Professor’s Tweet That Barbara Bush Was an ‘Amazing Racist’ Ignites a Fury

A professor of English at California State University at Fresno sparked outrage on Tuesday by tweeting that the former first lady Barbara Bush was an “amazing racist” who raised a “war criminal.”

Randa Jarrar, a tenured professor who is on leave this semester, wrote that she would never be fired because she has tenure and free-speech rights. She encouraged anyone who objected to contact the university’s president. They did, in droves.

The president, Joseph I. Castro, issued a statement offering condolences to the Bush family on the former first lady’s death and saying Jarrar was commenting as a private citizen, not as a representative of Fresno State.

“Professor Jarrar’s expressed personal views and commentary are obviously contrary to the core values of our university, which include respect and empathy for individuals with divergent points of view, and a sincere commitment to mutual understanding and progress,” Castro wrote.

His statement drew an angry backlash from some people who questioned why he didn’t condemn Jarrar’s remarks more forcefully.

The president later told The Fresno Bee that the university was investigating the matter and that he considered Jarrar’s statements disrespectful.

“A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish,” Castro said. “We are all held accountable for our actions.”

Screen shots of Jarrar’s comments were captured and shared on Twitter before she made her account private, with a note that she is on leave from Fresno State and the opinions are her own. In one, she wrote, “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal.”

In another, Jarrar, who teaches creative writing to both undergraduate and graduate students, wrote that she was “happy that the witch is dead.” Later she added: “If you’d like to know what it’s like to be an Arab American Muslim American woman with some clout online expressing an opinion, look at the racists going crazy in my mentions right now.”

Jarrar, who did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday, began an hours-long Twitter rant within an hour of the announcement that Bush, 92, had died. When irate readers demanded that she be fired, Jarrar’s response, according to widely circulated screen shots, was “LOL! Let me help you. You should tag my president @JosephCastro. What I love about being an American professor is my right to free speech, and what I love about Fresno State is that I always feel protected and at home here,” she wrote. “GO BULLDOGS!”

People on Twitter reacted with outrage.

Jarrar went on to taunt readers who had objected, according to reposted screen shots, saying that she worked as a tenured professor making $100,000 a year and that people will always want to hear what she has to say.

That prompted some to complain that her Twitter storm was an attempt to get publicity. The ratings for her newest book, which had been largely favorable, took a nose dive on Amazon after readers angry about her tweets posted reviews like the following: “Prosaic, poorly written, poor grammar, incoherent … Will make for expensive toilet paper.”

Jarrar also supplied a phone number for people to call her, but it was instead a suicide hotline. An operator there said she had been flooded with calls.

A campus spokeswoman said Jarrar requested earlier this year to take a leave for the spring semester, so she is not teaching classes on the campus this semester.

Her English-department profile refers to her as an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and translator who grew up in Kuwait and Egypt and moved to the United States after the Gulf War. Jarrar was born in Chicago to an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, according to a 2014 profile on the Institute for Middle East Understanding’s website.

Her books include A Map of Home, a collection of stories depicting the lives of Arab women, and Him, Me, Muhammad Ali, described on her website as “a collection ... featuring journalists and kids and queers and pregnant girls and birds who are arrested for spying.”

Jarrar’s writings also include an opinion piece, “Why I Can’t Stand White Belly-Dancers,” published by Salon in 2014, in which she accused such women of cultural appropriation.

But Is It a Firing Offense?

A blog that examines free speech and other issues took up the question of whether, as it described Jarrar’s situation, a professor can be fired “for being an ass on Twitter.” It concluded that there are no easy answers.

The blog, run by Ken White, a criminal-defense lawyer in Los Angeles, said three factors play into whether her comments are protected speech.

First, was she speaking on a matter of public interest? Yes, he concluded, the death of a public figure falls into that category.

Second, was she speaking as a private citizen or as part of her job duties? Since she was on leave and Twitter isn’t part of her job, the answer, he determined, would be as a private citizen.

And third, can her employer show that her speech was so disruptive to the workplace that it interfered with its orderly business? That would be the toughest for Fresno State to prove, White said.

His assessment: “Professor Jarrar was speaking as a private individual on a matter of public interest. It would be difficult for Fresno State to establish that the tweets about Barbara Bush themselves caused the sort of disruption of the school’s business that so outweighs her free-speech interests so that it would justify her termination.” (Initially, White wrote that steering calls to a suicide hotline could cause that kind of disruption, but it turns out the hotline wasn’t connected to the university.)

The question of whether, and how, states should be able to regulate offensive statements on social media has roiled public universities for years.

One of the most explosive free-speech controversies involved Ward Churchill, who was fired in 2007 by University of Colorado regents nearly six years after he wrote an essay comparing some American victims of terrorism to Nazi bureaucrats. The regents said they were reacting to alleged research misconduct, not his opinions, but his supporters were not convinced. Another high-profile case involved Steven G. Salaita, whose job offer by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was rescinded in 2014 after critical comments he had made online about Israel came to light. He filed two lawsuits against the university over the rescinded offer, and eventually settled the cases for $600,000.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends free-speech rights, came to Jarrar’s defense on Wednesday. Fresno State was correct to acknowledge that her comments were made as a private citizen, FIRE’s senior program officer, Adam Steinbaugh, said in a written statement.

“As such, and because they touched upon a matter of public concern, Jarrar’s tweets are unquestionably protected speech under the First Amendment, and Fresno State has no power to censor, punish, or terminate Jarrar for them,” he wrote. A public university shouldn’t be allowed to punish someone just because their expression led to a deluge of complaints, he wrote. Otherwise, they’d be subject to a “heckler’s veto” — effectively silenced and stripped of their constitutional protections because of public outrage, Steinbaugh wrote.

This isn’t the first time Fresno State’s president has had to react to a faculty member’s provocative tweet.

Last year Lars Maischak, a lecturer in history, attracted the attention of conservative media outlets by tweeting that “Trump must hang.” Castro condemned the tweet, and Maischak was assigned to convert his courses to an online format.

Maischak apologized for the tweet.

This article has been updated with new reporting (4/18/2018, 6:45 p.m.) and an additional statement from Joseph Castro (4/19/2018, 7:35 a.m.).

Clarification (4/20/2018, 12:35 p.m.): This article originally said that Lars Maischak’s contract wasn’t renewed. Although he is no longer teaching on campus, he is teaching online this semester.

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.