One thing that the left is adamant about is that everyone must stick to its narrative or be destroyed.
That was discovered again this week when a professor at Michigan State University, Stephen Hsu, had to resign as vice president of research and innovation for stepping out of line and going against the “evil police” narrative, The College Fix reported.
Hsu conducted research years ago in which he discovered that the narrative of police routinely hunting and killing black men was unfounded. He performed another study highlighting the differences in race.
A group called the Graduate Employees Union combed through years of his blog posts and then launched a campaign against him to get him fired.
On June 10, GEU used a #ShutDownStem day, which is linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, to demand his ouster.
“Today for #ShutDownAcademia #ShutDownSTEM, the GEU and its coalition partners in the STEM community are calling for the removal of Stephen Hsu as VP of Research and Graduate Studies at [Michigan State University],” it said in a tweet.
“The person responsible for directing MSU research funding is a vocal scientific racist and eugenicist. This is shameful, and it is actively harmful to our research community. #FireStephenHsu,” it said in a lengthy thread.
Today for #ShutDownAcademia #ShutDownSTEM, the GEU and its coalition partners in the STEM community are calling for the removal of Stephen Hsu as VP of Research and Graduate Studies at @michiganstateu.
— Michigan State GEU (@GradEmpUnion) June 10, 2020
The person responsible for directing MSU research funding is a vocal scientific racist and eugenicist. This is shameful, and it is actively harmful to our research community. #FireStephenHsu
— Michigan State GEU (@GradEmpUnion) June 10, 2020
But the union’s idea of racism is Hsu showing that the race of a police officer has no effect on whether that officer shoots a perpetrator or not.
“We found that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot,” Hsu said in the piece.
“The victory of the Twitter mob will likely have a chilling effect on academic freedom on campus,” Hsu said in an email to The College Fix.
“The GEU alleged that I am a racist because I interviewed MSU Psychology professor Joe Cesario, who studies police shootings,” Hsu said. “But Cesario’s work (along with similar work by others, such as Roland Fryer at Harvard) is essential to understanding deadly force and how to improve policing.”
Hsu was forced to resign as VP but allowed to stay on as a physics professor.
A counter-petition to Hsu’s firing said that having the professor resign would “set a dangerous precedent.”
“To remove Hsu for holding controversial views, or for inquiring about controversial topics, or for simply talking to controversial personalities … would also set a dangerous precedent, inconsistent with the fundamental principles of modern enlightened higher education,” it said.
GEU, of course, had a different stance in its email to The College Fix.
“Once we started the dialogue, dozens of people approached us with personal stories of their own attempts to speak out and their own experiences with Hsu, and hundreds signed on calling for his removal,” GEU Vice President Acacia Ackles said.
But this is not what academia is supposed to be. Higher education is designed to be an exchange of ideas where students and teachers express their opinions as they learn and grow.
Sadly, there is no room for learning and growing in today’s leftist culture. The new intellectual brownshirts insist that you conform or be destroyed.
As monuments and statues topple across the nation and those who step out of line lose their jobs, we face a crossroads.
Are we going to go the route of book burning and speech police or do we take a stand and end this nonsense?
In many ways that will be decided at the ballot box this November.
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