As founder and director of the Center for Terrorism Law at St. Mary’s University, right-leaning law professor Jeffrey Addicott has made plenty of controversial public statements over the past two decades.

“I’ve done over 5,000 media interviews since the founding of the center (in 2003),” he told me, “and over 900 speeches from all over the world.”

Two weeks ago, one speech finally landed Addicott in trouble. Speaking in Travis Park in defense of a statue honoring Confederate soldiers, Addicott threatened to “beat the living daylights” out of any racists there.

That sort of rhetoric might seem out of place coming from someone who lauds the policies of President Donald Trump. It fits, though, with Addicott’s far-right rationale for keeping the Confederate monument in place: The Civil War “wasn’t about slavery,” he said at the rally. “It was about money.”

The war, of course, was about slavery, a fact Texas itself made clear in 1861 in its Declaration of Causes for secession. People of “non-slave-holding States … demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States,” Texas groused.

It wasn’t Addicott’s misrepresentation of history, though, that prompted a rebuke from St. Mary’s President Thomas Mengler, who released a statement calling Addicott’s comments “deeply troubling.” According to Mengler, it was solely Addicott’s evocation of violence that crossed a line.

“St. Mary’s stands in support of academic freedom … whether that speech is from the left, the right, the mainstream,” Mengler told me this week. “Threats of violence, under any circumstances, whether in Travis Park or in the classroom or in the bar, are always unacceptable, and they’re particularly unacceptable for a professor at a Catholic university.

“We’re trying to model behavior for our students,” he added.

By demanding civility, Mengler is fighting against a strong current. Addicott’s violent speech was merely an echo of behavior modeled across the political and cultural spectrum in recent months, from Trump urging supporters to “knock the hell” out of protesters at his rallies to the left debating whether it’s “OK to punch a Nazi.”

After days of declining to comment on the matter, Addicott offered a mea culpa of sorts on Wednesday.

“If you google that idiom that I used, you can see what the definition is,” he said. “It’s an idiomatic expression to express extreme displeasure. But it can also be viewed as violent speech.

“The university was right,” he added. “I was wrong. I screwed up.”

How badly did he screw up?

Addicott has uttered problematic political statements before, always under the aegis of a “fully operational research center dedicated to the study of legal and policy issues associated with terrorism,” as the Center for Terrorism Law defines itself.

This week, for instance, Addicott told me that “no torture ever occurred at Guantanamo Bay. There’s enhanced interrogation techniques. But no torture.”

I find it noxious to suggest that force-feedings, sleep deprivation, stress positions and beatings don’t constitute torture. But at least this claim stimulates thought, discussion, debate.

Threatening to injure someone for exercising their First Amendment rights, whether that someone is protesting hate or spewing hate, is an attack on free speech, period — the same basic right that made Addicott’s many public-speaking engagements possible.

In any case, you can’t punch the alt-right out of America, just as nobody’s going to knock the hell out of the resistance. If anything, violence only hardens divisions.

That’s why Mengler was right, as the leader of an institution of higher learning, to defend the role of education in leading us out of the darkness.

“At bottom, it’s respect for the dignity of every individual,” Mengler said. “We want to model the kind of behavior that moves our culture forward in constructive ways.”

bchasnoff@express-news.net