citizen on matters of public concern, which is precisely what I have done.”
Samantha Harris, Hughes’s lawyer, said that “like faculty around the country who express views that are out of step with the prevailing orthodoxy on campus, Professor Hughes has become the target of an online pressure campaign.” This involves an effort to get students to file complaints about her with the university and “take her down,” Harris explained, quoting one Twitter user.
It looks like Hughes – armed with a lawyer – is not taking this lying down.
Via email, Hughes said it’s “just sad that we have reached a point in society where difficult issues cannot be freely and openly discussed without resort to personal attacks and calls for censorship.”
The marketplace of ideas, she added, “has broken down and increasingly, university faculty are terrified to speak out on a wide range of important issues for fear that — as seems to be happening here — they will draw criticism from their students and their institution will throw them under the bus.”
Hughes is a founding member of the Academic Freedom Alliance, which launched recently to defend professors’ academic freedom from attacks from the political left and right. Her case, she said, demonstrators “precisely why the AFA was founded and is so necessary.”
Harris, Hughes’s lawyer, said that URI is “obviously within its rights to criticize” Hughes’s views, but that the university’s statement seems to imply that the article may not be protected by the First Amendment “because she somehow failed to show appropriate restraint in the expression of her opinion. This simply is not the case.”
Leave a Reply