In Defense of Professors Who Want to Kill People

(i) The Story of Steven Shaviro

Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, has been suspended with pay for saying the wrong thing. A news story reported on his Facebook post:

"I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down," Shaviro wrote. "When right-wing groups invite such speakers to campus, it is precisely because they want to provoke an incident that discredits the left, and gives more publicity and validation to these reprehensible views than they could otherwise attain." 

He continued, "The protesters get blamed instead of the bigoted speaker; the university administration finds a perfect excuse to side publicly with the racists or phobes; the national and international press has a field day saying that bigots are the ones being oppressed, rather than the people those bigots actually hate being the victims of oppression," he said.

The Popehat Substack reproduced the post itself:

Professor Shaviro is a genuine scholar, even though he is at Wayne State and his field is film criticism.¹ His approach, to be sure, is not mine. He writes articles with titles like "A Chacun Ses Sexes: Deleuze and Guattari’s Theory of Sexuality,” “The Very Life of the Darkness: A Reading of Blood Meridian,” and “Supa Dupa Fly: Black Women as Cyborgs in Hiphop Videos”. I write articles with titles like "Concavifying the Quasi-Concave,"² "Can the Treasury Exempt Companies It Owns from Taxes? The $45 Billion General Motors Loss Carryforward Rule,"³ and “Ostracism in Japan.”⁴ And even when my subjects involve more sex and don’t use any math, economists are radically different from crits. But he’s trying to do research and is probably better than most people in his field.

I’m one of the people Professor Shaviro is talking about killing. My Dean at the Kelley School of Business called me sexist, racist, homophobic, reprehensible, disrespectful to women, and intolerant of racial diversity and diversity in sexual orientation. My Provost at Indiana University-Bloomington had a slightly different view. She agreed that I was sexist, racist, and homophobic, but she also said I was stunningly ignorant and more like someone who lived in the 18th century than the 21st. I guess I really bugged her when I was in the faculty senate. But she didn’t call for my death. At least not publicly.⁵

Professor Shaviro did say people like me should be killed if they try to speak out publicly. Was he serious?

Maybe, maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. Professor Shaviro is 69 years old and probably doesn’t even own a gun, though since he works in Detroit it’s hard to be sure— even liberals are prudent when it comes to their own personal safety. But I don’t think he’s a threat. I do own a couple of guns already after an unfortunate incident involving blood on my doorstep, but I’m not going to go out and buy an assault rifle to defend against Shaviro and his students. I wouldn’t even worry about visiting Wayne State University to give a talk. I’ve exchanged email with Shaviro asking if he is doing okay and giving him advice, and he seems a reasonable fellow.⁶

What he said was certainly not illegal. It was too vague and too general, not aimed at anyone in particular (see Popehat’s 2023 “True Threats and American Cultural Gulfs,” for a survey of the caselaw). If you pay attention to more than just the provocative sentence, his post is really an attack on people who shout down conservatives. He was saying it just helps people like Eric Rasmusen if you shout them down. Being an English professor, he knows you start a paragraph with a provocative sentence and then explain what you really mean. On Twitter what happens is that people read one sentence, at most, and then start attacking you. In fact, often they don’t even read a single sentence— they just see that other people on their side are attacking you, so they join in. It’s kind of like a fight where you see your pal kicking someone who’s down and you don’t know why, but you go and give him a kick too, just for fun.

I think Professor Shaviro was using hyperbole, the rhetorical device of saying something you don’t expect anyone to take seriously, just for effect. It isn’t much news in these times when a conservative is shouted down on a college campus while the police stand by and do nothing. If a conservative got killed, on the other hand, that would be big news, especially if the police just stood by while the mob strung up the speaker from a nearby tree and hanged him. So I don’t think Professor Shaviro means what he says. Rather, I interpret him as saying that if you want to fight conservatives and destroy traditional values, you ought to take some genuine steps of activism rather than just have fun shouting at a speaker at a tiny Federalist Society event nobody really cares about. But he’s an English professor, so he wrote down the idea colorfully.⁷

Professor Shaviro was immediately suspended without pay.

Wayne State President M. Roy Wilson released a statement condemning the post and announced that the professor had been suspended without pay. Further, he said the university referred the post to law enforcement authorities.

"We have on many occasions defended the right of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but we feel this post far exceeds the bounds of reasonable or protected speech. It is, at best, morally reprehensible and, at worst, criminal," Wilson wrote.

"We have referred this to law enforcement agencies for further review and investigation. Pending their review, we have suspended the professor with pay, effective immediately," he continued

Suspending Professor Shaviro and speaking of him this way is against university rules and defamatory. FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) has already connected him with a lawyer, and if he sues he will win. President Wilson is a dim-witted philistine who should be ashamed of himself and should be ostracized even by other college presidents. Wayne State’s Board of Governors is taking the cowardly route of refusing to either back up their law-breaking President or condemn him. Michigan state representative Carra sent a letter applauding the action, but perhaps we can’t blame politicians for not understanding the Bill of Rights.⁸ Most likely, the American Association of University Professors (the AAUP) will investigate, President Wilson will refuse to cooperate, and Wayne State University will be put on the censure list along with, most recently, Indiana University Northwest and Linfield University.

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(ii) How the Media Reacted

This is an easy case for toleration. I was surprised, however, to find that a number of my friends who normally advocate for free speech are distinctly unenthusiastic in this particular case. They can’t be, if they want to be principled. The general principle is that people who advocate things that other people or even most people find acceptable should have the right to do so. This is true even if they are advocating change in existing law, or even in the Constitution. This is true even if they are advocating for breaking the law or overthrowing the Constitution, so long as it is just talk, even if that talk encourages other people to start thinking about breaking the law. Eugene Debs case.

National Review wrote up the story neutrally, as did The Daily Wire, the Dailer Caller, and The College Fix, none of them either supporting Shaviro’s 1st Amendment rights or opposing them.

Professor Jonathan Turley said,

Shaviro’s words are worthy of our condemnation. However, a federal court could well order reinstatement if anything other than a temporary suspension for investigation is ordered by the university.

Professor Turley is wrong. He is right that Shaviro’s words are worthy of our condemnation. In fact, we should condemn him not just for calling for the death of Eric Rasmusen, but for his support for the abominations of sodomy and sex change operations. But essays in his defense are not the place to do it. It’s like making a back-handed compliment. It’s wrong to say that someone has quite a good figure, really, except for the big hips, and it’s wrong to say that someone has every right to say what he did, except it was outrageous and wrong.

What appalls me, though, is that Professor Turley, a law professor, a law professor who specializes in free speech law, said that a federal court would not order reinstatement if the suspension were just temporary for investigation. That is bad law. An illegal suspension is illegal whether it is for one day or one hundred. And this suspension is illegal. A professor can be suspended pending investigation only if his continuing to teach creates imminent danger. There is no such danger here. A university cannot, for example, suspend a professor for murdering his wife, unless there is cause to believe he is dangerous to someone else. The university could fire the professor moral turpitude, but it would need to give him due process. That means giving him a hearing, at a minimum, and letting him present his side of the story. At every university I know of, it means going through a long procedure of committee after committee, appeal after appeal, to make sure his rights are not violated. What a university may not do is to suspend the professor first, then investigate him for a year or two, then fire him, and then start the formal process. It’s very much like criminal law. Instead of execution first, trial afterwards, it’s trial first— but if, and only if, the defendant can be shown to be highly dangerous, he can be locked up until the trial.

Even worse was the single post on the subject in The Volokh Conspiracy, a supposedly libertarian blog. Princeton Politics Professor Keith Whittington not only refused to criticize the suspection; he scolded Shaviro for saying such colorful things.

Once the police investigation concludes, the professor's suspension should be lifted.

The professor would be well-advised to take a break from social media. Negative partisanship has gotten quite intense in our current environment, and the number of individuals who like to fantasize on social media about the death of their political opponents is truly disturbing.

Now would be a good time for the professor to recall the admonition in the AAUP Statement and the university's policy:

• “As a person of learning and an educational officer, he/she should remember that the public may judge his/her profession and his/her institution by his/her utterances. Hence he/she should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that he/she is not an institutional spokesperson.”

Does Professor Whittington really think there is any chance Facebook readers will think Professor Shaviro is an institutional spokesperson for Wayne State University? Is he himself willing to hold back on expressing his political views when “the public may judge politics professors and Princeton University by his utterances?” “Accuracy” here refers to facts, not opinions; what restraint is appropriate is a debatable question, and I think Professor Shaviro showed considerable respect for my opinions when he said they were so important that it would be worth killing me to stop me from persuading other people I’m right.

So far, I’ve been talking about the conservative or libertarian media (apologies if I’ve miscategorized anyone). Almost all liberal and leftwing writers were silent, presumably sympathizing with Professor Shaviro but not daring to defend him in public. Two exceptions were Popehat and Leiter Reports, which dared to defend the legality of his actions, but only with a big helping of moral condemnation to show that they don’t really approve of free speech that much and would like to apply social pressure to stop their fellow lefty from embarassing them.

Ken White at Popehat said:

Steven Shaviro, a Yale graduate and professor of English at Wayne State University, describes himself on Twitter as “Stealth assassin from the clouds. Science fiction. Music video. Alfred North Whitehead. Kitsch Marxist. Sex negative.” He is exactly what it says on the bottle; he is just like you would expect from someone who would talk like that. This week he’s infamous, in a desultory agitating-the-agitated sort of way, for needy and contrived praise of the murder of wrongthinkers.

Shaviro, a tenured Tantalus grasping for the sweet fruit of someone even momentarily paying attention to him, has thoughts about the recent debacle at Stanford Law School. Well, doesn't everyone? But Shaviro doesn’t want to vomit several thousand words at you until you cry uncle, like a thoughtful blogger. He aspires to edginess.

Univesity of Chicago Law School Professor Brian Leiter said in a blog post titled, “I do wish certain humanities professors would stop embarrassing the academy with pointlessly inflammatory social media posts,”

What's slightly nuts about Shaviro's post is analogizing mass murder to the expression of racist views:  speech and action aren't the same, despite the best efforts of many folks to confuse the two.  (Being an English professor, Shaviro throws in "transphobic" views to the list of views that warrant murder!)  Anyone who decides to kill a bigot will not be acquitted.  So Shaviro's post is idiotic and ignorant on many levels.

The University President, who is apparently as clueless as Shaviro, immediately suspended the professor,…

Leiter’s comments is particularly inapposite coming from someone whose speciality is Frederick Nietzsche, the king of edgy aphorisms such as, “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!"⁹

All praise, then, to FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. They supported Professor Shaviro unequivocally:

Whether taken at face value or read as oblique commentary on shouting down speakers, Shaviro’s post is squarely within the scope of the First Amendment. FIRE calls on Wayne State to reverse Shaviro’s suspension. 

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(iii) What Are the Bounds of Free Speech?

Not all speech is legal or should be legal. When someone tells a hit man to murder his wife, that is a crime. If someone announces publicly a reward for anyone who will murder his wife, that is a crime. If someone announce publicly that he wishes someone would murder his wife, however, that is not a crime, unless there is an implied reward (“Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”).

What is most difficult is when someone is not singling out a particular individual for violence but is saying knowing that his statements are likely to lead directly to murder. In particular, should be legal to belong to an organization that advocates for violent change and actually commits illegal acts on a regular basis and as part of its policy? That issue is the Loyalty Oath controversy of the 1940’s, and of whether the Communist Party should be legal.

The University of California's 1949 loyalty oath said:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of my office according to the best of my ability; that I do not believe in, and I am not a member of, nor do I support any party or organization that believes in, advocates, or teaches the overthrow of the United States Government, by force or by any illegal or unconstitutional means, that I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any oath or a party to any agreement or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath."

This seems reasonable to me. It says that an employee of the University of California should not help anyone trying to illegally overthrow the University of California. The Communist Party advocated the illegal overthrow of the University of California— and, at the time, was financed by a foreign government and active in espionage.¹⁰

I haven’t figured out what I think about two other examples, both from South Africa. One is Winnie Mandela, wife of the much-admired Nelson Mandela who became President of South Africa in 1994, who said eight years earlier "With our boxes of matches, and our necklaces, we shall liberate this country.” She was referring to the practice of lynching someone by putting a rubber tire drenched with gasoline around the chest of the victim and setting it on fire. This was a form of black-on-black violence once very common in South Africa— in the four-month period in which Mrs. Mandela praised it, 172 people were killed that way. Should she have been punished for her speech?

The other example is more recent. Now South Africa is ruled by Mandela’s political party. Black-on-black killing is still the most common, but from 1996 to 2016 some 1,500 white farmers were killed in about 15,000 farm attacks (out of about 45,000 white farms).¹¹ A very popular Xhosa/Zulu song, “Dubul Ibhunu” (“Shoot the Boer,” or, in its English version, “Shoot the Boer, Shoot the Farmer” goes like this:

The cowards are scared

shoot shoot

ayeah

shoot shoot

the cowards are scared

shoot shoot

awu yoh

shoot shoot

shoot the Boer

shoot shoot

shoot the Boer

shoot shoot

shoot the Boer

shoot shoot

shoot the Boer…

It’s rather repetitive, so I’ll stop there. Here it is sung by Julius Malema, who was leader of the ruling party’s youth league (red is the party color):

It’s often sung in English, too, as in the next video, which also contains other songs with the same theme.

Wikipedia tells the story thus:

In post-apartheid South Africa the song has been most notably sung by then African National Congress Youth League leader Julius Malema and then South African President Jacob Zuma. Critics of the song such as AfriForum and TAU-SA state the song encourages and can be partly blamed for the violent attacks on South African farms owned by white people.

In 2011, the South Gauteng High Court ruled that the song was discriminatory, harmful, undermined the dignity of Afrikaners, and thereby constituted hate speech. The court ruled that Julius Malema, who was brought before the court for previously singing the song at rallies, was forbidden from singing it in the future. Following the ruling Malema changed the wording of the song to "Kiss the Boer" and sang that instead—however, it can be argued to still have the same psychological influence as the original, due to the well-known context for the altered lyrics.

More recently, a court ruled that the song was not hate speech:

Malema again appeared in court in 2022 for allegedly singing the song in a case brought by Afriforum where the issue of whether or not the song was hate speech was debated. Judge Edwin Molahlehi of the Johannesburg High Court found that the chant and song was not intended to be taken seriously, that the reference to "boer" did not literally refer to white or Afrikaans people, and that it did not incite hatred towards white people generally; therefore the song was not hate speech. Afriforum seeks to appeal the judgement to the supreme court.

A South African sociologist has explained at length in a video that speech like this should not be banned, but he does not think Afriforum was racist in going to court to try to stop it. I don’t know what I’d do. Unlike Professor Shaviro, it is quite clear that Winny Mandela and Julius Malema are not just literally calling for murder to be committed, but that politically motivated murders are being committed by their supporters on a large scale. But they are not calling for specific people to be killed, just endorsing a general policy.

What do you think? Should their speech be criminal? If they were professors instead of politicians, should they be fired?

1. Those are both bad signs, but not fatal ones; One can be a scholarly Wayne State film critic, just as one can be an honest used-car salesman.

2. Which does not refer to Piet Hein’s poem, despite Robert Solow’s take on monetary theory.

3. Later made into a major qui-tam tax-suit; see New York State ex rel. Eric Rasmusen v. Citigroup, Inc.

4. Which for some reason keeps getting excluded from sociology journals. If anybody wants to publish it, please let Prof. Ramseyer or me know and we’ll submit to to you. Write me at erasmuse@indiana.edu.

5. She did issue a call for secret informants and an investigation of the heinous offenses a loathsome person like me must have committed, but that’s a story for a different day. By the way, while I hold many views that Provost Robel hates, she got my specific views wrong; do not believe the bullet points in her memo.

The President of the Indiana University system made no comment. He was a man, unlike the Dean and Provost, and he was politically too canny to put himself at risk by taking sides. It is noteworthy that when he retired the next year, the Provost was one of the top two candidates to succeed him that the faculty search committee suggested, but the Trustees rejected them both and restarted the search. The Provost returned to her position as a tenured law professor.

6. Recall, however, what Plutarch wrote in his life of Julius Caesar about what happened after Caesar was captured by pirates when he was a young man:

For thirty-eight days, with the greatest unconcern, he joined in all their games and exercises, just as if he was their leader instead of their prisoner.

He also wrote poems and speeches which he read aloud to them, and if they failed to admire his work, he would call them to their faces illiterate savages, and would often laughingly threaten to have them all hanged. They were much taken with this and attributed his freedom of speech to a kind of simplicity in his character or boyish playfulness.

However, the ransom arrived from Miletus and, as soon as he had paid it and been set free, he immediately manned some ships and set sail from the harbor of Miletus against the pirates. He found them still there, lying at anchor off the island, and he captured nearly all of them.

He took their property as spoils of war and put the men themselves into the prison at Pergamon. He then went in person to [Marcus] Junius, the governorof Asia, thinking it proper that he, as praetor in charge of the province, should see to the punishment of the prisoners.

Junius, however, cast longing eyes at the money, which came to a considerable sum, and kept saying that he needed time to look into the case.Caesar paid no further attention to him. He went to Pergamon, took the pirates out of prison and crucified the lot of them, just as he had often told them he would do when he was on the island and they imagined that he was joking.

7. He is a 69-year-old English professor with a BA and PhD from Yale, so he was trained to write by traditional English professos like the novelist Robert Penn Warren, the randy but readable Harold Bloom, and my own teachers there, Bart Giamatti and John Hollander. I doubt a younger, 40-year-old, English professor would know how to write so well.

8. On the other hand, perhaps we can.

9. In German,

"Gieb mir, Weib, deine kleine Wahrheit!" sagte ich. Und also sprach das alte Weiblein: "Du gehst zu Frauen? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!" — "Von alten und jungen Weiblein" in Also Sprach Zarathustra, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Other examples of Nietzsche’s bite are

The Germans are like women, you can scarcely ever I fathom their depths—they haven't any, and that's the end of it. Thus they cannot even be called shallow. That which is called "deep" in Germany, is precisely this instinctive uncleanliness towards one's self, of which I have just spoken: people refuse to be clear in regard to their own natures. Might I be allowed, perhaps, to suggest the word "German" as an international epithet denoting this psychological depravity? (Ecce Homo)

and

One had better put on gloves before reading the New Testament. The presence of so much filth makes it very advisable. One would as little choose “early Christians” for companions as Polish Jews: not that one need seek out an objection to them.... Neither has a pleasant smell.—I have searched the New Testament in vain for a single sympathetic touch; nothing is there that is free, kindly, open-hearted or upright. In it humanity does not even make the first step upward—the instinct for cleanliness is lacking.... (The Antichrist)

Nietzsche’s Victorian readers were clearly not as sensitive about hearing themselves disparaged as the more liberated Americans of today.

10. On Soviet financing: “The American Communist Con Man: The story of Gus Hall, grifter and embezzler,” Commentary, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes. On spying: “A Closer Look Under The Bed: Why all the fuss about domestic communism in the 20th century?” Claremont Review of Books, William A. Rusher (2004), and “WAS MCCARTHY RIGHT ABOUT THE LEFT?” The Washington Post, Nicholas von Hoffman (1996).

11. “Land reform in South Africa: 5 myths about farming debunked,” The Conversation, Johann Kirsten and Wandile Sihlobo (2022). 242,221 households have farming as their primary or secondary occupation, and the article estimates 18% of them are white. Wikipedia’s “South African farm attacks” gives 1,544 as one estimate of the nuumber of murders, and the table of reported attacks adds up to something around 15,000.