudly anti-intellectual.  Curmie is loath to use terms that exaggerate the gravity of a situation, but if this isn’t fascism, the footwear sure does seem to be the correct size.

Anyway, whoever asked the question didn’t go into any details, just that a professor at A&M had been fired.  Someone from FIRE acknowledged the situation in about a half a sentence, didn’t explain the context to listeners who might not have heard about the incident, and then proclaimed in the Q&A link that the question had been answered.  NO, IT FUCKING WASN’T!

FIRE still, as of this writing, hasn’t addressed the situation at A&M, just as they never addressed the question of religious charter schools in Oklahoma, but they did get out a brief statement about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, leaping to the conclusion that it was politically motivated.  (It might very well have been, but they certainly didn’t know that when the statement was released.)

PEN America, however, responded swiftly and surely.  Here’s Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms Managing Director of U.S. Free Expression Programs: 

We are witnessing the death of academic freedom in Texas, the remaking of universities as tools of authoritarianism that suppress free thought.  The decision to remove these academic leaders to satisfy politicians’ demands is an excessive punishment for the alleged violation of transparency requirements. When university presidents have little choice but to dismiss faculty members’ expertise and enforce ideological edicts, the space for free speech and open inquiry on our campuses is undeniably being suffocated.

As he writes this, Curmie is a member of FIRE but not of PEN America.  Both those situations are likely to change in the relatively near future.

Back when he was teaching, Curmie assigned texts by the likes of Marguerite Duras, Jean Genet, Imamu Amiri Baraka, Augusto Boal, and Irish drag queen Panti Bliss (Curmie encourages you to look up any of these folks who are new to you, Gentle Reader): not to get students to agree with their ideologies, but because you can’t understand the entirety of the way theatre and the larger culture interact without acknowledging the voices that may be on the periphery in one way or another.

If he were still teaching, Curmie wouldn’t change his syllabus or his teaching style one iota to accommodate the dictates of petty tyrants like Abbott or Trump.  It’s a good thing he’s retired, then.  This way, they won’t have to fire him.