On Tuesday evening, Randa Jarrar, a creative-writing professor at California State University at Fresno, wrote a series of insensitive and politically incorrect tweets. The next day, amid national outrage, the school’s provost gave a news conference denouncing Jarrar’s “deeply disrespectful statements,” and telling journalists that the “incident is under review.” The Fresno Bee quoted the school’s president, Joseph Castro: “A professor with tenure does not have blanket protection to say and do what they wish.”

This case shows that threats to free speech on campus are very real. It also shows that, contrary to a great deal of hype, these threats don’t come only, or even primarily, from the left.

Jarrar, who is an award-winning Arab-American writer, got herself in trouble for attacking Barbara Bush, whose death on Tuesday occasioned heartfelt bipartisan encomiums. “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal,” Jarrar wrote in a since-deleted tweet. She went on to call the former first lady a “witch” and said she can’t wait for “the rest of her family to fall to their demise.” Her tasteless words became an international story; a Fresno TV station even aired an interview with her ex-husband denouncing her.

I’m not going to defend Jarrar’s tweets. It’s true that, as people celebrate Bush’s extraordinary life, her Marie Antoinette side has gotten lost. (Shortly before her son ordered the invasion of Iraq, she said she didn’t want to waste her “beautiful mind” worrying about “body bags and deaths.”) But it’s indecent to let politics erase everything admirable about a person, especially at the moment of her death. And wishing for the demise of a family — even a family that includes politicians who have done terrible things — is grotesque.