Georgetown U. Professor Doesn’t Shy From a Fight With the Alt-Right

When C. Christine Fair succeeded in getting Richard Spencer kicked out of a private gym where they both used to work out, the Georgetown University faculty member said she was prepared for a nasty backlash from white supremacists.

Mr. Spencer, president of the white-separatist National Policy Institute, was, after all, a hero to many members of the so-called alt-right, who view liberal faculty members like Ms. Fair with scorn.

What unfolded over the next several days was a vicious war of words on social media that some say is testing the limits of free speech and putting an uncomfortable spotlight on Georgetown.

The controversy began on Wednesday, when Ms. Fair, an associate professor of security studies, approached Mr. Spencer in the Old Town Sport&Health gym in Alexandria, Va. Mr. Spencer, who has called for the creation of a separate white state that excludes members of minority groups, has incited angry protests on college campuses where he has spoken.

“When I approached this flaccid, sorry excuse of a man and asked ‘Are you Richard Spencer,’ this pendulous poltroon said ‘No. I am not,’” Ms. Fair wrote in a Tumblr post. “But of course he was.”

After calling him a coward and a neo-Nazi, she told Mr. Spencer she was tired of his “odious” comments about women and members of minority groups and that she found his presence in the gym “unacceptable.”

The gym manager appeared, and Ms. Fair told him he should prepare himself for the class-action lawsuit his employees, many of whom are women or minority-group members, would file because of the hostile environment Mr. Spencer was creating by being there.

The manager asked to speak to her further. “I thought I was being kicked out,” Ms. Fair said in an interview. “I was as surprised as anyone else that he was the one kicked out.”

The gym later notified Mr. Spencer that his membership had been terminated.

On Tumblr, Ms. Fair lambasted Mr. Spencer as an “evil crustacean” and as “racist, misogynist chicken shit.”

On both Tumblr and Twitter, Mr. Spencer’s supporters piled on, mocking her physique and suggesting, based on the erroneous assumption that she was Jewish, that she belonged in a gas chamber.

Some observers, including a former Georgetown faculty member who was on the receiving end of Ms. Fair’s previous online barbs, argued that she’d gone too far in her gloves-off fight with the alt-right.

So far, the university has defended Ms. Fair. A Georgetown spokeswoman issued the following statement on Monday: “While we will defend the academic freedom of our faculty, the views of any faculty member are his/her own and not the views of the university.”

In an interview on Monday, Mr. Spencer said he was a “model gym goer” who was there to work out, not engage in politics. When Ms. Fair asked him, in what he described as a belligerent manner, if he was Richard Spencer, he said he denied it because he wanted her to go away.

Getting kicked out, he said, was “very unfair.” Since he obeyed the rules of the gym, he feels he was expelled for “philosophical reasons,” Mr. Spencer said. (He expounds on that sense of injustice in a 20-minute video posted on Twitter on Monday night.)

“If someone was expelled for being a Buddhist or a Marxist, I suppose people would wring their hands,” he said.

The general manager of the gym did not return a call on Monday.

An Earlier Quarrel

This isn’t the first time Ms. Fair has been embroiled in controversy over her incendiary social media posts.

In December, a former journalism lecturer at Georgetown sent a letter of complaint to the head of Ms. Fair’s department accusing the professor of cyber-bullying her over an op-ed in The Washington Post. In that piece, Asra Q. Nomani described why she, as a Muslim woman and “long-time liberal,” had voted for President Trump.

In response, Ms. Nomani wrote, Ms. Fair “has leveled relentless abuse against me, including the accusation that I have ‘pimped’ myself out, a demeaning and sexist accusation that amounts to calling me a prostitute and slut-shaming me.”

Ms. Fair doesn’t deny that she called Ms. Nomani a fraud and a “fame-mongering clown show.”

Ms. Nomani called on Georgetown to investigate the matter and require Ms. Fair to apologize and attend some kind of training on engaging in civil discourse. The university, however, sided with Ms. Fair, saying that while it didn’t necessarily agree with her views, she had the right to express them. Ms. Nomani said that’s not the message the university should be sending to students at a time when many conservatives feel their voices are being suppressed.

“You have a real responsibility as a teacher to humanely facilitate conversation in the classroom between people of very different opinions,” Ms. Nomani said. “You may have someone in your classroom who agrees with Richard Spencer or Donald Trump. If you set this tone that people who oppose your point of view aren’t even human beings worthy of humane treatment, we fail our students.”

Ms. Fair, who is on leave this year writing a book, sees it differently. In both the criticism of Ms. Nomani and her Twitter war with the “alt-right,” she was writing on her own time, using her own computer, she said.

“Quite frankly, it’s not Georgetown’s business,” Ms. Fair said. “If we concede that our employers own our speech 24/7, we will not have free speech,” she said.

Her critics pointed out her support for causes like Black Lives Matter and Muslim rights, she said. “These dog whistles were calibrated to bring out the nuts,” she said. If anyone is prepared to take them on, she is, Ms. Fair said. “I have T. Rex skin.”

Because of threats she has received for her scholarship, which involves political and military affairs in South Asia, she said she has already installed security cameras in her home and has taken self-defense training. “Bring on the Nazis,” she said. “I just don’t care.”

She also said that, while she is not Jewish, she uses triple brackets around her name on Twitter, a symbol that white supremacists have used to identify Jews, in solidarity with people who have faced harassment.

“I don’t want to say, ‘Hey, you stupid Nazis, I’m not Jewish,’ because I don’t want to throw Jews under the bus,” Ms. Fair said.

Instead, when white supremacists taunt her with crematorium references or make fun of her physique, she shoots back sarcastic retorts:

Mr. Spencer said he didn’t sympathize with Ms. Fair as the target of a Twitter storm. “She is giving as much as, or probably more than, she’s getting,” he said.

“No one is engaging in violence or a direct threat of violence,” he said. “They’re basically bullying her. It’s just words. If you put yourself out there, you’re going to get attacked.”

Mr. Spencer, who has been punched in the face for airing his incendiary views, added that he thought Ms. Fair’s conduct was unbecoming of a Georgetown faculty member. “I think this woman is off the leash,” he said.

Refusing to ‘Just Sit There’

Asked whether engaging in a crude debate with her critics was just making the controversy worse, Ms. Fair said she had learned, as a survivor of childhood sexual assault, that fighting back was more effective.

“Some people tell women to just sit there and take it,” she said. “But I find it’s more damaging to women to sit there than it is to fight back.”

While her supporters applauded Ms. Fair, members of far-right groups continued to taunt her on Monday. They also continued to argue over whether she was right to call for Mr. Spencer’s expulsion from the gym.

A post on the Daily Stormer, a Neo-Nazi website, warned readers not to threaten her with violence, but added, “If you do go to her home after someone publishes her home address in the comments section, simply voice your opinion to her – using your First Amendment rights. If she asks you to leave, do so immediately.”

Asked about the possibility that protesters might show up at her house carrying tiki torches, the way they did in a protest Mr. Spencer led in a Charlottesville, Va., park this month, Ms. Fair said she’d probably go out and roast a marshmallow on one of them.

“How emasculating would that image be?” she asked.

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.