[UPDATE: See this post by Cheryl Abbate; compare its directness, clarity, and honesty with the misdirection, obfuscation, and mendacity of McAdams's posts.]
This Volokh Conspiracy post leads to these further points on the McAdams case.
As I understand it, Abbate said that she would not tolerate homophobic comments in class. She did not, however, on my reading of the documents, including her statements here at Daily Nous (which I wish Volokh would have cited in laying out the base facts of the original incident) equate any and all criticism of gay marriage with intolerable homophobia, only certain statements in that regard. This is an important distinction in my eyes, and one that puts McAdams in the position of spreading a falsehood when he says or insinuates that she banned all criticism of gay marriage on the basis of its supposed homophobia.
A second point about the Volokh piece is its erasure of the duty of mentorship to a graduate student in Volokh's account. It becomes criticism of one colleague by another. But this flattens out the professor / student relation between McAdams and Abbate.
As to the proper response by Marquette, in my Open Letters I called for Marquette to publicly support Abbate (which they have only indirectly and belatedly) for university officials to try to reason with McAdams:
As for the behavior of Professor McAdams, I hope that members of your administration, such as Dean Holz or Interim Provost Callahan, will find the time to discuss with him what obligations a decent respect for the trust placed in us as faculty members entails with regard to mentoring graduate students, rather than using them callously and carelessly as a pawn in his political fulminating.
As to Marquette's current course of action, I find it troubling, but I would hazard a guess as to their motivations, based on the assumption that university administrations use a risk management rationality: MU may think that their risk of losing a Title IX suit or OCR complaint claiming that they did nothing when a student was subject to the creation of a hostile work or education environment was greater than the risk of their losing a wrongful discipline case by McAdams, as well as the cost to their reputation if people cast this as an academic freedom issue and the cost to their donor base by alums who take McAdams's side.
The above is an explanation, not a justification. The university's risk management calculations might converge with normative values if one feels that a claim of academic freedom does not excuse the creation of a hostile environment for a student.
Finally, there is the question of what we are to make of McAdams's role in the hate mail that Abbate received? Can McAdams just say "hey, I didn't write that hate mail"? This seems a recipe for enabling harassment by proxy, for clearly none of the vile creatures harassing Abbate would ever have heard of her if it weren't for McAdams.
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