Jackass professor alert, revisited
Back in April, I noted an incident involving a sociology professor at UC-Santa Barbara behaving like a jackass. He sent out a big email full of pictures to his students comparing Israelis to Nazis. Students complained, and the complaint struck me as serious, if true. The charges officer at the university sent Robinson a summary of the complaint:
You, as professor of an academic course, sent to each student enrolled in that course a highly partisan email accompanied by lurid photographs. The e-mail was unexpected and without educational context. You offered no explanation of how the material related to the content of the course. You offered no avenue to discuss, nor encouraged any response, to the opinions and photographs included in the e-mail. You directly told a student who inquired that the e-mail was not connected to the course. As a result, two enrolled students were too distraught to continue with the course. The constellation of allegations listed above, if substantially true, may violate the Faculty Code of Conduct.
Inside Higher Ed reports that a faculty committee has cleared Robinson of the charge. I am inclined to agree with David Bernstein of George Mason University (and the Volokh Conspiracy) and Greg Lukianoff of F.I.R.E. that this is the best outcome. There remains two serious problems. First, it is pretty clear that Robinson is passing off deranged, bigoted, left-wing rants as scholarship, and that the sociology department which hired him and tenured him considers that acceptable. Second, Robinson is still peddling, along with millions of other bigots, an anti-Semitic lie. Inside Higher Ed says:
[Robinson] noted that he is Jewish and said that he abhors anti-Semitism, and that his academic freedom is being violated by the university taking seriously charges that link his e-mail criticisms of Israel’s government with anti-Semitism. “This is all because I have criticized the policies of the State of Israel.
Robinson is trying to use being a Jew (which likely means nothing more than his mother was Jewish) as insulation against the charge of being an anti-Semite. Take that seriously for a moment. The British National Party (the BNP) is an openly racist party, and is big into Holocaust denial. Nick Griffin, BNP head, is an open Holocaust denier. Marlene Guest, one of their recent European Parliament candidates, made the same claim, although she also seemed to think that Holocaust, in spite of not happening, gave us all improved dentistry and plastic surgery. But is the BNP anti-semitic? Of course not. How do we know? Because one of its members, elected as local councillor in Essex, is Jewish, as in her parents are Jewish. Well, that settles it.
Says something interesting. Two rabid Jews haters, one a left-wing sociology professor and the other the BNP, use the same line to lie about their bigotry.