Free speech at Marquette

Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post about a speech controversy at Marquette.

The back story (via InsideHigherEd):

• A Teaching Instructor, Cheryl Abbate, is lecturing in an ethics class, lecturing on John Rawls’ theory of justice.
• She calls for examples of violations of Rawls’ thesis, and a student raises the issue of gay marriage.
• She declines to discuss that issue.
• A student approaches her after class to express disappointment that critiques of gay marriage could not be raised in class.
• She indicates that the student does not have the right to express racist or homophobic comments in class.
• The student records the conversation and publicizes it.
• A tenured associate professor at Marquette (John McAdams) writes about the incident on his blog.
• Marquette later suspends McAdams with salary and benefits and orders him off campus.

Volokh writes critically of the decision:

Given that the university’s actions seem to be based just on McAdams’s criticism of another instructor (though I’d love to hear more from readers who know any further facts on all this) those actions strikes me as quite improper. Marquette is a private university, and thus not bound by the First Amendment; and Wisconsin is not one of the states that generally restricts private employer retaliation based on an employee’s speech. Still, Marquette frames itself as a university that respects academic freedom and free speech rights. Acting this way towards a faculty member who publicly expresses his opinions on an important issue, including when the issue involves what he sees as improper suppression of student views by a colleague, stifles that freedom.

Read the whole thing.