MEGAN MCARDLE ON MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY’S WITCH HUNT:

The university seems not to have read through to the last line. It is trying to fire McAdams precisely because he exercised his academic and personal freedoms of thought, discourse, advocacy and action. I may not entirely approve of the way he exercised them, but that’s beside the point — no, actually, it’s exactly the point. We don’t need protections for speech that everyone approves of.

Let’s recall again what we’re talking about: a blog post. That got 53 comments. On his personal blog. Which Marquette has bundled into the same category as sleeping with your students or embezzling department funds. The letter from the university stresses that this is not the first time he has published the name of a student who he disagrees with, but “publishes the names of students he disagrees with” seems a bit of a stretch as a firing offense. Both of the previous cases cited — a student at the campus newspaper who declined to accept an ad discussing the purported risks of the “morning-after pill” and one who was organizing a campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues” — hardly seem like confidential information.

I’m on the record as thinking that tenure should be abolished. But it hasn’t been, and as long as it exists, McAdams has rights under that system, which Marquette seems to be violating. Moreover, it’s hard to believe that if the offense had been coming from the other side — if a liberal tenured professor had called out a conservative graduate student because he thought she was giving short shrift to social-justice perspectives — that professor would now be fighting for his job. It seems more likely that he’d get, well, a stern talking-to.

As the American Interest recently noted, the academy is already under fire from politicians who are beset by budget worries and convinced that America’s universities have become propaganda mills where conservative ideas are belittled and ignored. And I can’t put it any better than it did: “The future of the academy is already precarious. The least administrators could do is stop making it so easy for people to wave goodbye.” Marquette should respect McAdams’ rights because it’s the right thing to do. But failing that, they should respect his rights because it’s the best way to protect their own.

Yeah, well, too many schools seem to want to live up to the “propaganda mills” image. And if they do, they should pay the price.