The controversy over a professor’s tweet calling Barbara Bush a racist, explained

The conservative reaction to professor Randa Jarrar’s tweets says a lot about the campus free speech debate.

After former first lady Barbara Bush died on April 17, some praised her political skill or her outspoken nature.

But Randa Jarrar, an English professor at California State University Fresno, was unimpressed with the accolades.

“Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal,” Jarrar tweeted (her account is now private). “Fuck outta here with your nice words.”

The tweet, and Jarrar’s subsequent criticisms of Bush and her family, ignited a flurry of criticism, with the New York Post calling Jarrar “cowardly” and a “looney leftist.” The president of Fresno State hinted at disciplinary action, saying on April 18 that “a professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish.” On April 24, the president announced that although Jarrar’s tweets were “an embarrassment to the university,” she would not be disciplined.

Jarrar is an academic and writer who has never shied away from politically controversial topics. (I once edited a piece she wrote for Salon on belly dancing and cultural appropriation.) But the fury over her tweets is an example of a much larger debate about speech on college campuses. Conservatives have increasingly criticized liberal students for protesting speakers with whom they disagree, accusing them of taking “political correctness” to the extreme and threatening the First Amendment. Progressive students and others argue in response that protest is also a form of free speech, and that in any case, the First Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to give a speech on a college campus.

In this case, though, the roles are reversed. Conservatives are calling on the administration to fire the professor because of something she said. Progressives, meanwhile, say that there’s nothing untrue about what Jarrar said. Bush, despite the warm tone of many of her obituaries, was known during life not just for her “sharp” tongue but also for disturbing remarks, as when she said being trapped in the Houston Astrodome was “working very well” for victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Jarrar took issue with Bush’s comments about Anita Hill

After Barbara Bush’s death at the age of 92, some obituaries mentioned her opposition to segregation or her pro-choice views. But Bush had also drawn criticism for some of her comments long before Jarrar tweeted about her. In 2005, she implied that the 25,000 people evacuated from New Orleans to the Houston Astrodome due to Hurricane Katrina — many of them poor and black — were actually better off after being forced from their homes. “So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway,” she said in a radio interview at the time, “so this is working very well for them.”

Bush also wrote in her 1994 memoir that Clarence Thomas was “a good man” who had been “smeared” by reports that he sexually harassed Anita Hill. “Is this woman telling the truth?” Bush wrote. “I do not mean to sit in judgment, but I will never believe that she, a Yale Law School graduate, a woman of the 80s, would put up with harassment for one moment, much less follow the harasser from job to job, call him when she came back to town and later invite him to speak to her students at Oral Roberts University.”

“It also makes no sense to me that this was all publicly aired on television,” she added.

Jarrar, who has not yet responded to Vox’s request for comment, referenced this history in a follow-up tweet, linking to NewsOne coverage of Bush’s comments on Hill and writing, “What this woman did and said to and about Black women is unforgivable.”

Jarrar also tweeted, “I’m happy the witch is dead. can’t wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis have,” and, in response to criticism, posted the phone number of a suicide hotline, apparently portraying it as her own, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Critics responded with insults and calls for her firing

Within days, Jarrar had received multiple death threats in response to her comments, she tweeted. Bob Fredericks of the New York Post picked up the story, writing that “the would-be egghead’s hateful tweets took the internet by storm” and that “the looney leftist remained defiant, gloating that she was untouchable because she had tenure, which in most cases provides college professors with lifetime job security regardless of their idiotic behavior.”

A local TV station interviewed Jarrar’s ex-husband, who said he was disgusted by her tweets and accused her of lying about him in the past; Jarrar has written that he was abusive. Meanwhile, alumni and others tweeted criticism of Jarrar at Fresno State’s accounts, and some have called for her to be fired.

“We share the deep concerns expressed by others over the personal comments made today by Professor Randa Jarrar,” university president Joseph Castro said in a statement on April 17. “Her statements were made as a private citizen, not as a representative of Fresno State.”

In an interview with the Fresno Bee, Castro added that the university was reviewing the case as well as its collective bargaining agreement with faculty. “We are all held accountable for our actions,” he said.

“This was beyond free speech,” Castro said of Jarrar’s tweets. “This was disrespectful.”

A spokesperson for Fresno State told Vox in an email that “the University is treating the matter seriously by reviewing it within University policies and agreements.” She added that since it is a personnel matter, the university “cannot comment on the status of the review nor its outcome.”

On April 24, Castro announced that the university would not discipline Jarrar for her tweets. “Professor Jarrar’s conduct was insensitive, inappropriate and an embarrassment to the university,” he said in a statement. However, “we have concluded that Professor Jarrar did not violate any CSU or university policies and that she was acting in a private capacity and speaking about a public matter on her personal Twitter account. Her comments, although disgraceful, are protected free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.”

The reaction to Jarrar’s tweets is part of a bigger debate about speech on college campuses

The controversy over Jarrar’s tweets comes at a time of larger debates around speech on college campuses, though these have typically taken a different form. Conservative New York Times columnists Bret Stephens and David Brooks, among others, have written with disapproval when college students protest comments by professors or appearances by conservative speakers.

In October, Stephens wrote that today, “professors live in fear of accidentally offending their own students and a governor needs to declare a countywide state of emergency so that white supremacist Richard Spencer can speak at the University of Florida.” But, he wrote, “free speech is what makes educational excellence possible.”

“If you can’t speak freely, you’ll quickly lose the ability to think clearly,” he added. “You will be unable to test an original thought for fear that it might be labeled an offensive one. You will succumb to a form of Orwellian double-think without even having the excuse of living in physical terror of doing otherwise.”

Brooks, meanwhile, wrote in March that “students across the country continue to attack and shut down speakers at a steady pace, from Christina Hoff Sommers to Jordan Peterson.”

“My gut reaction is that these student mobbists manage to combine snowflake fragility and lynch mob irrationalism into one perfectly poisonous cocktail,” he said.

Jarrar, meanwhile, got criticism, not defense, from some conservative writers. At the right-wing site the Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra wrote that Castro’s statement signaled that “the university is not going to take a hard stand over the hateful remarks from this professor who mocked the death of an American icon and rejoiced in the suffering of her family.”

Jarrar has some defenders in libertarian circles — Robby Soave at Reason wrote that “students, other professors, and the broader Twitter community should feel free to vocalize their disapproval of her comments, but Jarrar shouldn’t lose her job or be formally sanctioned by Fresno officials.” After this story first ran, I also saw some conservatives defending Jarrar on free speech grounds.

But at least initially, some on the right reacted to her speech with the kinds of outrage and calls for removal conservatives traditionally criticize. On April 17, Jarrar tweeted, “who’s the snowflake now?”

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