Scott Lucas is a writer in Oakland, California, and a contributor at San Francisco magazine.

The anonymous tip came in at 10:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 6. There it sat for almost 24 hours, until Rob Shimshock, a 22-year-old reporter for the Daily Caller in Washington, found it in the site’s generic inbox, an electronic slush pile. The unsigned email contained links to a few tweets, as well as to the biographical page of an untenured history lecturer at California State University, Fresno—Lars Maischak.

The author was obscure, but the tweets were explosive. On February 17, Maischak had posted on Twitter about the new president: “To save American democracy, Trump must hang. The sooner and higher the better. #TheResistance #DeathtoFascism.” Two days later, he wrote: “#TheResistance Has anyone started soliciting money and design drafts for a monument honoring the Trump assassin, yet?” And on February 22: “#TheResistance #ethniccleansing Justice = The execution of two Republicans for each deported immigrant.”


This was the kind of story the novice reporter Shimshock, who had interned for Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart News as a college student, had been trained to cover. “I saw the incitement to violence and the abject scorn” for conservatives, Shimshock told me. He sent an email to the lecturer to confirm that the account belonged to him, and to Fresno State for a response. Maischak didn’t write back, but a school spokesperson did, saying that the tweets did not reflect the university’s views. So at 8:41 p.m. on Friday, the Daily Caller published its story: “Professor: ‘Trump Must Hang,’ Republicans Should Be Executed For Each Immigrant Deported.”

In an instant, it was as if Maischak, who had only 28 Twitter followers at the time, had wandered alone across the Demilitarized Zone, armed with a squirt gun, into nuclear North Korea. The Daily Caller wrote four stories about him in eight days. Breitbart opined that Maischak’s tweets were evidence why “universities across the country are now viewed with disdain by average, salt-of-the-earth Americans.” “Fox & Friends” weighed in with condemnation, as did the Blaze and Gateway Pundit. Here, they said, was a prime example of how the left’s hatred for Donald Trump was quickly curdling into something violent—and being protected by America’s out-of-touch system of higher education. The mainstream media picked up the story too, from the Los Angeles Times to the Washington Post, which held up the lecturer as one of several rhetorical bomb-throwers “to suffer the consequences for publicly wishing death upon Trump.”

Since the initial burst of notoriety, Maischak, who says he received hundreds of death threats on Twitter and email, has declined to speak publicly at length about his tweets, taking the advice of his attorney to lie low. Fresno State administrators put him on leave for the rest of the spring semester and moved him to a non-teaching job this fall; the fate of his job after the spring of 2018, the last semester remaining on his contract, is still unclear.

But now, Maischak is ready to talk. In an interview in August, he told me that he regrets nothing, insisting that his comments were taken out of context by a right-wing media intent on creating a scandal, and fueled by a university administration unwilling to back up what he sees as academically protected free speech. “The university has never bothered to find the facts,” he says. If his contract isn’t renewed, he is considering suing Fresno State. “Our attorneys are talking,” the university president, Joseph Castro, told me, while declining to answer specific questions about Maischak’s future.

Whether or not Maischak deserves to keep teaching, his story is emblematic of a dilemma for higher-education institutions in the Trump era: to defend comments by faculty members that, on their face, are indefensible, or to soft-pedal academic freedom as an emboldened right-wing media searches for targets? According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, schools around the country—ranging from Fresno State to Dartmouth to Essex Community College in Delaware—have “distanced themselves from scholars” under fire from right-wing media in nine cases this year, as of the end of June. Earlier this month, a professor at Austin Community College resigned after tweeting about Trump’s education secretary, “I’m not wishing for it...but I’d be ok if #BetsyDevos was sexually assaulted.”

Most of the discussion over campus free speech in the Trump era has centered on conservative provocateurs like Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon and Ann Coulter, whose recent attempts to visit college campuses have been met with intense backlash, even violence, thanks to their alignment with Trump and his politics. There have been countless viewpoints aired about whether universities should defend speech that their students deem offensive or hateful—with many conservatives and other free-speech defenders fingering weak-kneed college kids and their overprotective administrators for stifling the exchange of ideas. But Maischak’s case is a kind of fun-house mirror inversion of that debate: What do colleges and universities do when their left-wing faculty are the ones whose speech goes too far?



***

I met Maischak over lunch and beers at a restaurant near where he lives in California’s Central Valley, on a punishingly hot August day. In person, he is relaxed and conversational, speaking in German-accented English and still bearing the blinking, confused mien of an academic accustomed to a kind of noble irrelevancy but now thrust into an unaccustomed spotlight.

Born in Bremen, Germany, Maischak, 47, received his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University. He published his only book in 2013, a project that grew out of his dissertation about conservative German merchants sailing the Atlantic in the 19th century. In part, it was a story about how far-right ideas spread in his home country—the kind of ideas that formed the soil in which fascism later grew. In the book’s prologue, Maischak straightforwardly wrote that he had made “use of the works of Karl Marx,” and, to this day, he openly identifies as a Marxist.

Fresno State’s Lars Maischak, a German-born historian, says his tweets about Trump hanging were intended as an academic argument about the how fascist regimes end. | Chueyee Yang/The Collegian

Maischak has taught in the history department at Fresno State for the past 11 years. Like many academics, he is not on track to receive tenure. It’s a precarious existence. The school hires him on three-year contracts, heavy on teaching requirements and light on time for research or writing. Still, Maischak was content with the gig. In our conversation, he waxed about the simple pleasures of a marginal post at a state university, raising a family and studying Hegel’s works one paragraph at a time at a local coffee shop, with a study group made up of a philosophy student, a chemist and an IHOP waitress. During the recession, when he was assigned to teach fewer classes, he moonlighted as a video game designer on a modification to Europa Universalis IV, an intricate simulation of world history that makes Civilization look like checkers.

As Trump rose to political prominence, the historian came to believe, as he still does, that the now-president is best described as a fascist. Historically, several leaders of fascist governments—Benito Mussolini, Hideki Tojo, Vidkun Quisling, to name a few—have faced execution at the hands of political opponents. So, Maischak says, he believed Trump could meet the same fate. He told me he presented a version of that argument in his classes after the election, but it didn’t go over very well. “It got students who voted for Trump very angry,” Maischak says. With an eye toward writing a book he has provisionally titled Fascism in America, the lecturer took to Twitter instead to spitball his ideas.

Even though Maischak’s most inflammatory tweet in February used the phrase “must hang” and “The sooner and higher the better,” he says he was making a descriptive claim about what might happen to Trump—not a prescriptive one about what should happen. “That was the point of those tweets,” he insists, “to say that you’re going down the dark side. There isn’t much I can do about it, but historically, it hasn’t gone unpunished.” Maischak says he never expected the tweets to go viral, and he isn’t sure how they came to the attention of the Daily Caller more than a month later. (Shimshock told me he doesn’t know the identity of the anonymous tipster either.)

Maischak tried to explain himself on Twitter in the days after the Daily Caller story was published, but he quickly realized his point was being misunderstood. Aside from the national media attention and online death threats he received, local talk radio hosts in Fresno, one of California’s more conservative cities, excoriated him on the air for hours at a time. The Secret Service opened an investigation into the tweets, though it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. “I haven’t heard back,” Maischak says. On April 12, five days after the Daily Caller story was published, the lecturer issued an apology and deleted his Twitter account.

The same day, Castro, the university president, released a statement saying, “Dr. Maischak reiterated that it was not his intent to incite violence or harm others, however, Fresno State has a responsibility to continue a review of the situation.” Maischak’s job at the university was still in jeopardy. As a lecturer, he belongs to an employee union, which offers him some protections. But the union’s collective bargaining agreement with the university doesn’t cover social media use on a personal Twitter account. (Unrelated to the incident, the faculty senate is working on a new policy to address this.) In a phone call and a meeting with university administrators, Maischak says he was pressured to resign voluntarily and that an offer to be reassigned to another CSU campus went nowhere. Castro declined to comment on the specifics of the negotiation but told me, “Every action we have taken has been fully consistent with our collective bargaining agreement with his union. I believe we have shown him respect throughout the process.” Eventually, Maischak agreed to be placed on paid leave for the remainder of the spring semester, with substitutes covering his classes; the school announced the decision on April 18.

The reaction among students was fairly measured. That same day, the student newspaper ran an editorial that argued, “While Maischak is entitled to his own opinion and has the right to share that opinion, it is his responsibility as a professor at a public university to uphold a persona that welcomes all students—not one that isolates those who support the president.” The article concluded, “In a situation like Maischak’s, there seems to be no happy ending.” According to Maischak, his own students were mostly supportive. He ran into one at the grocery store after he had taken leave, he says, and the student said hello and that he thought Maischak had a point. A few students emailed him similar views, he told me.

Maischak theorizes that conservative donors to Fresno State had something to do with the school’s decision to suspend him for the semester, though the evidence is thin. In December 2016, two other members of the school’s history department wrote an op-ed in the Fresno Bee tying Trump to the white supremacist ideology of Dylann Roof, who killed nine African-Americans in a South Carolina church in 2015. On Twitter, Maischak began sparring about the article with some Fresno conservatives. One of them was Michael Der Manouel, a local talk radio contributor, Fresno State alumnus and major donor to the school’s football team who describes his politics as America First and anti-political correctness. (He tweets under the handle @LincolnFresno.) Maischak intimates that Der Manouel and other Fresno State football donors pressured Castro to keep the lecturer off campus for the spring semester. In an interview, Der Manouel told me, “A lot of faculty has gone completely berserk.” But both he and Castro deny Maischak’s claim; Der Manouel and Castro met in February, both told me, but they said it was to discuss an unrelated matter.

Over the summer, when a gunman wounded several people at a Republican congressional baseball practice in Virginia, Fox News cited Maischak’s comments as evidence that “media pundits and activist groups bear responsibility for unsettling political discourse that has crossed the line of civility and could spawn acts such as” the shooting. In early August, the university removed Maischak from the classroom for the 2017-2018 school year and assigned him to an off-campus role redesigning two online courses; Fresno State’s final decision about whether to renew Maischak’s contract is still forthcoming. Usually, university faculty fight to receive off-campus assignments that amount to little more than make-work, but Maischak says the message that he received was clear: The university wants him gone.



***

At issue for Maischak is that he believes his tweets, while provocative, should be protected as free, academic discourse. “It is my job to offend, not out of habit or attitude, but because I need to describe things as accurately as possible, especially when it comes to people in power,” he says. You don’t fire the doctor, in other words, for telling you about the cancer. Maischak also believes that, by sidelining him, the university is siding with a right-wing mob calling for his head and telling him, in his words, “If you don’t want to die, leave your job.”

When I spoke by phone with Castro earlier this month, while he was in Alabama to watch Fresno State play the country’s No. 1-ranked college football team, he rejected Maischak’s claim that the university was taking political sides. He noted that he had recently spoken out in favor of Dreamer students, whose status in the country could be jeopardized under Trump’s proposed changes to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, and that he was now fielding calls from donors and alumni about that decision. “We try to be transparent,” Castro says.

As to whether Maischak’s tweets should be protected as free speech, Castro said he wouldn’t say. More broadly, he told me, “This particular matter—along with others around the country—very much places universities in a position where we can education our community about what is and what is not free speech,” adding, “In general, our students are not fully aware of what the First Amendment includes.” Whether Maischak’s tweets should be read as a call to the barricades or the musings of a historian, chances are this won’t be the last time Castro, not to mention other college presidents across the country, has to make that call.

In Fresno, I pushed Maischak—none of this would have happened if he hadn’t tweeted what he did. It’s hard to believe he’ll see the inside of a classroom at Fresno State ever again. And what other school would hire him now, given what they could find by Googling him? Didn’t he feel some remorse, at least for his phrasing? He replied, with a touch of grandiosity, that he does not. “You can’t honestly regret saying something that was true just because of the consequences,” he told me. “I’m with [Martin] Luther on that one. Here I stand, I cannot help it.”

There’s just one thing Maischak says he would have done differently if he could live the moment over again: “I would probably have made the Twitter account private, had I realized you could easily do that.”