A Professor Called Out a Student by Name on His Blog. Should That Cost Him His Job?

The core of McAdams v. Marquette University, a case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court that will determine the fate of a conservative professor trying to save his job, is a contractual dispute. But far more is at stake. Exactly what depends on whom you ask.

Four years ago, John McAdams, a political-science professor known to be a thorn in the Marquette administration’s side, criticized a graduate teaching assistant by name on his blog. McAdams believed the woman had silenced the views of an undergraduate opposed to gay marriage during a classroom discussion. He then sent the blog post to Campus Reform, a right-wing website that highlights perceived liberal bias in higher education.

The graduate student, Cheryl Abbate, received a slew of hateful messages, and left the university to attend the University of Colorado at Boulder. Marquette, meanwhile, suspended the professor for causing harm to a student and behaving unprofessionally, and it eventually moved to fire him. The professor’s appeal to save his job made its way to the state’s Supreme Court, which is expected to release its ruling on Friday.

The case is being watched in Wisconsin and beyond as a barometer of the limits of tenure and how to balance academic freedom with other responsibilities professors have to their university communities.

To McAdams, on the verge of permanently losing his job, the case is squarely about academic freedom and the right of tenured professors to express unpopular opinions. The primary question before the court is whether the blog is protected by the “legitimate personal or academic freedom” that McAdams says his contract with the university guarantees tenured professors.

For years, McAdams has used his blog to lampoon the university’s evolving values, which he says are becoming increasingly supportive of gay rights and losing touch with Marquette’s Catholic mission. “There is a history here,” he says. “I have in numerous instances before made trouble for Marquette by exposing things going on at the university.”

By identifying Abbate on his blog, McAdams says, he was simply naming a person accused of “misconduct.” Any responsible journalist — and McAdams steadfastly argues that his blogging activities are journalism — would have done the same. If Marquette, a private college, is able to get away with firing a professor for publishing on his blog the name of a graduate student whom he believes behaved badly, other colleges would be emboldened to erode contractually guaranteed tenure protections, McAdams says.

“The precedent will be about how easy it is for private institutions that guarantee academic freedom, and public institutions where the First Amendment automatically applies, to weasel around guarantees of academic freedom,” McAdams says. “All sorts of things that faculty might publish could be deemed irresponsible by university administration.”

That’s not how Michael R. Lovell, Marquette’s president, sees things.

‘Inherently Wrong’

When Lovell became president of the Jesuit university in 2014, he says, one of his first actions, with the help of the campus community, was to articulate the university’s “Guiding Values,” which had never been written down before. At the top of the list was to “pledge personal and holistic development of students as our primary institutional vocation.”

“No sooner did we approve that guiding set of values than the issue came up with John McAdams,” he said in an interview. “It struck me as inherently wrong, especially a faculty member treating a graduate student this way. The power differential between a tenured faculty member and graduate student is significant.”

After a class discussion about the philosopher John Rawls, the unnamed undergraduate approached Abbate, the graduate instructor, and accused her of being dismissive of opposition to gay marriage. It’s unclear what was said in class that prompted the student to raise his objections afterward. During their encounter after class, Abbate told him that, “in this class, homophobic comments, racist comments, sexist comments, will not be tolerated.”

Unbeknownst to Abbate until the end of the conversation, the undergraduate student recorded the exchange. He turned the recording over to his academic adviser, McAdams. With the student’s permission, McAdams wrote about the confrontation on his blog, The Marquette Warrior, where he gleefully tackles liberal bias in universities, so-called snowflakes, and perhaps his favorite punching bag, “SJWs” – social justice warriors.

McAdams’s post did not call for any particular action to be taken against Abbate, nor did it directly publish her contact information. But it did link to her personal blog, which contained that information, and it argued that the graduate student’s classroom stance was evidence of liberal intolerance. “Abbate, of course, was just using a tactic typical among liberals now,” McAdams wrote. “Opinions with which they disagree are not merely wrong, and are not to be argued against on their merits, but are deemed ‘offensive’ and need to be shut up.”

A university lawyer, Ralph Weber, rejects the argument that McAdams’s suspension and firing resulted from his conservative views. To Marquette, Weber says, the professor’s infraction was cut and dried: his decision to call Abbate out by name, in public. “He has more than 3,000 blog posts over more than a decade and was never disciplined for any view he had on any subject,” Weber says. “If he had written the exact same blog post and left the graduate student’s name and contact information out of it, he would not have been disciplined.”

Academic freedom, Weber says, is often misunderstood by people outside academe. It doesn’t mean professors have a right to say whatever they want. “You still have the responsibility to act in accordance with professional standards,” he says. McAdams “had professional duties toward Marquette students.”

A faculty committee, composed entirely of tenured professors, echoed that view of professional responsibility. The committee concluded in a 2016 report that McAdams’s blog post “violated his obligation to fellow members of the Marquette community by recklessly causing harm to Ms. Abbate, even though that harm was caused indirectly.” The report added that the harm was “substantial, foreseeable, easily avoidable, and not justifiable.”

However, the faculty committee recommended a lesser penalty than firing. Since McAdams had never been reprimanded or even warned that his behavior was approaching a boundary nearing dismissal, the professors argued, suspension without pay for up to two semesters was an appropriate sanction. Lovell sought that penalty, along with an assurance by McAdams that he would accept the faculty committee’s expectations of professional standards, commit to those guidelines, and express regret about the backlash Abbate suffered. McAdams refused, leading to his firing.

The American Association of University Professors filed a legal brief in support of McAdams, arguing that the assurance Lovell was seeking was a “fundamental violation” of the professor’s academic freedom. Lovell argued it would be “negligent if I didn’t ask him to assure me that we wouldn’t be back in this situation in a few months.”

‘We Were Taking a Beating’

All eyes are on the legal fate of McAdams. But for Marquette, the case has been fought just as hard in the court of public opinion. The university has forcefully pushed back against McAdams’s narrative that the key issue is academic freedom. It pressed its case in advertisements in newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal. It set up a web page, complete with a timeline and fact-vs.-myth section. It hired a public-relations firm with a storytelling team.

“In terms of our brand and public perception,” Lovell says, “we were taking a beating. We thought it was important to at least try to get the truth out about what we felt our side of the story was.”

Among the key precepts of Marquette’s side of the story: McAdams attacked a student. “While the target of John McAdams’s blog was a student teacher, she remains a student first,” the university’s fact-vs.-myth web page states. “There are established channels for faculty to use when expressing concerns about students. Publishing blog posts that publicly criticize students and put their contact information before a hostile audience is not one of those channels.”

Lovell says the case is about protecting students and enforcing professional standards. “You have to understand parents aren’t going to send their kids here if they aren’t going to be safe,” he says. “If we have faculty members putting students in harm’s way, I would argue intentionally in this case, that’s something we have to be able to police. We have to be able to discipline people who are putting students in front of hostile audiences.”

The state Supreme Court could provide McAdams with summary judgment, which would reinstate McAdams as a professor, and then the focus would turn to damages. The court could also remand the decision to a lower court for trial, leaving both parties in limbo, or side with the university, ending the professor’s career at Marquette.

As McAdams awaits his potential firing, he says he has no regrets. In hindsight, if he had known Abbate would have received blowback, he maybe wouldn’t have included her name, but he couldn’t have known about the fallout beforehand, he says. “Theoretically,” he says, “I could still apologize and come back. But I’m not doing that.”

He would still like to be a college professor, if he’s reinstated. If not, he says, he’ll spend more time on his book. Part of the tentative title is “Sixty Politically Incorrect Things You Should Know.” He’s unsure of what will come after the colon, though. It’ll be either “... But Your Professor Won’t Tell You,” or “... But The Mainstream Media Won’t Tell You.”

Vimal Patel covers graduate education. Follow him on Twitter @vimalpatel232, or write to him at vimal.patel@chronicle.com.