A Professor’s Writings About Pederasty Enraged Students. So They Protested at His Home.

Tensions were already high at the University of Texas at Austin when a group of protesters enraged by a professor’s writings banged on the front door of his home on Monday evening, shouted that he was a predator, and filmed as he was escorted to safety by local police officers.

It was the latest incident in an escalating series of protests by students who object to professors they believe have no right to be on campus because of past behavior — or, in the case of a classics professor at Texas, for the content of scholarship they find dangerous or offensive.

While some have applauded such protests as long-overdue responses to troubling behavior and harmful ideas, others see the potential for trouble if protests cross the line into vigilantism.

The target of Monday night’s protest was Thomas K. Hubbard, who has written about “pederasty” — sexual relationships between adult men and teen boys in some cultures, including ancient Greece. Hubbard, who has described such activities as “learning experiences” in those cultures, has been branded by critics as an apologist for pedophilia.

A group that calls itself Fire the Abusers posted a video showing protesters banging on Hubbard’s door and filming through his window before the police came to escort him out.

https://t.co/zspON4rmxz

— Fire The Abusers (@FireTheAbusers) December 10, 2019

A campus official, Shilpa Bakre, released a statement on Tuesday calling the actions against Hubbard “unacceptable.”

“He has received threats of physical harm and had his home vandalized,” Bakre wrote. “Students have the right to contest specific ideas, but threatening anyone’s safety violates the law and university standards of conduct.” The campus police are concerned about the threats against faculty members, Bakre wrote, “and will work to protect them from harm.” As of Tuesday evening, no one had been arrested or disciplined over the protest.

The university has been rocked this semester by a series of protests against two professors who returned to teaching after being temporarily suspended. One of them, Coleman Hutchison, an associate professor of English, was disciplined for not reporting a relationship with a former student and for making inappropriate statements to current graduate students.

Students have also protested the return to the classroom of Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of integrative biology and philosophy who was also accused of misconduct and found to have violated university policy. Sarkar’s class was disrupted by protests.

Legitimate Research

In a written statement on Tuesday, Hubbard, 63, said that he had never been charged with a crime or sexual harassment in 40 years of teaching and that he is not “personally oriented to underage youth.”

“It is no more valid to conclude that scholars who work on sex-offender policy and the relevance of cross-cultural evidence are themselves sex offenders than to think that advocates of drug decriminalization are themselves drug abusers or that advocates of criminal-justice reform are criminals,” he wrote. “Such simplistic thinking chills serious debate and research on vital public-policy issues.”

Hubbard elaborated on his views in a question-and-answer document emailed to The Chronicle, in which he said he doesn’t write about pedophilia. He said he had written about “pederasty,” which he defined as a different custom involving “romantic courtship of adolescent males” practiced in diverse historical cultures. “How teen sexuality should be regulated and how legal violations should be punished are legitimate areas of research and debate among scholars and public-policy professionals,” he wrote.

In 2016, Hubbard organized a conference on the Austin campus that examined questions of where to draw the line in determining whether someone has given sexual consent. The conference was a capstone to an honors seminar he offered, “Mythologies of Rape.”

Most of the speakers he had invited argued that those who are accused of sexual misconduct face an uphill battle to prove their innocence. Some students, wearing T-shirts that proclaimed “consent is golden,” said they had found those views unsettling and had felt the speakers were out of touch with their generation.

William Creeley, senior vice president for legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said the situation at UT-Austin brought up two competing sets of rights — the First Amendment protections afforded students and faculty members who speak out on matters of concern, and “the rights of all of us to enjoy the quiet solitude of our own residence.”

“Students have the right to stand outside and yell,” Creeley said, “but there are statutory lines of stalking and criminal harassment, and if those are crossed, it should be a matter for law enforcement.”

He added that “disrupting classes, threatening people in their homes, and engaging in violent or otherwise criminal behavior is beyond the realm of protected First Amendment activity.”

The protest organizers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Meanwhile, groups outside the university have spread word of the protests.

An article posted by a group called the Incendiary News Service contended that “according to activists on the ground, the home demonstration against Hubbard was intended to take the fight out of classrooms and directly to the doorsteps of these men, showing them that they are not safe anywhere.”

University officials remain concerned that outside groups that single out professors with threats of violence may be pushing protests in a dangerous direction.

Last year Richard Morrisett, a professor of pharmacy, was found dead in his home of an apparent suicide after word circulated about a domestic-violence incident that had sent his girlfriend to the hospital. Morrisett had been placed on paid administrative leave for 18 days after pleading guilty to a felony charge of assault. There is no direct evidence that the ensuing protests against him had anything to do with his suicide, but the campus police had become troubled by outside agitators who took advantage of the crisis. A group calling itself the Revolutionary Student Front, which had no official connection to the university and has since disbanded, posted threatening graffiti that was signed with hammer-and-sickle symbols.

Similar symbols were spray-painted on Hubbard’s driveway, according to photos circulating on Twitter.

The university has scheduled a student-led town hall on January 27, 2020, at which administrators and students will discuss the university’s sexual-misconduct policies and other issues raised by the recent protests.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.