“Strong Independent Woman Singing”

Curmie is once again distracted from his growing backlog of things he’s promised himself and others to write about. This time, it’s to remember Sinéad O’Connor, one of the truly great artists of our time, who was taken from us far too young (age 56) a few days ago. That also was the age at which another of Curmie’s musical heroes, Warren Zevon, died. The difference is that whereas Curmie was several years younger than Zevon, he's over a decade older than O’Connor. It hurts more to hear about the passing of someone younger than oneself. 

The encomia are coming fast and furious now, and Morrissey, for once, is correct in condemning the hypocrisy of the music industry magnates and media moguls who are suddenly mourning the loss of someone they had long shunned for the unforgiveable sin of nonconformity. She was a remarkably beautiful woman, but not only didn’t exploit that fact but actively undercut the sex kitten image by shaving her head and appearing in t-shirt and ripped jeans rather than the flowing locks and cute (short) dresses the record company execs tried to foist on her. 

One of the things that struck Curmie in the aftermath of her death was the diversity of songs posted on Facebook by friends over the past few days. Of course, “Nothing Compares 2 U” shows up a lot; it was her biggest hit, after all. But there’s also a magnificent rendering of Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” from the Broadway hit Evita (a song which has a fair amount of relevance to her own life), the Irish folk song “The Foggy Dew” about the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, and the contemporary social commentary of “Black Boys on Mopeds.” If it could be sung, she could sing it. Well. 

There were lots of others, too, of course: the autobiographical “Daddy I’m Fine” (which provides the title for this essay), straight-ahead rock-and-roll (with an edge) like “Mandinka,” traditional folksongs like “He Moved through the Fair,” 20th century chestnuts like “I Want to Be Loved by You” (yeah, she out-Marilyns Marilyn) and “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” and ballads of love gone wrong like “Troy” and “Last Day of Our Acquaintance.” She sings with the backing of big bands, of traditional Irish folk groups, of rock combos. Her rendition of “Irish Ways and Irish Laws” is a capella; it doesn’t matter who, if anyone, is with her: she dominates. 

Hers was one of those voices that was instantly recognizable. She could slide seemingly effortlessly from breathy romanticizing to a visceral roar; she could be almost unbelievably vulnerable and terrifyingly defiant… sometimes at the same time. There has never been, and will never be, a voice quite like hers. 

But “voice,” of course, has two meanings. One, having to do with pitch and timbre and the like, was cheerfully exploited by record companies and concert venues. The other meaning has to do with giving a voice to those who, metaphorically at least, go unheard. It was a problem that she wanted to be taken seriously for her artistry. That she often wrote and performed songs that followed in the tradition of protest songs from both sides of the Atlantic could be (barely) tolerated. Saying out loud instead of discreetly hinting that women can be interested in sex as well as romance no doubt bothered the industry execs, but at least she was selling records. 

It was not as a singer/songwriter, however, but as a woman, as a victim of child abuse, as an Irish citizen, that she took on the powerful elites by openly defending the Irish Republican Army, pulling out of a scheduled appearance on Saturday Night Live because the episode was to be hosted by the misogynistic Andrew Dice Clay, and withdrawing from the Grammy Awards because of their preference for popular success over actual artistry. None of this did her career any good, except with a few hard-core fans. 

But finally appearing on SNL and tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II, declaring him “the real enemy” for his placing the interests of the Church above those of innocent children was widely condemned by the likes of Joe Pesci, Frank Sinatra, and even fans at a Bob Dylan concert. Her career was never the same again, although she did record a few more albums after a layoff of several years. 

That was a moment of considerable courage, perhaps of recklessness. What the pundits have gradually and belatedly admitted is that she was absolutely right. No, maybe the Pope wasn’t, perhaps, the embodiment of evil per se, but the Church hierarchy was unquestionably responsible for a disproportionate share of child abuse, shuffling predatory priests from parish to parish while protecting them from civil authorities. It is now, alas, a little late to say “oops.” 

Curmie admits to being somewhat complicit in all this, to the extent of not being a devotee when he could (should?) have been. He was not a fan of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” which remains one of his least favorite songs in her discography. (Curmie notes with a rueful smile that she might approve of his refusal to conflate economics with art.)  In any case, he had heard few if any of her other songs when that SNL incident occurred. He became a fan only in retrospect, hearing her first on Irish folk songs, then searching out her other work, both as an artist and as a social commentator… and sometimes at the intersection of the two, as in her advocacy for hip-hop and reggae. 

None of us—not Sinéad O’Connor, nor Curmie, nor you, Gentle Reader—can avoid making mistakes. But we can acknowledge and correct them. Let’s do that, and call attention to the force of nature known as Sinéad O’Connor. She had a voice—in both senses of the term—for the ages. We can disagree with some of her positions, but not with her willingness to speak her truth, consequences be damned. She suffered far more than anyone ought to have to endure, throughout a life bookended by an abusive mother and a son’s suicide, with worldwide fame supplanted by worldwide humiliation and rejection in between. 

Watching her perform on video, especially live, is always an experience. When we get a long shot, we often see a small woman with slumped shoulders, almost apologetically stepping up to the microphone. Then we hear that voice, and the shoulders roll back, and we’re on alert: this woman is anything but frail. The camera zooms in and we see those glorious flashing dark eyes. You can’t look at them without the certainty of the truth being shared with us; her truth, at least. We cannot not listen. 

Sinéad was a mass of contradictions, as only geniuses can be. She is gone now. She was mortal, after all. No. She was mortal. She is immortal. Or at least we can damned well hope so.

Jason Aldean and the Three Possibilities

The list of things Curmie has started to write about, or started the research to write about, without ever finishing the job keeps growing. Add the WGA and SAG/AFTRA strikes to that compilation. He’ll get back to them if they remain relevant. But for now, let’s talk about the Jason Aldean “Try That in a Small Town” kerfuffle. You can find the song on YouTube or Spotify. Curmie won’t provide links, though, because he doesn’t want to be directly responsible for even one more hit. Curmie listened; call it taking one for the team. 

Needless to say, Gentle Reader, Curmie is not an aficionado of country music. In fact, his personal vision of hell includes a soundtrack of trite faux patriotic lyrics and twangy vocals. If you’d asked him a few days ago who Jason Aldean is, he’d probably have been more likely to guess that he’s a minor league infielder included in some trade package for a star player than a country singer. But Aldean is apparently rather a big deal: Billboard lists him at #7 on the country charts for 2022, ahead of a handful of people Curmie’s actually heard of, and he has ten platinum albums. 

Be it noted, Gentle Reader, that if you’re a fan of country music in general or Jason Aldean in particular, that’s fine, as long as you don’t make Curmie listen. (He similarly promises not to foist his musical tastes on you, except, perhaps, via a link you can choose not to click.) But Curmie does believe he knows something of small town life, having lived in towns or cities of fewer than 85,000 people for over 66 years (and in places under 35,000 folks for 58+ years), as opposed to Aldean’s [checks notes] literally never. 

Curmie is amused but unoffended by Aldean’s inauthenticity. Yes, an earlier song of his, “Rearview Town” paints a very different picture of small towns. No, Aldean has never actually lived in one. But Bruce Springsteen has sorta passed his sell-by date as a voice of the working class, too. And Curmie is still a fan. Songs don’t have to be about personal experience. 

It’s also worth noting that “Try That in a Small Town” was actually written by the quartet of Kelley Lovelace, Neil Thrasher, Tully Kennedy, and Kurt Allison, not by Aldean. Still, it’s Aldean at the center of the controversy, so we’ll continue as if this is all his doing, even though he’s just singing someone else’s lyrics. In other words, Gentle Reader, please mentally insert “…and the songwriters” after Aldean’s name in the ensuing discussion. If you’d similarly change the verbs to match their newly plural subjects, that would be appreciated, too. 

The song starts by describing behavior which we’d all agree is both reprehensible and illegal: sucker punching someone, carjacking an old lady, robbing a liquor store. But then things start getting a little more divisive: “cuss[ing] out a cop” and “stomp[ing] on” or “light[ing] up the flag” may not be activities Curmie would recommend, but they’ve been consistently reaffirmed as protected speech. 

The response: “Well, try that in a small town / See how far ya make it down the road / Around here, we take care of our own / You cross that line, it won’t take long / For you to find out, I recommend you don’t / Try that in a small town.” Whoa. Stop right there. “See how far you make it down the road”? Really? The appropriate response to the exercise of First Amendment protected speech you disagree with is to chase someone down, and prevent them, presumably by force, from going down the road? 

Here it’s worth pointing out that, especially given the immediate reference to “a gun that my granddad gave me,” that we’re not talking about being “shunned” or “unpopular,” however much Jack Marshall of Ethics Alarms might try that spin in a comment on his post on the subject. (Today’s apophasis is that we’ll let the Tin Foil Hat paranoia of “they say one day they’re gonna round up” go without comment for now.) 

What’s being advocated here is not adopting a music hall French accent and declaring you fart in someone’s general direction. No, this is absolutely and literally a paean to vigilantism. The fact that it doesn’t rise to the level of a “true threat” in legal terms means only that the song shouldn’t be censored, which, of course, is different from whether a private enterprise like Country Music Television decides to broadcast the video or not. 

This invocation of violence then continues with a reference to a small town being “Full of good ol’ boys, raised up right / If you’re looking for a fight.” Curmie finds it difficult, given the preceding verses, to think the fight in question is anything but literal. This is what “raised up right” means? Jolly. 

Of course, it’s the video, even more than the song, that is really drawing fire from the left. There are scenes of rioting that suggest we’re looking at the BLM-inspired violence of a couple of years ago. A fair share isn’t, of course; Rolling Stone reports that a lot of the imagery comes from stock footage of demonstrations in Toronto and Montreal. Go figure, right? 

Plus, of course, the backdrop for the shots of Aldean himself is the Maury County Courthouse in Columbia, Tennessee, which seems to be literally the source of light in the video. Oh yeah, it’s also the site of the lynching of Henry Choate in 1927 and of the Columbia race riot of 1946. Charming. 

So all of this raises the question of just what the hell is going on. It strikes Curmie that there are three possible explanations. The first is that Aldean really is a racist, and that Curmie’s friend who suggested that the reason the song is called “Try That in a Small Town” is that “’Try That in a Sundown Town’ wouldn’t have the same ring to it” might be on to something. The possibility that a MAGAmaniac who dressed his kids in t-shirts reading “Hidin’ from Biden” might be evincing the predilections of a small but demonstrable contingent of that red-capped horde cannot be discarded out of hand. 

The carefully manipulated video, the racial implications of the distinction between urban and rural, and the choice of backdrop all could reasonably be perceived to point in that direction. Curmie is insufficiently attuned to dog whistles of that particular variety to have a strong opinion, and he refuses to engage in the kind of straw man arguments he sees all too often online. Curmie doesn’t like it when some ultrapartisan conservative decides what progressives think, and he declines to do the same thing in reverse. So… is Aldean’s song (or the video) racist? Perhaps, but Curmie would take some more convincing, and isn’t going to label someone he’s never met without more evidence than this. 

The second alternative is that Aldean is a garden-variety idiot. (All racists are idiots; not all idiots are racists.) Were this to be the case, he’d be unaware of the symbolism of the setting and of the overtones associated with the distinction between the urban and the rural (or semi-rural). He’d honestly believe that not mentioning race per se in the lyrics would mean the song wouldn’t be interpreted as being about race. 

He’d still view vigilantes as people “raised up right,” and threats of violence as appropriate responses to those whose politics are different from one’s own. But thuggery against people who see the world a little differently than you isn’t the same as doing so because their melanin count is higher than yours, right? 

The third possibility is the most intriguing. No one is going to call Jason Aldean an intellectual giant, but, as Mitch McConnell has proved, being smart and being shrewd aren’t the same thing. So what if the brouhaha, the removal of the song from CMT, the defiant stand at a concert in Cincinnati (in front of a lot of fans, none of whom appear to be more darkly complected than Curmie)… what if it was all a set-up? “One high-level exec” told Mikael Woods of the Los Angeles Times “Aldean is irrelevant today — a sideshow all the way.” And what is the current hubbub if not a sideshow? 

Curmie has argued for years that not all seemingly bad work (or bad results) ought necessarily to be read that way. To choose an example from Curmie’s field: the deus ex machina (literally!) ending to Euripides’ Orestes has been decried by many critics as faulty dramaturgy because it is so utterly implausible. But was one of the great classical tragedians really that sloppy? Or is it just possible that we’re supposed to notice the awkwardness, that the most famous atheist of his era might just be suggesting that it’s unreasonable to expect the gods to fix our problems, that the best way out of a difficult situation is not to get into it in the first place? 

Similarly, might Aldean or his handlers have anticipated that CMT pulling the song was the best possible outcome in a world of YouTube and Spotify? That he’d have every Republican talking head or Presidential candidate singing his praises? That morons like “Veteran Biker” would claim that Aldean “may be on the Mount Rushmore of country music”? (As above, you can search out the link if you choose, but there’s no question about the coded messages and dog whistles in this one.) 

Might they have guessed that people like Curmie, who’d never heard of Aldean, now know who he is, and even listened (once) to the song? That the song would rocket up the charts as an immediate response to the controversy? That even otherwise intelligent people would valiantly attempt to defend the song’s message as opposed to simply his right to sing it? 

Did Aldean dangle the song and the video out there, hoping (not without cause) the leftie press would rise to the bait like a Kardashian who’s spotted a camera? Is Aldean that cunning? Are his handlers? Did Aldean’s people actually leak the bit about the Maury County Courthouse? Maybe. After all, a boycott of something you weren’t going to buy anyway doesn’t carry much of a threat, and appealing to the base has its advantages. 

What Curmie knows for sure is that actual small towns are both better and worse than Aldean’s fantasized imaginings. That the same Constitution that allows Aldean to sing “Try That in a Small Town” also allows Curmie to call it violence-excusing crap. And that if Aldean ever actually ventured into the actual small town Curmie calls home, Curmie sure as hell wouldn’t go to his concert… but he also wouldn’t get a bunch of friends together to beat him up. Or even threaten to.

Confucius and the Fourth Circuit

Twentysomething years ago, a few months after completing my PhD, I got a phone call from my mentor in Asian theatre, who, upon learning my job search wasn’t going as well as I might have hoped, asked if I wanted to teach a couple sections of the university’s Eastern Civilizations course. I asked if I was really qualified to teach such a course. His response: “You know something, and you can read.”

 

Based largely on his recommendation, I got an interview for the position. I made no attempt to conceal my ignorance of a lot of what I’d be teaching. But the department had struggled with grad students who had lost control of their classrooms, and I’d taught full-time for ten years before entering the doctoral program; I got the job. The head of the Eastern Civ program closed the interview with “There are some books in my office you’ll want to read before you start.” I knew something, and I could read. 

That’s relevant to my consideration of the recent ruling of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University, in which a tenured faculty member claimed to have been punished for arguing against certain initiatives undertaken by his department. I’m no lawyer, so there’s some legalese I’m not so sure about, and I have no interest in chasing down all the precedents cited by either the majority or the dissent to see if they really say what these judges say they say. But I know something and I can read. 

More to the point, one of the texts I taught in that Eastern Civ course was Confucius’s Analects, which I had to get to know a lot better than I did previously in order to teach it to someone else. One of the central tenets of Confucian thought was his argument against having too many laws, as no one could possibly predict all the various special circumstances surrounding every dispute. Context matters; timing matters; motives matter. Confucius’s solution was to turn everything over to a wise counselor (like him) who would weigh all the relevant elements on a case by case basis. That’s not the way our justice system works, nor would it be practical, but it’s easy to see its appeal… in theory, at least. 

Significantly, Confucius’s reservations about laws’ inability to anticipate all the possible combinations of circumstances are the first cousin if not the sibling of what Jack Marshall of Ethics Alarms calls the “ethics incompleteness principle,” which asserts that there “are always anomalies on the periphery of every normative system, no matter how sound or well articulated.” 

An extension of this is that what is lawful and what is just are related but inevitably not identical concepts. The problem is magnified when it’s not just the law, but previous court decisions, that are ambiguous. Where, for example, does the First Amendment’s guarantee of free expression leave off and an employer’s desire for a congenial and (generally speaking) united workplace begin? Does it matter if the employer is a government agency? If it’s a university? If the alleged miscreant has tenure? If the place is just a little awkward as opposed to a war zone? Is academic freedom a relevant concern? The answer to the first question appears to be “well, it depends”; all of the seemingly disjunctive questions would appear to be best answered by “sort of.” 

The basic facts are these: Stephen Porter teaches statistics in the Department of Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education at North Carolina State University. He claims to have been punished—not fired, exactly, but ostracized and placed in a situation which could likely result in his position being retrenched—for being outspoken about what he perceived to be an abandonment of “rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion.’” 

Porter says that three moments between 2016 and 2018 are at the center of his claim. The first came in the spring of 2016, when he objected to the addition of a question about diversity on student evaluation forms because he believed the question to be insufficiently researched. 

The second occasion was two years later, when he sent an email to departmental colleagues linking to an article in Inside Higher Ed which criticized a departmental search led by Alyssa Rockenbach. Porter appended the comment, “Did you all see this? … This kind of publicity will make sure we rocket to number 1 in the rankings. Keep up the good work, Alyssa!” 

In a subsequent meeting with Penny Pasque, then the department chair, Porter argued that Rockenbach had “cut corners” in vetting a candidate “out of a desire to hire a Black scholar whose work focused on racial issues.” (That candidate, by the way, had been fired from his previous position for financial misconduct.) 

That fall, Porter published a brief blog piece entitled “ASHE Has Become a Woke Joke.” His commentary concluded, “I prefer conferences where 1) the attendees and presenters are smarter than me and 2) I constantly learn new things. That’s why I stopped attending ASHE several years ago and switched to AEFP.” [ASHE is the Association for the Study of Higher Education; AEFP is the Association for Education Finance and Policy.] 

Finally, that fall, the department considered hiring a new faculty member. Pasque changed what was originally scheduled as a meeting of the HEPA (the Higher Education Program Area) faculty to discuss the candidate, and, with only a small number of faculty present in a virtual meeting, proposed that Porter leave HEPA. 

Feeling ambushed, Porter responded, “Give me a fucking break, folks. I was the one who said [the potential hire] should come. And now I’m the bad guy because I don’t want to leave Higher Ed for a non-existent program area.” This, of course, led to further tensions, including a reprimand for his language. Things escalated from there, and Porter was involuntarily removed from HEPA and de facto prevented from having advisees because of “lack of collegiality” and complaints from graduate students (that would be a grand total of two of the sixty grad students, by the way). 

Porter claimed his comments were protected speech, and that the university violated his First Amendment rights; he sued the university and several individuals. The university saw things otherwise. The Fourth Circuit, by a vote of 2-1, agreed with the university. Unsurprisingly, for different and predictable reasons, both FIRE (who had filed an amicus brief on Porter’s behalf) and Jonathan Turley disagreed. 

Here’s where my “knowing something” becomes relevant. Curmie has no opinion about whether the relevant precedent is Pickering v. Board of Education or Garcetti v. Ceballos, but he does know how universities operate. Let’s start with a couple of points that clearly work against Porter. 

First, the chances that he’s an asshole as opposed to merely someone whose political stances the administration doesn’t like is quite high. He says his response to that student evaluation question was “was amicable in tone, although perhaps embarrassing” to the person presenting the proposal. That’s clearly a subjective, self-serving, and retrospective view (not discounting the possibility that it’s also accurate). 

And sending a taunting email to a colleague who has been embarrassed in a national publication, especially when the anonymous source for the article is quite likely to be Porter himself, is more than a little unprofessional. Copying the rest of the department only aggravates the situation. 

Secondly, Porter’s blog post did indeed damage the reputation of the university, even if he has a point, since it led to a rebuttal from the president of an important professional organization in the field in her keynote address. The old adage of “don’t shit where you eat” is advice Porter does not seem to have taken to heart. 

And it’s pretty clear that Porter did little to mend the fences with his departmental colleagues when warned that failure to do so would have repercussions. 

But there are considerations in the other direction, too. (If there are lawyers reading this and Curmie is screwing up the legal arguments, please correct him.) First off, being a curmudgeon is (I trust, given my sobriquet) not illegal, and comments remain protected speech except in specific instances—sedition, incitement, slander, etc. (There’s another exception we’ll come to in a moment.) 

The fact that Porter is a tenured faculty member at a state university carries three (count ‘em, three!) protections. 1). Whereas most businesses have the authority to sanction employee speech (“you can say what you want, you just can’t do so and work for us”), there’s a specific exemption for university faculty, at least in certain circumstances. 2). Private enterprises, including universities, have at least some authority to maintain their own rules, provided they are clearly stated and equitably enforced, but state universities do not have this freendom. 3). Tenure brings with it the full degree of academic freedom, which has come to include the ability to criticize the decisions of their administration. 

The majority decision rests, apparently, on two foundations. One is that the presumed lack of chronological propinquity between the blog post and the department chair’s response, and between Porter’s outburst in the meeting and his removal from HEPA indicates that the latter is not a direct result of the former. Here’s where quoting Dr. Porter directly (from a different context) seems the appropriate rejoinder: “Give me a fucking break, folks!” Of course it was retaliation. The court’s argument that the time lapse means anything suggests an ignorance of both the way universities operate and, indeed, of human nature. (It also doesn’t speak well for Porter’s legal team.) 

The other argument is that Porter was speaking as an employee, and is therefore not entitled to the First Amendment protections he would have as a private citizen. (This is why Elon Musk had the legal right to fire that engineer who told him the truth instead of what he wanted to hear.) Indeed, Porter supposedly said he was “just doing [his] job” in questioning the student evaluation proposal. If nothing else, this comment elicited one of my all-time favorite lines in judicial decisions: in his dissent, Judge Julius N. Richardson writes, “Superman deflects praise by saying that he’s ‘just doing his job,’ even though the citizens of Metropolis never cut him a paycheck.” 

In fact, that episode could be interpreted either way. Yes, Porter was acting as an employee in one sense, but as a statistician with a particular interest in this kind of survey, he was employing his particular skills. Does this qualify as his “research,” which would make his speech protected? I’m gonna call this one a wash. 

The blog post would seem to meet the requirements of protected speech: it’s written as a private citizen, expressing an opinion on an area of public interest. (I’m interested, and I have no connections, positive or negative, to the organization in question.) Still, the blog does identify Porter as a faculty member at North Carolina State… or at least it does now; I presume it did when the essay was posted. Does that mean he was functioning as an employee? I don’t think so, but one could make the case. 

Finally, there’s the business about the new hire and the ensuing brouhaha. Here, there’s no question that Porter was uncivil, but he was certainly provoked. Curmie is pretty certain he never told colleagues to “give me a fucking break,” but substituting “damned” for “fucking” would increase the likelihood he’s uttered that sentence fairly significantly. 

Yes, Porter was “uncollegial” at that moment, but Curmie offers the following in response. We’re talking about a one instance (or perhaps two or three, if we include the other incidents) over the period of several years. This does not a pattern make. (Yes, there may have been other incidents that didn’t make it to the court case.) 

Collegiality is, of course, a good thing in general terms, and it is essential to some degree in some disciplines: in my field, theatre, for instance, if the director and designers can’t get along, it will indeed affect the work product of the institution. But even here, there’s no need to like each other, just to work collaboratively. I don’t know enough about what people in a Leadership, Policy and Adult & Higher Education department do, but from an outsider’s perspective, it doesn’t seem like any high degree of collegiality would be a sine qua non. Moreover, whereas collegiality is sometimes, probably too often, a consideration as to whether someone gets a promotion, Curmie has never seen it used in what amounts to a demotion. 

Finally, and most importantly, there’s an increasingly ominous trend to use “uncollegial” to mean “insufficiently obeisant.” Disagreements are at the center of the academic project. Similarly, the most valuable comments on, for example, Ethics Alarms, aren’t the ones that say “You’re absolutely right, Jack”; they’re the variations on “yeah, but…” or even “I disagree because…” There are some issues on which we’ll never agree, but hearing an articulate rationale for an opinion with which we disagree is how we learn, and that, Gentle Reader, is a good thing. 

When Curmie started his career, the concept of “shared governance” was alive and well. It’s now on life support, in danger of flat-lining in the very near future. Administrators are increasingly overpaid relative to faculty, increasingly autocratic, increasingly dismissive of anyone who questions their latest harebrained scheme. And Trustees/Regents/whatever at state universities listen only to the governor who appointed them or, occasionally, to high-ranking administrators; students, faculty, staff, and alumni are ignored… unless, of course, they happen to be rich. 

So, where does this leave us in this case? It ought to be self-evident that legal decisions ought to be based on the law, but here the law doesn’t really clarify things very much, as so much depends on definitions that are neither clear nor fixed. But now is when we listen to Confucius and search out the most just solution. 

It’s possible that stronger legal case is that of the university.  But it’s clear to me, at least, that Dr. Porter is the more aggrieved party. I wouldn’t necessarily relish having him as a colleague, but from my perspective the Fourth Circuit got this one wrong. Of course, Curmie was an opinionated professor who occasionally had the audacity to say out loud that not all decisions emanating from administrators’ offices were divinely inspired, so perhaps he’s not the most unbiased source.

This piece was written as the third installment of “Curmie’s Conjectures” on the Ethics Alarms blog.  I have made a couple of minor stylistic changes and corrected a typo or two here, but the argument remains the same.  As with earlier such posts, there is much more likely to be discussion there than here; you are welcome to head there... or not.

Changing Voter Eligibility: Four Really Stupid Ideas

Pondering who can vote and who can’t hasn’t occupied a lot of space or time in Curmie’s mind for several years. Yes, there was the brouhaha about absentee ballots during COVID, but that wasn’t about who could vote, but how. And there are the usual plaints from Democrats about voter suppression and from Republicans about ineligible (e.g., non-citizen) voters. But the former requires a very liberal (see what Curmie did there?) definition of “suppression,” and the latter arguments are presented with a dearth of actual evidence. 

And, of course, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the MAGA minions in aftermath of the last presidential election. But even if those protestations had merit (which they didn’t), they were centered on allegations of manipulation, not of who had the legal right to cast a ballot. 

But just in the last week or so, Curmie has seen four proposed changes to the process, all remarkable in their stupidity. (A couple have been around longer, but Curmie only recently learned of their existence.) Curmie can’t quite decide which order to put them in, but has decided to arrange them in what he currently, as he writes this, considers increasing levels of lunacy. (His ordering by the time you read this, Gentle Reader, may well have changed, and you should certainly feel free to shuffle the order at will.) 

We start, then, with an idea that seems to be gaining at least a little momentum among Democrats and teenagers. The Democrat-controlled Vermont legislature recently overrode the Republican governor’s veto, thereby allowing 16-year-olds to vote in municipal elections and indeed to hold office if elected. The rationale, such as it is, is to keep the youngsters politically involved. The veto seems to have been grounded in the potential confusion about the state’s definition of adulthood. No, the reason to oppose this is that it’s a stupid idea. 

The fact that this nonsense has any traction at all—in cities in several states, as it happens—can be chalked up to the perhaps mistaken belief among Democrats that teenagers are more likely to agree with them on such issues as gun control and abortion. But even if we grant the Dems’ dubious claim to ethics on this one, there are two objections. First, those issues aren’t the ones being decided at the local level—for there to be any benefit to progressive causes, those 16-year-old voters would have to become more engaged 18-year-old voters than they would otherwise be. Curmie doubts there’d be much change. 

More to the point, there are a lot of changes between the ages of 16 and 18, not simply in terms of brain development (although that, too). At 16, teens are staying in their parents’ house, and are more than likely to simply mirror their parents’ politics. Kent State made Curmie suspicious of Republicans, but it never occurred to him to vote for a Democrat until he was away at college. 

Oh, by the way, there is even an attempt at a constitutional amendment. This may or may not be necessary, as the 26th Amendment guarantees voting privileges to 18-year-olds, but doesn’t prohibit suffrage to younger citizens. Curmie is no lawyer, but if Maine and Nebraska can treat electoral votes differently than every other state, maybe voting rights could be different in Vermont or California or wherever? (Or perhaps not.) Anyway, it’s a non-starter, so it doesn’t matter much. 

Speaking of non-starters, let’s move on to two ideas that would definitely require constitutional amendments that are about as likely to happen as Curmie becoming starting power forward in the NBA. First up is an informal endorsement by Elon Musk of some Twitter yahoo’s idea that suffrage ought to be restricted to parents, since “The childless have little stake in the future.” A year or so ago, he proclaimed that “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far,” when of course the precise opposite is far more likely to be true. Musk didn’t need to own Twitter yet to be a doofus. 

Fact is, even a narcissistic prat like Musk has seldom said anything so stupid. Naturally, he thinks he’s being profound, whereas he’s proven repeatedly that when he’s not in the position to exploit other people’s expertise, he’s… well… a buffoon. He couldn’t care less about the future, except perhaps for his own multiple progeny. Curmie, on the other hand, is childless, but is a life-long educator, and dozens of his former students are also educators. Which of us has better credentials in terms of caring about the future of the species in general? 

But stop me if you’ve heard this before: there’s this arrogant twatwaffle who has a raft-load of stupid ideas, but he thinks we shouldn’t recognize that fact because he’s rich. No, not him… that’s what the last two paragraphs were about. This one is Vivek Ramaswamy, longshot contender for the GOP nomination in 2024. He’s a Randian amoral egomaniac and full-fledged wackadoodle who seems think that being even more authoritarian than Trump or DeSantis is the way to go… although it’s difficult to tell if he’s thinking more about the nation or his own campaign strategy. 

Ramaswamy’s proposal to raise the voting age to 25 with an exception for those who have served for six months in the military or could pass the test foreign nationals must take to become citizens shares more than one essential quality with the Democratic attempt to lower the voting age. This one definitely requires a constitutional amendment (which won’t happen), and if anything is even more cynical than the Dems’ plan. We suspect, but don’t know, how 16-year-olds would vote; in the 2020 election, the 18-24 year old vote went to Democrats by 25 points. Whyever would a hardcore Republican, candidate or not, want to raise the voting age? 

Each of these ideas scores in the upper reaches of what can be measured by the stupidometer. What could possibly surpass them? Well, this: Seaford, Delaware, has changed its charter to allow businesses to vote in local elections. Apparently the outsized influence those corporations already exert in a state with more than twice as many incorporated businesses as citizens just isn’t enough. 

David Genshaw, the mayor of this small town of 8,000 residents, may just be the most moronic officeholder in the country, and Curmie need hardly tell you, Gentle Reader, that there is plenty of competition for that apparently coveted title. Quoth Genshaw, “These are folks that have fully invested in their community with the money, with their time, with their sweat. We want them to have a voice if they choose to take it.” Only about 100 more people voted in the most recent city election than there are corporations registered on Seaford. The low turnout is reasonable because, let’s face it, most of what is decided at that level is rather insignificant, and there’s little difference between candidates. 

Both of these statements are changed significantly if artificial entities that don’t even have a physical presence in the town are able to vote. It’s bad enough that absentee landlords can vote on some issues; this is beyond absurd. First off, those “folks” haven’t done a damned thing to “[invest] in their community”; they are (and this is not a criticism of them) simply looking out for the proverbial #1. 

More importantly, corporations aren’t people, irrespective of what SCOTUS might think… which brings us to another reason why this is the cleanup hitter in this list. Whereas it is extremely unlikely that Delaware’s Democratically controlled state legislature will sign off on Seaford’s folly, which they’d need to do—Curmie need hardly tell you that this proposal is being advanced by Republicans—it’s certainly plausible some asshat might sue, that the case would find its way to SCOTUS, and that a far more conservative court even than the one in the Citizen’s United case (damn, was that really over 13 years ago?) would rule in favor of corporations, actual citizens be damned. 

So, whereas this is the worst idea in a contest of plenty horrible ideas, it’s also the only one with a chance of becoming law. Curmie is not amused.

Censorious Asshats and High School Theatre

Curmie really does plan to get to two pieces he’s half-promised: an update of his nine-year-old post on the de facto costs of a university education today compared to yesteryear, and a close look at the 303 Creative SCOTUS ruling. 

But on the 4th, Curmie’s netpal Jack Marshall alerted him to a story in the New York Times about how difficult it is to find a high school play that won’t run into trouble with some gaggle of censorious asshats (the usual nod to Ken White for the locution). Curmie couldn’t get to the Times story, but found it on Yahoo (a useful work-around, Gentle Reader, if you, like Curmie, don’t have a Times subscription). 

By the time Curmie had a chance to really respond, however, it was time to watch the Boston Pops Independence Day celebration, which has become a tradition at Chez Curmie… and then life happened, and Curmie is only now finishing up his essay.

Anyway, by the morning of the 5th, Jack had posted his commentary on his Ethics Alarms blog. There are some good comments, too. (Feel free to ignore the ones from those folks who would find a way to blame the fact that their beer isn’t cold enough on a Woke conspiracy to undermine American values.) 

Michael Paulson of the Times lists a host of proposed (or even initially approved) plays and musicals that have been deemed problematic or indeed cancelled by schools across the country (those with links are ones Curmie has written about at some point in the last decade or so; he’s not going to bother to mention the college and community theatre productions that have met a similar fate): She Kills Monsters; Shakespeare in Love; Three Sisters (yes, the canonical Chekhov play); The Prom; Almost, Maine; South Pacific; Thoroughly Modern Millie; How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying; Bye, Bye, Birdie; Grease; Fences; Oklahoma!; Newsies; The Little Mermaid; Crush; Indecent; The Addams Family Musical; Marian, or the True Tale of Robin Hood; The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. 

That’s quite a list, but Curmie has a few additions: All Shook Up, Kismet (!), Spamalot, The Wiz, Legally Blonde, Dead Man Walking, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hairspray. Oh, and there was the superintendent’s interference in a production of The Producers.  The chances some idiots somewhere shut down a show that Curmie didn’t hear about: approaching ontological certitude.

The fact is that it would be difficult to name a show that doesn’t have something in it to offend someone. As Curmie wrote in the piece on All Shook Up:

Carousel is one of the creepiest plays ever; Henry Higgins—our hero—is a condescending, sexist, erm… sphincter in My Fair Lady (far more so than his Shavian predecessor in Pygmalion); Godspell requires a conflation of John the Baptist and Judas; all the heroes of West Side Story are gang members; the best songs in Jesus Christ, Superstar go to Mary Magdalene and Herod; the title character in Sweet Charity never strays far from her origins as a prostitute in the Fellini film on which the musical is based; “Hernando’s Hideaway” from The Pajama Game (done right, at least) drips with sexuality; Luther Billis cross-dresses in South Pacific, and extra-marital sex is taken as a given (albeit never made explicit). Need I go on?

(Notice that these were just the musicals, by the way.) At the time, Curmie suggested that none of these titles would be challenged. He apologizes for his woeful lack of imagination, as the complaints have now morphed into full-blown lunacy. 

It is certainly true that Curmie wouldn’t do some of these shows in high school, but it’s because they’re too difficult for high school actors, or because as a culture we’ve moved away so far from the mores of when the play was written that audiences will struggle to get to the real meaning of the text. (Curmie says this while acknowledging that he’s seen some really good productions of, say, The Taming of the Shrew that have found ways to undercut the play’s obvious sexism because it’s more important that we have some empathy for Petruchio.) 

Speaking of sexism, many classic musicals certainly have more than their share, and several have more and better roles for men than for women, which becomes a particular problem at the secondary school level due to the fact that far more high school girls than boys want to perform. That doesn’t mean those shows don’t have some great tunes and story lines that still resonate with audiences and performers alike. 

There are, of course, complaints from the left about such things as racist language or cultural appropriation. For all that, by far the majority of the censorious asshattery at the high school level emanates from the right. (It’s the other way around at colleges and universities and in the professional theatre world, but that’s not the current issue.) More importantly, whereas there are a couple of plays listed above that rather push the envelope, most of the alleged offenses are things like suggesting that gay people exist or uttering epithets considerably milder than what one would be guaranteed to hear on a two-minute stroll through any high school cafeteria in the country. 

Particularly sad are the attacks on plays like She Kills Monsters or The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (both of which have specifically made-for-schools versions), which have plentiful teen-aged characters and deal with coming-of-age issues faced by adolescents.  They are ideally suited for production by high school groups, in other words.

So, what’s the source of all this turmoil? Well, we’ll get to a couple of conjectures about that in a moment. But the real problem is simple: the reason we’re getting all of this censorious… erm… bovine fecal matter is that the asshats in question are, at least sometimes, getting away with it. Yes, it’s true that a number of the idiotic decisions were subsequently overturned because the culprits finally were sufficiently embarrassed by international humiliation online were able to claim victory by accepting changes already offered before their censorship saw the proverbial light. But even an initial decision in favor of suppression bolsters the spirits of the censors, and concomitantly disappoints and enervates student artists.

So, who is/are the problem? Curmie suggests a three-fold response. For the sake of brevity, Gentle Reader, please insert “Not all, but too many” before each of these sentences. In order of increasing degrees of both frequency and power, then:

--High school theatre directors seek to impose their personal political perspectives on their students and audiences.

--Principals and superintendents are even more cowardly than they are stupid.

--School boards are comprised of idiots who were elected by a tiny minority of like-minded morons.

So, let’s look at those individually. There does exist a subset of high school directors who are more interested in “making a statement” or being perceived as “cool” (or whatever the current term is) by their students than in providing the benefits associated with high school theatre, which in some ways harken back to the origins of school theatre centuries ago: critical reading, empathy, teamwork, friendships, confidence in appearing before groups, memory, what was once called “elocution,” and (yes) fun. After over forty years as a theatre professor and director, Curmie could go on, but he suspects that you already get the point, Gentle Reader. 

High school theatre shouldn’t be about the director except as a guide through the text and as the instiller of professionalism, and plays should be chosen for their ability to challenge and engage students without throwing them into the proverbial deep end. Plays should be enjoyable to be a part of, and to attend. Intentionally doing shows that are likely to offend the local audience is simply counter-productive, but the allure of what in Curmie’s youth was called “sticking it to The Man” is, perhaps, occasionally overwhelming. 

Most of the problem, however, stems from the common conceit (in both senses of the term) of the right. These folks (again: not all, but too many) are so insecure in their persons and their beliefs that any suggestion that their demographic profile, their belief system, isn’t the only one is seen as an attack. Simply alluding to a gay character is somehow “grooming,” having a black character complain about racism is anti-American, showing a Muslim character in a favorable light is an attack on God himself. 

Which brings us to the level of school administrators. As a class, these people are far more fond of rules than of thinking, and their one unifying characteristic is risk aversion on steroids: a single dissenting voice (from anyone other than a student or teacher, of course) sends them scurrying for cover like cockroaches when the lights come on. They’re also, of course, the very people who at least de facto approved that show when scripts and royalties were ordered, and in many cases insisted on being consulted on the choice of show… then, they are shocked!, to an extent that hitherto only Claude Rains in “Casablanca” had ever been shocked, that a character is wearing a short skirt or drinking a fake martini or says he has two dads. 

Or they cancel a show, demanding that changes are made in the text: changes that have already been approved by the playwright or the agency, and which were part of the contract signed by someone with enough authority to commit the school to its terms and to a few thousand dollars of the district’s money. Hint: that person is unlikely to be a show’s director. 

Curmie would just love to see some principal or superintendent somewhere tell Karen and Skip just not to come to the show… oh, and to get a freaking life. Perhaps that happens from time to time and it just doesn’t make headlines. That would be unlikely, but even a Curmudgeon can dream… 

Finally, it’s time to quote Mark Twain yet again: “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.” First off, who gets on a school board? Especially recently, the answer is “zealots.” Seriously, Gentle Reader, could you even name a single member of your school board? Curmie admits that he couldn’t. And in nearly a half-century of voting, he has seen maybe two debates between school board candidates as much as advertised. These were sparsely attended events (to put it generously). Most of the campaigning consists of generic statements about the well-being of the next generation and oh-so-relevant information like having lived in the city since birth and being a loving spouse. 

So, how do you get elected to the school board? It certainly has little to do with any skillset relevant to the position. (Curmie has never known of a current or former educator being elected to a school board. That shouldn’t be a requirement, obviously, but one might consider it a reasonable credential.) Knowing people personally is a huge help. And what’s the best source of that? Well, church is a great place to start. 10% voter turnout, and they’re mostly from the Unification Church of Christ the Theocrat or Our Lady of Perpetual Whining. And thus we end up with a school board that pretends to protect kids from largely imaginary liberal groupthink by imposing their own blinkered and myopic world view. 

Unfortunately, what Curmie has just described is not the most insidious manifestation of theatrical censorship. Idiot administrators and proselytizing school boards don’t have to actually pull the plug on a show; they just need to act like they will. Prior restraint has long since become the most powerful weapon of those who would silence expression that makes them even mildly uncomfortable. They can claim, truthfully (sort of), that they didn’t forbid anything. 

The most chilling detail in the Times article isn’t that someone wants to suppress Three Sisters; it’s that 2/3 of high school teachers say that censorship concerns are influencing the choice of their upcoming season. Oh, and of course the Righteously Indignant can be guaranteed to smugly assert that this self-censorship is an acknowledgment of previous wrong-doing, rather than an extension of their own power-play. 

Curmie differs with Jack Marshall on two aspects of this story. Unsurprisingly, he sees less leftie indoctrination in high schools than Jack does. More importantly, whereas Jack expresses little hope for a solution—“I have no ideas for a way out. There may not be one.”—Curmie thinks we’re still at a point where fighting is worth the effort. This is, as the expression goes, a hill worth dying on. Stupid decisions have indeed been reversed in the wake of public scrutiny. 

Sure, some plays by David Mamet or Sarah Kane might be, nay, are inappropriate for high school performance. But there should certainly be a very wide range of what is acceptable. And we’re not going to get anywhere if we stay locked in our partisan bubbles. We on the left need to speak out against stupid arguments from “our side,” too. It’s not cultural appropriation to do Fiddler on the Roof; it’s not sexist to do Waiting for Godot as written, with an all-male cast; it’s not racist to cast a white actress in a role once (even famously) played by a black one if the role doesn’t require it. 

Curmie suggested in a recent post that if we constrain ourselves by looking only at left and right, we overlook the equally if not more important continuum from authoritarian to libertarian. That’s the battleground on which this conflict will be fought, and we need all the allies we can muster.

Some Independence Day Contemplations

A year ago on Independence Day, Curmie wrote this: “The standard line among liberals is that the system is stacked against anyone who isn’t white, male, rich, heterosexual, and Christian. The male and Christian parts of this aphorism certainly seem to have been upheld by SCOTUS of late.  We’ll see about the others.”  (Curmie was referring to the Dodds,  Carson, and Kennedy decisions.)

SCOTUS has now completed the clean sweep, as “white” in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, “rich” in Biden v. Nebraska, and “heterosexual” (and Christian) in 303 Creative v. Elenis all emerged triumphant in SCOTUS decisions issued in the last few days.  Or, rather, their opposites were unquestionably the losers.  All of these decisions were depressingly predictable along partisan lines. 

Certainly the profoundly unethical machinations of the evil (yes, evil) Mitch McConnell can be blamed for a lot of things… but not this.  Yes, the Carson and Kennedy decisions were both abominations, but the others were at least understandable, and most were actually the right call.  Dodds overturned a pretty bizarre rationale in Roe v. Wade.  We can object to the mendacity of the Trump appointees in declaring that Roe was “the law of the land” during their candidacy and then jumping at the first opportunity to reverse it.  We can also wonder whether Roe was so bad a decision that a right granted to American women for decades could legitimately be removed.  But as a matter of Constitutional law per se, Dodds is likely the correct ruling.

Similarly, whereas some form of recognition of racial diversity as a positive force in society would be preferable, the fact is that the Constitution is pretty absolutist about favoring one race over another.  And President Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan was indeed an overreach, probably in policy terms and certainly in terms of executive authority.

That leaves the 303 Creative case, which Curmie intends to come back to in a future post after he’s has a chance to really study the arguments.  There are some definitions to be clarified… which means there is at least a case to be made in favor of the SCOTUS decision.

Ultimately, what is revealed in all this is what we already knew: that politics will intrude into every decision, that Confucius was right that no set of laws can possibly anticipate every eventuality, and that the Venn diagram for that which is just and that which is legal is not a circle.  More importantly in terms of understanding where we are as a nation, someone is going to feel shortchanged (and not without at least some reason) by any decision made by SCOTUS or anyone else in the position to render a judgment.

Those perceiving others to have privilege will behave antagonistically.  Those perceived by others to have privilege will behave defensively.  At some point, it almost doesn’t matter if the descriptor is accurate.  But the key word here is “almost.”  More significantly, all of us have some form of privilege that others don’t; all of us lack some form of privilege that others enjoy.  Maybe we ought to remember that.

Curmie remembers a workshop at a conference he attended many years ago. Participants were divided consecutively by some distinguishing characteristic—say, race.  Then the workshop leader would say a few words, and we’d all be part of the whole again… only to be divided by gender, or rank in the professoriate, or institutional affiliation (R-1s over here, private liberal arts colleges over there, non-flagship state universities in that corner, community colleges way in the back…).  What we found was that whenever we were in the privileged group, we just stood there, awkwardly; when we were in a marginalized group, we chatted freely, even with people we’d never seen before.  There’s a lesson there.

The country is being pulled apart by factionalism.  The left and the right accuse each other of authoritarian tactics.  They’re both right on that score, which is about the only thing either is right about consistently.  And neither major political party has exactly bestowed its leadership roles on people of great insight or integrity.  The country is more divided than at any time since the time of Curmie’s youth and early adulthood: the days of race riots, “women’s liberation,” the Vietnam War, and Watergate.  We live, in the words of that supposedly Chinese curse, in interesting times.

There is plenty of reason for despair.  But for all his outward cynicism, Curmie is something of an idealist.  His describes this blog on his Facebook page as “a political blog for cynics and other romantics.”  So it is that he was particularly struck by a phrase in a 4^th of July musing by the redoubtable Ken White of Popehat: “an America that was more of the sum of its wrongs.”  What a felicitous description!

The ”more perfect union” envisioned by the Founding Fathers is a journey, not a destination.  There will be detours along the way.  Roadblocks may force us to double back from time to time to find the road that will ultimately lead us in the direction of our goals.  Some remarkably stupid utterances will no doubt emanate from our left and our right; we must not allow ourselves to be distracted, to get caught up in minutia rather than continuing our quest.

Our nation is comprised of people.  That makes us fallible on a good day, self-destructive on a bad one.  Independence Day may seem little more than a day off from work, a chance to eat some burgers, drink some beer, and watch some fireworks.  But there is something ennobling about it nonetheless.  For a few moments every year, we’re together as denizens of the same flawed but miraculous assemblage of disparate races, religions, socio-economic classes, and political views.  We are reminded, briefly but materially, that we not defined by our politicians or our differences.  Today, we don’t cease to Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, or any of the other labels that divide us.  But we do, ephemerally at least, put those taxonomies to the side and become Americans above all else.

Curmie isn’t naïve enough to think we’re all going to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya” (or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” for that matter) together.  We’re going to fight and scrap and call each other names.  We’ll punch each other in the nose (metaphorically, I hope).  But at the end of the day, perhaps… just perhaps… we’ll celebrate what we have and who we are, without losing sight of what we wish we might be. 

‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. 

Another Case from Yale, This One with a Twist

I had a post about half-written, talking about the fact that SCOTUS justices are nominated and confirmed (or not) primarily for their adherence to certain political principles rather than for their integrity, judgment, legal expertise, or temperament. 

‘Twas not ever thus. In my lifetime, five SCOTUS Justices were confirmed by a voice vote and three others received all 100% of the votes. Another seven received at least 80% of the votes. But of the current members of SCOTUS, only Chief Justice Roberts received majority support from Senators of both parties… and that was by a single vote. Justice Thomas, who’s been around the longest, is the only currently-serving member of the Supreme Court to have been confirmed by a Senate controlled by the party not in the White House at the time. 

This, I was about to argue, makes the process depressingly predictable: liberals over here, conservatives over there, with Roberts as the closest thing to an unreliable vote for “his side.” I was getting around to talking about the allegations against Justice Alito: did he really do something wrong, or is furor mostly partisan in nature? Answer to both questions: yes. 

But then, despite the predictable split in the two Affirmative Action cases, the student loan forgiveness case, etc., we also see Gorsuch writing a scathing dissent on Arizona v. Navajo Nation and Barrett and Kavanaugh voting with the liberal bloc on Moore v. Harper.  Plus, Jack Marshall already said pretty much what I would have said about the Alito case. I may want to return to the general outline of my half-written essay at some point in the future… but the timing isn’t right, now. 

So let me go off in a different direction and talk about a faculty member dismissed from an elite university for her political statements. The headline on the FIRE article begins “Yale shreds faculty rights to rid itself of professor…” Certainly we’ve seen a fair amount of that kind of fare, mostly from left-leaning administrations seeking to silence opposing views. What’s different is what follows in that title: “…who called Trump mentally unstable.” Well, that sure goes against the whole “universities are cesspools of Woke indoctrination” mantra, doesn’t it? 

The case involves the firing—wait, no, Yale wants to be sure it’s called a “non-renewal”—of Dr. Bandy Lee, a voluntary assistant clinical psychiatry professor, for a series of statements to the House Judiciary Committee and subsequent tweets calling then-President Trump “mentally unstable” and his supporters suffering from a “shared psychosis.” 

A federal court upheld Yale’s claim that its oft-repeated purported adherence to the “Chicago Principles” wasn’t… you know… a statement of policy, much less “a set of contractual promises.” In other words, Yale believes unequivocally in freedom of expression, except when it might be inconvenient to do so. 

And, of course, they’re equal opportunity censorious asshats (H/t to Ken White, as per tradition, for the phrase), having earned FIRE’s Lifetime Censorship Award in 2022 for a variety of restrictions on free expression, most of which stemmed from a commitment to the squishy ethical values associated with Woke authoritarianism. It turns out that Yale’s self-image as Guardians of Conformity is non-partisan… or whimsical… or that the med school is run by different censorious asshats than the undergrad and law schools… or whatever. 

The court also found that Lee was not entitled to Connecticut’s statutory protection for employees against employer discipline or discharge for 1st Amendment protected activity because, being unpaid, she was not really an employee, despite their acknowledging that Lee received office space, access to library and laboratory facilities, technology, and other forms of “indirect remuneration.” 

OK. So. Yale is hypocritical in all this, and so far, at least, the courts have allowed them to be so. Fine. But there are some nuances here that make the ethical considerations a little more complicated. 

Had I been the one to say what she said in early 2020, I would have been protected not merely by the 1st Amendment, but also by academic freedom, since I was a tenured professor. It has been argued that the original intention of tenure was to allow faculty to speak and publish controversial opinions within their area of expertise (e.g., my argument that few of the “groundlings” in Shakespeare’s theatre were really from the working class). 

This is true, but it is now accepted as the norm that tenured faculty are free to express their ideas about a wide variety of issues, including the policies of their university’s administration, and, indeed, politics. But academic freedom only fully kicks in with tenure, and Lee’s position at Yale was a couple steps down the ladder from anything resembling full protection. 

Or, rather, it would have been, except that Yale so exuberantly touts its commitment to academic freedom in a way that does indeed suggest that all members of the Yale community are entitled to these protections, even though the university now argues the contrary in court. 

More centrally, I am not a psychiatrist, and don’t claim to be. If I, or indeed any of the vast majority of the people who read this blog, called President Trump (or his successor) mentally unstable, it would be regarded as essentially a figure of speech, filtered through the speaker’s own biases and political predilections. We might mean exactly what we said, but no one would think it was other than a personal opinion. 

If, hypothetically, I say “Anyone who believes in Trump’s innocence is insane,” there will be a variety of (perhaps unspoken) responses. Most would be a variation on “What Curmie really means is that he believes firmly in Trump’s guilt on this particular issue; he’s simply over-stating the case. It’s clear that his statement shouldn’t be taken literally.” Other responses would be metaphorical applause or brickbats, depending on the perspective of the reader. What that reaction would not be is a belief that I have psychoanalyzed Trump’s defenders and rendered a professional judgment. 

Dr. Lee lacks that escape path, especially when her twitter profile highlights her advanced degrees, and she certainly suggests that her opinion ought to carry more weight than other people’s because she’s a psychiatrist. There’s a real ethical question about whether she should be using professional terminology to describe, publicly, people she has never even met. There’s something called the Goldwater rule, which may or may not be a rule, per se, may or may not still be effect, etc. The idea is that no one in the profession should make public diagnoses of public figures they have not personally examined. 

I won’t claim to be an authority on the ethics standards of the psychiatric community—Lee says she adhered to existing policy; others, including several on that Twitter chain linked above, would argue that point. I’m not taking a side in that dispute except to describe her actions as probably well-meaning (the good of the nation) but definitely partisan and provocative. 

Is that enough to get fired? Under normal circumstances, probably not. But there was no little furor about her tweets, and it’s not entirely unreasonable to think that the Yale administration decided that keeping an unpaid faculty member around wasn’t worth the controversy. 

Curiously, I can find nothing to suggest that was Yale’s thinking. I find no mention of “unprofessional conduct,” for example. Rather, they seem to have relied on arguing that the promises they made and continue to make to faculty and students are so much puffery, and none of us should expect them to keep their word. 

 “O brave new world / That has such people in’t!” I’m more with Huxley than with Shakespeare’s Miranda on this one.

Like my earlier essay on Socialists as the defenders of free expression, this piece was written for a recurring column (for want of a better term), Curmie’s Conjectures, on the Ethics Alarms blog.  It has been edited slightly here, but the argument is unchanged.  Curmie reminds you, Gentle Reader, that there is far more likely to be discussion there than here.  So go there... or don’t.  Your call.