A lawfare payday because there’s a market for speech rights when you disrespect your students.
The reality for students is that staying in a hostile class environment does imply that it’s time to drop the course and do the doxxing and shitposting that Rate My Professor provides.
Harry Frankfurt is proven correct about bullshitting when a professor insists on their right to bullshit in bad faith, especially when teaching. Another enterprise transformed into a griftable moment, gaming the “liberal” in liberal education, negating teachable moments because, something, something ontological, perhaps for a judge with religious convictions(sic).
The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what he is up to.1
1 (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 54)
In consideration of this, Frankfurt’s explanation of bullshit can be summarised by four essential features:
The bullshitter is indifferent toward whether what she says is true or false.
The bullshitter is indifferent toward her audience’s beliefs.
The bullshitter intends to deceive her audience into thinking that she is not bullshitting.
Bullshitting and lying are incompatible.1
1 (Stokke, Bullshitting, 2018, p. 4.)
Would the discourse in that classroom have been similarly non-hostile had the student(s) assumed that the professor could be gender fluid and similarly be openly referred to as “she” and “her” on the same grounds of personal “religious convictions and philosophical beliefs.” under university codes of conduct. Students get speech rights as well.
Darn that separation of church and state in a democracy and some folks’ desire to become a footnote to history. The mistake in this case was likely the censure by the institution, playing into the mercenary age of trumpist lawfare.
A public university professor in Ohio has been awarded $400,000 after he was disciplined four years ago for not using a transgender student’s preferred pronouns.
Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in southern Ohio, sued the school in 2018, arguing the disciplinary action brought against him for refusing to use a student's preferred titles and pronouns violated his free speech rights.
According to a news release from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a legal organization focused on religious freedom and free speech cases, forcing Meriwether to call the student by she/her pronouns went against the professor’s “religious convictions and philosophical beliefs.”
The case began in 2018 after Meriwether addressed a transgender student as “sir.”
When the class ended, the student asked Meriwether to use she/her pronouns when being addressed, but Meriwether refused to do so.
According to the ADF, Meriwether offered to use any name the student requested, but the student became “belligerent” and “promised to get Meriwether fired.”
The university launched an investigation into the incident and found Meriwether had created a “hostile environment” in the classroom.
He was delivered a written warning stating he could be fired or suspended without pay for violating the university’s nondiscrimination policy.
Meriwether sued the university, which was initially dismissed by a federal district court due to lack of standing, but later appealed and reversed.
In March 2021, the 6th Circuit Court ruled in Meriwether’s favor, noting that if “professors lacked free speech protections when teaching, a university would wield alarming power to compel ideological conformity.”
It added: “A university president could require a pacifist to declare that war is just, a civil rights icon to condemn the Freedom Riders, a believer to deny the existence of God, or a Soviet émigré to address his students as ‘comrades.’ That cannot be.”
