John Protevi's Blog

Update on an update in the McAdams case

UPDATE by Justin Weinberg: 

The copy of the letter of intent to pursue termination proceedings for McAdams, from Richard Holz, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette, which McAdams linked to, was altered to omit some information. This information includes, among other things, the fact that McAdams was the official academic advisor of the undergraduate who illicitly recorded his conversation with Abbate. This (a) reinforces Holz’s point that McAdams knew, or ought to have known, that the student did not drop the course for reasons concerning personal or political beliefs, and was lying or reckless when suggesting otherwise, and also (b) shows that McAdams acquired the information on which he based his blog posts about Abbate in virtue of his role as an official of the university. The full version of the letter from the dean (which does not reveal the student’s identity), is here.

Left unanswered is whose idea it was to record Abbate, or whether the idea was discussed, in advance, during one of the advising meetings between McAdams and the undergraduate.

Original update here. 

#slatepitching John McAdams

This is why ‪#‎slatepitch‬ is a thing (for facile and lazy contrarianism). It ignores the MU admin claim (p 14 of the Holz letter) that the 2008 and 2011 incidents show that McAdams has established a pattern of provoking harassment of female students. 

1) These pieces should always let McAdams speak for himself regarding the 2011 incident, in which he prints the name and email address of an MU undergraduate woman, phones her at home, and then prints how to find her phone number. 

2) This piece neglects Abbate's own take, including her claims as to McAdams' deliberate word choices designed to inflame her harassers.

3) The piece is lazy; it doesn't cite the very relevant piece by Peter Kirstein at Academe. 

4) Or the equally relevant piece by Ira Allen at Academe.

My take: 

1) I think we can and should separate a) civil society / professional discussion (in which we should exercise appropriate critical reasoning, neither too credulous nor too skeptical, but for which the term "due process" is misapplied); and the following, for all of which some notion of "due process" is essential: b) institutional proceedings, in which the AAUP guidelines for due process can be a model; c) civil proceedings and d) criminal proceedings, each of which have their own standards of proof and process.

2) I don’t know the provisions of the MU process (which now begins in earnest), but I hope it includes the possibility of outside counsel, AAUP observation / participation, and other such actions, so that it will provide a rigorous testing of the administration’s claims and proposed penalty.

3) It seems to me that what MU's procedure will have to do is decide whether McAdams's claims to "academic freedom" are appropriate, or whether they are misused as an excuse for harassment (or whatever technical term the MU administration will seek to use). I take it everyone agrees AF does not excuse harassment (or whatever term is appropriate here), so the question is whether McAdams's actions fall inside or outside the scope of AF protection, that is, whether they constitute harassment (or the term MU wants to use).

What I think happened, should have happened, and might happen in the McAdams case

WHAT I THINK HAPPENED IN THE CLASSROOM (based on study of the relevant and available documents and accounts). [Slight updates for clarification, in brackets, 21 January 2015; I also recommend people read this blog post by Cheryl Abbate detailing the misogynist hate mail she received as a result of McAdams's action.].

1) During the class there was never a discussion about gay marriage. The point of the class was just to get a basic idea of some contemporary social policies that would violate Rawls’s equal liberty principle ["Each person has an equal right to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic liberties which is compatible with a similar scheme of liberties for all"]. One student pointed out that a ban on gay marriage would violate Rawls's equal liberty principle [it would deprive a group of people of equal basic liberties] and since Abbate judged this as true and there were more nuanced examples to focus on, she moved on to the next example of a policy that would violate this principle.

2) Another student approached Abbate after class and asked why there was not more discussion of gay marriage.  

3) In a move that has been approved by the vast majority of professional philosophers — and here the disciplinary difference between philosophers and political scientists is I think important to note — Abbate told the student that discussion of gay marriage in a class devoted to Rawls’s equal liberty principle would not be relevant as in her judgment [allowing] gay marriage does not violate the principle [allowing gay marriage does not deprive anyone of a basic liberty compatible with a system of liberties for all]. This is a professional judgment call and McAdams does not have the training or standing to challenge this initial point. 

4) The student then claimed that there is research that shows children who have gay parents “do a lot worse in life." 

5) Abbate pointed out that this was a non-sequitur as gay marriage and child-rearing are not necessarily connected, and further that she would question the research he was referring to, because years of research says otherwise. She also invited him to send her the "research" he was referring to (and Abbate has informed me that he never did this).

6) The student then said “Regardless of why I’m against gay marriage, it’s still wrong for the teacher to completely discredit one person’s opinion when they may have different opinions.’ ”

7) Abbate then said that "SOME comments are not appropriate and are offensive." At this point, she was informing the student that he did not have an absolute right to say whatever he wanted in an ethics class. She then explained that examples of inappropriate / offensive comments would be sexist, racist, and homophobic comments. Thus she DID NOT equate ALL criticism of gay marriage with homophobia.

 

WHAT I THINK SHOULD HAVE HAPPENED

1) I think the McAdams should not have published his attack on a graduate student at all.

2) If he was unable to restrain himself, he should not have published his attack on a graduate student until he had communicated with Abbate, the Chair of the Philosophy Department, the Dean, the Provost, and the President of the university.

3) In the face of McAdams's attack, the MU administration should have quickly issued a public support of Abbate and a public rebuke of McAdams for violating Abbate's reasonable expectation of mentorship rather than attack from a tenured professor. 

 

WHAT I THINK MIGHT HAPPEN

These remarks attempt to consider three factors: 1) the conventional rights of academic freedom of McAdams, 2) the legal rights under Title VII and IX of students and employees of Marquette to be free of hostile work and educational environments, and 3) Marquette’s legal obligations under Title VII and IX to provide such environments.

Given an assumption that university administrations act mostly in terms of risk management — but that their risks are multiple and sometime orthogonal to each other — I wonder what role their estimation of their risk of reprimand relative to their legal obligations under Title VII and IX is playing in their actions. McAdams has an (academic freedom) right to be cantankerous, but he doesn’t have the (legal) right to harass, and MU is obligated to ensure that he doesn't harass with impunity. That’s the crunch point.

Now, should defenders of academic freedom be worried about the wording and case law and OCR guidance around Title VII and IX? Yes, absolutely. (We should be horrified at the Garcetti lineage of cases too!) But I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water and junk my legal protections against workplace harassment either. McAdams being clever enough to play the edges doesn’t mean I should have to put up with a stalker.

Will MU’s case pass academic critical muster against McAdams, balancing academic freedom qua (conventional) rights of professors and the (legal) Title VII and IX rights of students and colleagues? We’ll see.

As for the purely legal side of things, as MU is a private university there are no First Amendment implications and so McAdams will have to fight his fight purely as a contract law matter; as much as he can claim academic freedom in the court of public and academic opinion, he can’t claim “free speech” in the FA sense of the term.

Marquette's desire to uphold Catholic values is going to be important: I don’t know if McAdams has the contractual right to act in the way he does AND to be employed at a Jesuit university whose basic value is “care for the person.” It would be ironic indeed if he loses because of religious freedom of the institution to enforce its code of values. (I don’t know what he thinks about the Hobby Lobby and such decisions; I imagine he liked them at the time, but that he might not like it at the end of his trial.)

Further points on the McAdams case

[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.

7 points with regard to John McAdams of Marquette

1) McAdams violated Abbate's academic freedom (which involves teaching / class management).

2) He violated Abbate's right to mentorship by professors. 

3) He should have realized Abbate would get hate mail; he’s a professor of political science who lists “public opinion” as a speciality, so he should have known that the foreseeable effects of his actions would be hate mail directed to Abbate.

4) The Open Letters did not ask that MU sanction him, only that MU officials publicly support Abbate, and that they talk with McAdams to explain professional ethics. Quoting the second one:

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.

5) If McAdams feels his academic freedom is being impinged upon by MU’s actions, then he should contact the AAUP. 

6) His claiming academic freedom for his blogging entails the freedom of members of the academic community (in this case the 415 signatories of the first Open Letter) to condemn his actions.

7) I wish Cheryl Abbate all the best in the rest of her studies and in her professional career.

Open Letter to Dr Michael Lovell, President of Marquette University (updated)

UPDATE: Sat 22 Nov 6pm. President Lovell has released a Letter to the MU community. Although it doesn't name names, it is nonetheless a good sign to see this:

We are dedicated to uphold academic freedom and to maintain an environment in which the dignity and worth of each member of our community is respected, especially students. We deplore hatred and abuse directed at a member of our community in any format. Please know that we listen to any member of the campus community who expresses concerns alleging inappropriate behavior. As stated in our harassment policy, the university will not tolerate personal attacks or harassment of or by students, faculty and staff. To be clear, we will take action to address those concerns. ​

Let's thank President Lovell, while adding that we hope clear action is soon forthcoming.

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Dr Michael Lovell
President, Marquette University

Dear President Lovell,

I write you today with a matter of some urgency. According to the 6th update to this story, http://dailynous.com/2014/11/18/philosophy-grad-student-target-of-political-smear-campaign/#comments, Cheryl Abbate, a philosophy graduate student at Marquette, has begun receiving hate mail as a result of this Fox News story: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/11/21/teacher-to-student-if-dont-support-gay-marriage-drop-my-class/. 

The harassment Ms Abbate is receiving in inimical to the values not only of American universities in general, but of the Jesuit tradition in particular (speaking as a Loyola University of Chicago graduate), and I ask you to take immediate action in the form of a public statement deploring this harassment and affirming Marquette’s commitment to the welfare of its graduate students. 

As you may be aware, these threats can be traced to the unprofessional behavior of Professor John McAdams of the Political Science department at MU, who, in connivance with a student who provoked a confrontation with Ms Abbate after class, while both surreptitiously taping the conversation and lying about that fact, betrayed a basic commitment to mentorship and guidance of students by blasting Ms Abbate on his blog: http://mu-warrior.blogspot.in/2014/11/marquette-philosophy-instructor-gay.html. 

If I may, I would direct your attention to these comments on an Open Letter I authored on the situation, which has garnered over 200 signatures in a few short days: http://proteviblog.typepad.com/protevi/2014/11/open-letter-in-support-of-cheryl-abbate.html

"Please add my name to this. Even if everything printed were true and the grad student said and did everything attributed to her ( which I do not grant) this response -- public calling out, exposure to public condemnation, political labeling,-- by a faculty member violates every expectation of graduate training and collegiality. It is a betrayal of the trust invested in faculty to mentor and guide students, not to make of them casualties in larger battles whether inside or outside their institutions. Bonnie Honig, Professor of Political Science, Brown University."

"I support this letter and am so pleased to see how widespread the response has been. Ms. Abbate deserves no less than any instructor, tenured or otherwise, deserves: due process, a resistance to trying a case in the court of public opinion, respect for her expertise, and the professionalism of her colleagues. The kind of news-baiting in which Professor McAdams has engaged is a disservice to students and faculty alike. I suspect he would not enjoy anyone vilifying him without first attempting to gather the facts in the case. In addition, the student who recorded a conversation without Ms. Abbate's consent, and who denied he was doing so, should be apprised of the law, as well as of general principles of ethics. I am a graduate of a Jesuit institution (Fordham University) and have studied Jesuit history. This developing situation is absolutely not in keeping with rational interpretation of the _Constitutions_ or later interpretations of "Our Way of Proceeding." Kathleen M. Comerford, Department of History, Georgia Southern University” 

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.

Yours respectfully, 

John Protevi (PhD, Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago, 1990)
Chair, Department of French Studies
Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies
Professor of Philosophy
416 Hodges Hall
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803 USA

In which I correct an obvious error by Professor John McAdams and wish him many fruitful conversations

In this recent blog post Professor John McAdams makes a blunder, which I correct in a comment left at his place, reproduced here:

---

Professor McAdams, the sentences you attribute to me were instead made by Justin Weinberg, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina, and author of this post at his blog, Daily Nous: 

That you make such an elementary mistake does not lead one to confidence in the care with which you compose your writings on this issue.

I am however the author of this Open Letter, which now has over 200 signatories: 

I direct your attention to the first comment, by Bonnie Honig, Professor of Political Science at Brown University:

Please add my name to this. Even if everything printed were true and the grad student said and did everything attributed to her ( which I do not grant) this response -- public calling out, exposure to public condemnation, political labeling,-- by a faculty member violates every expectation of graduate training and collegiality. It is a betrayal of the trust invested in faculty to mentor and guide students, not to make of them casualties in larger battles whether inside or outside their institutions.

I found this comment instructive as well:

I support this letter and am so pleased to see how widespread the response has been. Ms. Abbate deserves no less than any instructor, tenured or otherwise, deserves: due process, a resistance to trying a case in the court of public opinion, respect for her expertise, and the professionalism of her colleagues. The kind of news-baiting in which Professor McAdams has engaged is a disservice to students and faculty alike. I suspect he would not enjoy anyone vilifying him without first attempting to gather the facts in the case. In addition, the student who recorded a conversation without Ms. Abbate's consent, and who denied he was doing so, should be apprised of the law, as well as of general principles of ethics. I am a graduate of a Jesuit institution (Fordham University) and have studied Jesuit history. This developing situation is absolutely not in keeping with rational interpretation of the _Constitutions_ or later interpretations of "Our Way of Proceeding."

Kathleen M. Comerford, Department of History, Georgia Southern University

----

Finally, I do not wish you to "shut up"; I hope you continue talking, and wish you a very pleasant conversation with the Dean, Provost, and perhaps even President of Marquette.

UPDATE 1: Th 20 Nov, 9:48pm: McAdams has corrected his blogpost, though without noting the original error, nor approving the rest of my comment. If the former is only mildly problematic -- though a respect for blog tradition would recommend noting the original mistake along with the correction -- the second is more troubling. I will give him the benefit of the doubt however so I've left another comment with the substantive claim, adding something to the effect of the following: 

Professor McAdams cherry-picks some extreme correspondence and then claims they reveal the "id of the politically correct." I counter by citing the calm and reasoned criticisms of Honig and Comerford. I invite Professor McAdams to engage their claims to avoid the appearance of cherry-picking his opponents, a mild form of straw man.

UPDATE 2, Friday 21 November, 7:25am: In this new post, Professor McAdams indulges yet again his penchant for cherry-picking the words or actions of graduate students he doesn't like. Yet he has not approved my comment on the previous post, sent to him well before he authored this one, in which I ask him to engage the arguments of professors. We'll see if he ever approves any more of my comments.

UPDATE 3, Friday 21 November, 1:07pm: Professor McAdams has approved my comments. I thank him for that and hope that he will accept the invitation to engage substantively with the criticisms of Honig and Comerford. 

Open Letter in Support of Cheryl Abbate

Dean of the Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, Marquette University, Dr. Richard C. Holz, [email protected]

Interim Provost, Marquette University, Dr. Margaret Faut Callahan, margaret.callahan@marquette.edu.

Dear Dean Holz and Provost Callahan:

I write to express my deep concern about the behavior of Professor McAdams and to offer my support to Ms Abbate over the events reported here: http://dailynous.com/…/philosophy-grad-student-target-of-p…/

The one-sided public attack on a graduate student by a professor over classroom behavior is a threat to academic freedom. It does not appear to me, from reading the blog post of Professor McAdams, that he made any attempt to get Abbate’s side of the story. Instead he took up the motivated report of a student and based an attack on Abbate solely on that student’s testimony. http://mu-warrior.blogspot.in/…/marquette-philosophy-instru…

I hope that you will offer your support to Ms Abbate and take steps to ensure that Professor McAdams learns the rudiments of professional behavior in the future.

Yours respectfully,

John Protevi (PhD, Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago 1990)
Chair, Department of French Studies
Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies
Professor of Philosophy
416 Hodges Hall
Louisiana State University
Baton Rouge LA 70803 USA

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UPDATE: You may co-sign this letter if you wish by commenting to that effect.