Campus Racial Thought-Crimes
As the Maoist-like purges on university campuses continue, yet another faculty member has suffered the consequences of speaking words that may not be spoken and having views that are forbidden at universities where woke students, pretending to be supremely tolerant, indict others with their actual intolerance and join with faculty and administrators in suppressing views that they will not and cannot abide.
The latest victim is Charles Negy, an associate professor in the University of Central Florida’s Psychology Department. Negy’s thought-crime? In now-deleted tweets, Negy, who has taught at UCF for 22 years and presumably enjoys the protection oftenure, questioned one of the prevailing absolutes on university campuses: namely, that what is called “systemic racism” permeates and defines American society, and that even on university campuses—those places where the most enlightened and sensitive of all citizens reside—racism still shows itself in a dark undercurrent of bigotry, bias, and repressed hatred for non-white others.
The ubiquity of race obsession on campuses in the post-George Floyd age of Black Lives Matter has shown itself at schools other than UCF, as well. At Princeton University, as one noteworthy example, self-inflicted racial guilt was so prevalent that in September the University’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, published a self-flagellating open letter in which he bemoaned the fact that “[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.”
Negy rejected this notion and made the mistake of publicly questioning the idea that racism is so prevalent, so unrelenting that it defines all of our interactions and is the reason why, Negy mused, that Asians, as one visible example, thrive academically, economically, and socially while blacks do not.
“If Afr. [sic] Americans as a group,” Negy tweeted, “had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?” What Negy suggested, of course, is heresy in the victim-centered culture of academia, where personal responsibility and initiative are discounted, and the oppression of the dominant white culture is assumed to be the principal impediment to the personal achievement of non-white groups.
White people, it is widely assumed, are “privileged” and control the culture and the levers of power; and black people struggle against these cultural and economic defenses at a fundamental disadvantage—all stemming from the country’s original sin of slavery. White people, because they are believed to be essentially racist just by virtue of being white, are implicitly racist, should experience white guilt, and must publicly acknowledge and atone for their racist inclinations.
Professor Negy challenged that notion, suggesting that decades of affirmative action, race-based preferences in hiring and college admissions, and set asides and other benefits of the welfare state have actually given black people advantages not shared with their white peers, that black people enjoy a type of privilege, too. “Black privilege is real,” Negy wrote in another now-deleted tweet. “Besides affirm. [sic] action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback.”
This was all too much for the sensitive and tolerant souls on the UCF campus, and a Change.org petition, which garnered some 30,000 signatures, was soon circulating in which Negy’s firing was demanded. UCF president Alexander Cartwright, who apparently was eager to satisfy the mob and fire the tenured professor for his offensive thoughts, did recognize that, as a public institution, UCF had to respect and honor Negy’s constitutional right to express any ideas he wished to, admitting in an interview that “The Constitution restricts our ability to fire him or any other University employee for expressing personal opinions about matters of public concern. This is the law.”
Any view which asks black people to be responsible for their own successes and failures, of course, contradicts the prevailing belief that blacks are perennial victims of white oppression and white privilege, that their social and economic failure is the result of systemic racism, and that their options in life are hobbled by the legacy of slavery, living in a racist country, and suffering because of a system of oppression that is both institutionalized and designed to maintain the status quo in which a white society benefits from and creates racial inequity. Negy challenged that orthodoxy.
Workers must have a right to free speech
The policing of workers’ private communications continues apace. The latest episode comes in a little-reported employment tribunal case from the north-east last week.
A Darlington classic-car dealer had a blazing row with his employee, Michael Austin, a paint-sprayer, over the way the business was run. Austin mentioned the spat on his Facebook page and complained of feeling low as a result of it. Numerous Facebook friends rallied round – all too enthusiastically, as it turned out. One suggested that Austin should punch his employer’s face. Another, knowing the employer to be gay, called him all sorts of uncomplimentary names, including ‘shirtlifter’. Despite having made no comment on any of these unedifying posts, Austin found himself unceremoniously sacked, apparently on the basis that he had broken his employer’s policy on social-media posts and had brought the business into disrepute.
Austin went to the employment tribunal, and (for once in a freedom-of-speech case) won, taking away nearly £30,000. The Facebook exchange didn’t, the judge said, seem to have had any serious effect on the employer’s reputation beyond the Facebook circle concerned. And whatever restrictions the company’s social-media policy might put on employees, it didn’t cover stupid things that third parties said there.
Good news? Up to a point. We still need to worry. For one thing, it is depressing that any employer should regard it as acceptable to fire a worker in a case like this. Austin was sacked for a private posting on a private account in a private capacity – and not even for anything he said. The alleged sackable offence was, as far as one can see, one of omission – nothing more than failure to contradict what his friends said. Things are coming to a pretty pass when employees are at risk from what they don’t say as much as from what they do. Whatever the ultimate result in court, no decent employer should even think of disciplining their workers in cases like this.
For another, we have to remember that in cases of this kind the outcome can very much depend on the employment judge, whose findings tend to be upheld on appeal unless they are clearly misguided. Austin, one suspects, was lucky. The judge he was allocated clearly saw the sacking for the piece of self-important pomposity and mountain-out-of-molehill-making that it was, and decided accordingly. But success wasn’t guaranteed. It’s not inconceivable that a different employment judge would have found that if he continued posting on Facebook without calling out what others said, he was implicitly approving their responses, and that there had been at least a danger that the comments would spread to the wider community of classic-car buyers. You are not, in other words, as safe as you think.
In the background, however, there lurks a further problem. Some European countries, such as France, regard it as beyond question that a person’s right to freedom of speech – however defined – applies as much against his employer as it does against the state. (Indeed, the French courts are also, as a rule, pretty generous to the employee in this respect.) We ought to have a similar rule here, but we don’t.
In the UK, subject possibly to the European Convention on Human Rights in very extreme cases (not even human-rights lawyers are quite sure about this), it is simply a matter of reading the contract of employment. If your contract – which in all but a handful of cases comes presented to you on a take-it-or-leave-it basis – says it is a sackable offence to post politically controversial matter on Twitter or make public comments on transgender issues, that’s it. Matters of this sort automatically become the employer’s business, whether they otherwise ought to or not. It is high time we had legal protection for employees’ speech on private social media – and indeed in a private capacity generally, whatever a contract of employment might say to the contrary.
There is some hope that there may be progress here. The Joint Select Committee on Human Rights under Harriet Harman, currently looking at free speech in the round, recently asked for views on whether free-speech protection for employees was adequate. We shall have to wait for the outcome, though perhaps without a great deal of hope. (You have until 31 January to submit written evidence to the inquiry.)
Meanwhile, however, you can be sure of one thing. Employers’ lawyers will have read about the Austin case. As you read this article, it is a racing certainty that some of them will be busy redrafting contracts of employment to say that employees must take reasonable steps to moderate their social-media feeds and thus make sure that if this ever happens again the employer will win. Until we have proper worker free-speech protections allowing workers to talk, there is, unfortunately, something else that most certainly will: employers’ money.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/25/workers-must-have-a-right-to-free-speech/
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