On his usually excellent blog, Prof. Jonathan Turley tells readers about Derek Lopez, a teacher’s assistant and graduate student at Illinois State University. This jerk—-signature significance!—was caught on video attacking a Turning Point USA table on his campus and verbally abusing the conservative students manning it. The 27-year-old Lopez says to the students as he overturns their table, “Well, you know, Jesus did it, so you know I gotta do it, right? Thanks, guys, have a great day!” Then he tears down a TPUSA flyer on a nearby bulletin board.
He was later arrested. Will he be fired? He should be, but don’t bet on it. He is a part of a dangerous ideological movement in this country that believes that violence and the abuse of political adversaries is justified as the “means necessary” to remake America. He is not an aberration.
Ethics Observations:
1. This is an increasingly common and ominous development as the Left has turned to the Dark Side. There used to be occasional professors and teaching assistants who crossed this obvious line decades ago when campus activism was becoming the norm, but not many, and they were quickly cut out of the metaphorical herd. Lopez is one more symptom of the bias and ethics rot that has eaten away at the center of the U.S. educational institutions.
2. The fact that TPUSA is viewed with such fear and loathing by the Left is an indication of how important Charley Kirk’s counter movement is. The ethical, democratic way for progressives to respond to the challenge would be to reexamine their own conduct and choice of leaders and perform a “fearless inventory.” Instead, they have defaulted to hate and violence.
3. “Jesus did it” is an example of Rationalization #32. The Unethical Role Model: “He/She would have done the same thing”: “This is a fantasy rationalization, and therefore a wonderfully versatile one. Just pick the great, famous and admired man or woman who you think would be most likely to engage in the wrongful conduct you are considering, and you will immediately feel good about it. If you are doing no worse than Churchill, of Gandhi, or Lincoln, or Martin Luther King or Princess Diana, after all, how bad can you be? This is a clever rationalization, but a transparent one. Andrew Jackson was a racist and a killer, but he isn’t admired for being a racist and a killer. FDR was vindictive and ruthless, but those aren’t the qualities that made him a great President. Lincoln, Jefferson, Oprah—it’s easy to cherry-pick flaws among the great and famous, but absurd to use those aspects of their personalities as objects of emulation. It is true: Clarence Darrow would have bribed a jury (and did); Arthur Miller would have neglected a disabled son; Jackie Kennedy would have lived a lie. The fact that we can find someone objectively remarkable who engaged in just about any crime or unethical act we can imagine merely proves that even the best of us fail to negotiate the challenges of life perfectly. It isn’t an excuse to stop trying to do the best we can in our own lives.”
I will add that using Jesus for this purpose is particularly odious.
4. Conservative professors and academics do no behave this way. I can’t think of a single example. Why? Well, a) because their side of the ideological divide has not gone completely bonkers; 2) conservatives do not generally include violence in their tool box, whereas it is a standard issue leftist implement, and 3) few conservative faculty members work at most universities, and those who do would never feel comfortable trying the equivalent of Lopez’s outburst unless they have a death wish or are determined to leave academia.
Turley gives us a neat overview of the trend:
For years, conservative values on campus have been viewed as virtually sacrilegious in a culture of increasing academic orthodoxy. … We have seen faculty engage in such violence and property destruction for years, particularly targeting TPUSA and other conservative groups.
… University of Missouri communications professor Melissa Click, …directed a mob against a student journalist covering a Black Lives Matter event. Yet, Click was hired by Gonzaga University. Since that time, we have seen a steady stream of professors joining students in shouting down, committing property damage, participating in riots, verbally attacking students, or even taking violent action in protests. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, professors actually rallied around feminist studies associate professor Mireille Miller-Young, who physically assaulted pro-life advocates and tore down their display. Despite pleading guilty to criminal assault, she was not fired and received overwhelming support from the students and faculty. She was later honored as a model for women advocates. At Hunter College in New York, Professor Shellyne Rodríguez was shown trashing a pro-life display of students. She was captured on a videotape telling the students that “you’re not educating s–t […] This is fucking propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bullshitt. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”……In an Instagram post, she is then shown trashing the table. Hunter College, however, did not consider this unhinged attack to be sufficient to terminate Rodríguez. It was only after she later chased reporters with a machete that the college fired Rodríguez. Another college then hired her.
Another example comes from the State University of New York at Albany, where sociology professor Renee Overdyke shut down a pro-life display and then resisted arrest. One student is heard screaming, “She’s a [expletive] professor.” That, of course, is the point. In Wisconsin, a department chair was shown destroying a table of conservative students.”
Turley goes on, “Once again, what is most striking about these individuals is the sense of license to engage in such violence conduct. Higher education has long created a sense of orthodoxy and intolerance on campuses.”
I think this is a case where Burt’s quandary above (Clip #13 in the Ethics Alarms clip archive) can easily be resolved. It’s clear, or should be, who the “bad guys” are.
Ethics Alarms 
This is the source of the rationalization orgy reported by NotTheBee.
I wasn’t listening very closely to the story about the group chat participants, but I believe they had been ejected or somehow sanctioned for their speech.
It’s a natural cognitive dissonance scale effect. After repeatedly observing violent conduct go without consequences, unethical speech slides upward.
It’s a great column. I agree that there is to my knowledge no comparable violence on the right on college campuses by faculty. I disagree that there is a systemic effort to exclude conservative voices from higher education. I coauthored a book in 2008, Closed Minds? about ideology and politics in higher education. We conducted a nationwide random sample survey of professors. We confirmed that profs are even more liberal than they were 20 years ago, and they’ve been on the left as an occupation since the first scientific polls of faculty in the 1930s. BUT–the causes of the initial and the intensifying tilt are not a conspiracy, or at least, Occam’s Razor would suggest several other better ones. First, folks who are on the right are often believers in markets. Folks who believe in markets are often motivated by them. Academia has a very low ceiling for money. The big money on campus is in administration and in sports. Some superstar profs (usually in hard sciences, but sometimes business or econ or every now and then something else) gets north of 180K, but it’s rare. And there’s many tens of thousands scrapping by as adjuncts, who would risk that? It’s far more likely you end up teaching 8 adjunct courses a year for less than 50K with no benefits than that you get tenure at a high paid place and clear 170K at the end of your career. My friends who went into business, law, medicine…all make significantly more than me. Second–most profs are at public universities. In 1950, both Ds and Rs were for spending on higher ed. Today…in most states…if an R wins the governorship, profs get no raises for a while. We are not shocked when oil and gas executives vote GOP because that makes them richer. Professors are not saints. We like money, too. Finally, and perhaps most importantly–campuses are places where the gay rights debate was over by about 1988. The rest of the nation was still having huge arguments about this in 2010. Similar thing happened in the 1950s with race–profs got their first on racial equality, on average. The GOP doubled down on anti-gay in elections like 2004, and also allowed figures who believe stuff like young earth creationism and the divine right of men to lead, to speak at their conventions. This was smart politically, because there are many more believers in creationism than there are college professors, but when you take those positions….you lose support on campuses. Final reason–the few campuses that are conservative (like GMU’s law school, Hillsdale, Catholic U, etc) sometimes explicitly refuse to hire liberals, and thus the very small number of conservative profs become even rarer on regular campuses. This is worse for the liberal students than it is for the conservative, because part of college should be having your core beliefs challenged. Liberals don’t get that enough. They might graduate never taking a course with someone more conservative than they are….whereas as a conservative student, you’re going to graduate constantly having your ideas tested. I was a young Republican at a VERY liberal school, and almost never heard a conservative thought in my classes, and really appreciated the profs who gave conservatism a fair shot.
That’s a fantastic analysis, Jerry. One question for you: what do you make of the general drive to push everyone through colleges and universities?
One of the things that resonates most for me from my years at the University of Wyoming is how many people went there without any idea of what they were doing, and either flunked out and then carried thousands of dollars in debt, or graduated with a degree and then were dismayed that just having a degree did not land them jobs as they expected. Many of these people would have been better served by attending trade school or directly entering the work force, and instead they wasted years and accumulated debt that they were ill-prepared to pay off. And this, mind you, is one of the cheapest state universities in the nation, even counting out-of-state tuition. (No, this isn’t a plug for people to attend UW (Go Pokes!), but they do have a good College of Engineering that’s worth looking into…)
Anyway, from what you’ve seen, is the general push for everyone to attend college real, or is that a distortion? And if it is real, do you think that’s been overall helpful or detrimental?
I don’t know enough to really answer your question well, but I know enough to know it is the right question. And AI may be making it an even better question, in two key ways. Many jobs currently done by college graduates are going to be done by AI. Also, AI University is coming. Imagine me being replaced by an AI prof, who knows MORE than I do about many things, is never impatient, never late with grading, much better looking ( at least online–you’ll be able to select the looks, voice, accent of all your professors, just as some do now with AI porn)…and in the aggregate, AI University doesn’t have to be better than the typical University, it just has to be acceptable, because it will cost 1/100th? 1/20th? of what colleges cost now.
As for your original excellent question–yes, I suspect the education establishment created a largely liberal establishment consensus that EVERYONE should go to college. Which is bananas. It also contributed to the impression among many people who didn’t go to college that the Democrats looked down on them and their choices. Not only did I know a lot of people who wasted a lot of money on college, I knew people who went to law school for no other reason than…they didn’t know what to do, and they were good arguers. I like parts of the German system, where you can get an apprenticeship that leads to manufacturing or some other sector, without shame. The DOWNSIDE of that system, though, is high stakes testing early in life that almost eternally determines your chances. They don’t make much allowance for late bloomers. Higher ed is mostly free…but scarce and admittance (to grad school in particular) is conditional on years of doing great work. But again–this is not my area, so don’t take anything I say as definitive.
Excellent. Comment of the Day.
If I could add my 20 years of community college experience working first as support personnel and adjunct faculty then in what was termed a professional/technical management role. The idea of someone teaching 8 courses as an adjunct courses per year was unheard of because the Maryland Higher Education Commission and Middle States Accreditation would not allow it. I had to get special dispensation to teach 3 sections of Economics one semester when the lead professor was on sabbatical in Slovenia. The f/t load of a professor (associate to full) is 5 (3) credit sections, 3 office hours per section and some committee assignment in which you just meet now and then. For those on tenure track they have to pack their resume’ with community service activities which of course typically is centered on human services. The level of commitment or contribution to any of these activities is rarely assessed by an independent auditor. More often than not the outside activities consist of attending meetings and showing the college flag.
I might be inclined to agree that there is no conspiracy to pack the house with liberal faculty but search committees tended to put a higher value on those candidates who were aligned with progressive organizations and their own political ideologies. you had to possess the qualities they favored or you could not get passed these gate keepers. Even in conservative Western Maryland the faculty were by and large somewhere just left of center. Conservative thought was not dismissed in the Business division but my experience with other divisions suggested that not offering a conservative opinion helped maintain relationships. If you did offer one the faculty would be dismissive and if you pushed the idea they would unwilling to lend you any assistance in future projects
I do agree that professors like anyone else like money and they would constantly tell anyone who would listen that they could make more in the private sector. When I would point out that there is substantial non-monetary compensation that if that factored in would probably equilibrate the compensation packages I would invariably hear that you cannot compare the differences. If that were not the case, they would not be rational actors. The question is how many hours are faculty willing to put in to make 6 plus figure salaries that are described above. Based on my experience very few. There are very few professions that pay six figures where you are not on call almost 24/7 to respond to a client’s needs. Even government actors who get paid such high salaries need to be available at a moment’s notice.
excellent points. There’s a good book about the Winner Take All Economy from more than a decade ago showing that the rising levels of inequality in almost every profession have produced a world in which, to get to the top 10% of almost any profession, you end up with insane work hours and response expectations. This is almost unique to the US (somewhat UK), and partially explains our rising inequality. As for tenure–one of the things I discovered in my research was that it was originally needed to protect left wing professors from corporate university donors. They would literally go in to the president and say “fire that guy! He’s helping my workers unionize!” and the prof would be gone. But today, it seldom serves that function, and rather protects a lot of deadwood. Indeed, an argument could be made that it is insufficiently strong on speech and freedom of inquiry and way way way too strong on protecting folks who aren’t doing research, teach poorly, and contribute very little.
Oh, and –AI University will also be free of most forms of prejudice, ideological bias, unless that’s what you want. “Please give me a moderate conservative approach to economics, a social conservative approach in my philosophy course, and a Marxist sociologist!” Finally–they will be so good at diagnosing precisely what you aren’t understanding, just like Khan Academy does, and give you targeted feedback that is immediately useful. It’s amazing. They’ll say–“you missed this aspect of multivariate regression, watch the 5 minute lecture at 3:30-4:30 to understand beta weights” It’s very similar to the difference between a cancer treatment aimed at your precise genetic profile, and one that is just–oh, this chemo poison sometimes kills the cancer before it kills the patient.