Photo: Graffiti seen in North Austin reading “Pedo Hubbard, Watch Your Back”

By Robert Madrone

This afternoon, Incendiary received a photo of graffiti reading “Pedo Hubbard, Watch Your Back” on the side of a building off of N. Lamar Blvd in North Austin. “Pedo” is used as a shorthand for pedophile. The graffiti appears to be in reference to Thomas Hubbard, a classics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who has recently been targeted by outraged students at the school for his promotion of pedophilia in the guise of the study of homosexuality in Greco-Roman cultures.

Another photo shows a green house with a tarp covering parts of the front porch, and a small amount of red spray paint exposed behind the tarp. Incendiary has confirmed that this is Hubbard’s residence, and that the graffiti underneath the tarp is another reference to his heinous teachings. A hammer and sickle is also visible in the driveway, echoing graffiti against Richard Morrisett in 2017, a professor who was targeted by students for beating his wife.

Hubbard has taught at UT Austin since 2000, where he has held classes on topics such as, “Homosexuality in Ancient Greece & Rome,” which are mere covers for studying and promoting relationships between men and pre-pubescent boys, which Hubbard has called “proper learning experiences.”

Hubbard seeks to import the sexual practices and ideologies of aristocratic slave societies to present-day society, and has described age of consent laws, which prohibit sexual activity between adults and minors, as a “sad by-product” of a “self-righteous era.”

While on the surface, bourgeois society prohibits sexual activity between adults and minors, in fact, youth are hyper sexualized and vulnerable to predators under modern day capitalism, putting Hubbard more in line with bourgeois exploiters than not. The decades of tolerance of his academic work in the bourgeois university, which is not merely historical study, but open advocacy for pedophilic relationships, is clear proof of this. UT has said that Hubbard’s work is “protected speech,” even as it is used by the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) to try and lower the age of consent.

Professors such as Hubbard have been the focus of an upswell of student organizing on the UT campus, primarily led by women, against abusive and predatory professors who exploit their power dynamics to pursue their own sexual gratification. The graffiti in the streets and on Hubbard’s own home shows that the outrage toward predatory and ideologically bankrupt academics is not just held by students, but will spill off the campus and among the broader masses, who will take action against the defenders of backwards and anti-people ideas.