C. Christine Fair, a security studies professor at Georgetown University, thinks poorly of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s white male supporters. She tweeted a photo of the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, saying, “Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: We castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes."
It’s not surprising that this vitriol came from a college professor. College campuses have been “safe spaces” to hate conservatives for a long time (bonus points if those conservatives are of the white and/or male variety). The University of Southern Maine offered a tuition-free one-credit course for students willing to travel to Washington, D.C., and ambush Sen. Susan Collins. The school promptly canceled the course when people found out that it entailed no actual instruction and that students who support Kavanaugh would not be welcome on the trip.
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Many academics oppose Kavanaugh, but Fair’s vitriol is especially shocking because she teaches at a religious school. Georgetown University is a Jesuit institution, and it accordingly teaches "cura personalis" — care of the whole person. One can hardly spend a day on that campus without hearing the Jesuit mantra. I would know; I did my undergraduate and graduate studies there. Georgetown also constantly repeats another Jesuit saying, "ad majorem dei gloriam" — for the greater glory of God. The ethical undercurrent of that school makes it a very difficult place to be a hateful person.
Not only does Fair teach at a religious school, she teaches Security Studies. Secure nations disagree without resorting to political violence. The murder and castration of elected officials, or even the threat of it, is not conducive to national security. Fair denied all morality and all logical reason to tweet what she did.
How does she explain such an outburst? Fair told the Washington Post, “I set this up for Tucker Carlson. He proved my experiment” by addressing her comments on air. What a hollow ploy for attention! Fair said, “This idea I’m somehow calling for actual violence is preposterous.” Either she’s lying now, or she was lying when she wrote “castrate their corpses and feed them to swine.”
The school responded with a statement which reads in part, “We protect the right of our community members to exercise their freedom of expression. This does not mean the University endorses the content of their expression. We can and do strongly condemn the use of violent imagery, profanity, and insensitive labeling of individuals based on gender, ethnicity or political affiliation in any form of discourse.” The statement never mentions Fair by name.
Professors should be allowed to teach, regardless of their political views. They should not be allowed to threaten people who go against those political views.
Imagine if another professor had made a comment like Fair’s about Democratic senators instead of Republican ones. The official school response may well have been the same. The students, however, would have run that professor out of town. How can I predict this? The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
On Thursday, conservative speaker Allie Stuckey found all the posters for her event at Georgetown ripped up and torn down. In late June of this year, student protesters swarmed Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao, while they departed from an event on campus. Georgetown is becoming a more difficult place to be conservative, because it is becoming a place where leftists can bully without consequence.
My alma mater is at risk of losing the vibrant debate culture that made it an elite institution. Georgetown and schools like it will sow the seeds of their own destruction by emboldening the angry Left that has no interest in debate — only bloodlust for their political enemies.
Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) writes about politics, media, ethics, and culture. She holds both a bachelor's and master's degree from Georgetown University.