Doors with slippery slopes in Academia

posted at 9:56 am on April 10, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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Lake Superior State University sounds like a placid and unassuming corner of Academia, but it soon could find itself at the center of a Constitutional brawl. The university demanded that one of its professors remove political cartoons from his door as they created a “hostile environment”. However, as Professor Richard Crandall pointed out, other cartoons remained on other doors — and the hostility appeared to be directed at Crandall’s particular point of view:

Getting one’s own office can be a rite of passage right up there with defending a dissertation or receiving tenure — and many professors’ lairs are reflections of their own attitudes and beliefs. Usually, it takes just a quick glance at the door, as anyone who’s taken a stroll down the hall of an academic building can attest: What a professor finds amusing, outrageous or just plain interesting is there for all to see.

At a public university, such common displays of individual preference would presumably fall under the protections of the First Amendment. But not when such displays are offensive to others, according to officials at Lake Superior State University, which threatened to reprimand a tenured professor whose door boasted cartoons and other images of a conservative political bent. In a March 26 letter to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which had been monitoring the case and publicized it on Wednesday, an outside lawyer representing the university reiterated its argument that because the professor “acted in an unprofessional and insubordinate manner, his actions cannot be considered protected speech.”

The first complaints date back to 2005, and the professor, Richard Crandall, was ordered to remove the materials from his door in 2007 (he eventually complied). Items included a photo of Ronald Reagan, pictures mocking Hillary Clinton, a sign posting a “Notice of the Weekly Meeting of the White, Male, Heterosexual Faculty and Staff Association (WMHFSA),” and various cartoons about abortion, Islamic terrorism and other topics. One depicts two hooded women looking over a photo album. One says, “And that’s my youngest son, Hakim. He’ll be martyring in the fall.” The other replies, “They blow up so fast.”

Now, these may not be the most edifying political cartoons ever printed, and not to everyone’s taste. However, they don’t have to be, either; they reflect Crandall’s taste and positions, which is why he posted them on his door. Lake Superior says the issus is that Crandall’s speech involves “religious minorities” — Islam — but that’s also a political topic of rather significant import. Does free speech end at religion?

If the issue was hostility, then Lake Superior needs more door cleaning than just at Crandall’s office. They have not asked other professors to remove cartoons from their doors … but the other cartoons have something else in common. Among those cited by Crandall and FIRE are anti-war and anti-”Big Oil” cartoons. One of the latter depicts the Bush administration as a lackey of the oil and gas industry.

In truth, the Crandall case does involve religion — the Religion of Liberal Thought. Academia apparently cannot abide any dissent from their received Wisdom, and so must strong-arm people with whom they disagree to prevent disagreement. In this way, they can convince themselves that they exist in a strange sort of artificial political consensus that has a lot more relation to 1984 than the First Amendment.

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