Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at New Jersey’s Essex County College, appeared on Tucker Carlson’s primetime Fox News show earlier this month to debate the merits of a blacks-only Memorial Day party held by a New York City chapter of Black Lives Matter​. Carlson, as he does, provoked Durden. “You’re demented, actually,” he said. “You’re sick, and what you’re saying is disgusting.” Durden, a media personality herself, did not respond in kind. “Boo-hoo,” she said, “you white people are angry because you couldn’t use your ‘white privilege’ card to get invited to the Black Lives Matter all-black Memorial Day celebration.”



Black Lives Matter​ group in New York holds an "exclusively black" Memorial Day party... and asks all other races to stay away. pic.twitter.com/M24KFpXzPw — Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 7, 2017

Two days later, Essex County College suspended Durden, and last week she was fired. Because of Durden’s appearance, school president Anthony E. Munroe wrote on Friday, “The College was immediately inundated with feedback from students, faculty and prospective students and their families expressing frustration, concern and even fear that the views expressed by a College employee (with influence over students) would negatively impact their experience on the campus…. While the adjunct who expressed her personal views in a very public setting was in no way claiming to represent the views and beliefs of the College, and does not represent the College, her employment with us and potential impact on students required our immediate review into what seemed to have become a very contentious and divisive issue.”

This justification for Durden’s firing, while disappointing, didn’t surprise me. I’m also a college professor, and appeared on Carlson’s show in April to defend my New Republic article about why colleges have a right to reject hateful speakers. While my appearance didn’t generate the same controversy as Durden’s, a wave of people contacted my school, Colby College in Maine, in an attempt to have me fired (they apparently missed the irony of trying to get someone fired for their speech, about speech, because you disagree with that speech). In addition, my colleagues in the English department, plus a few lucky senior administrators, have been hapless recipients of racist and anti-Semitic diatribes, thus burdening our IT staff.

Meanwhile, I received thousands of insults and threats. Beginning mere minutes after my appearance, I was deluged with emails and instant messages calling me a “fucking liberal idiot,” “pussy snowflake,” “ignorant and hypocritical cunt,” “fucking Nazi,” and “Jew fag.” Strangers threatened to break my legs, scalp me, and make me “eat a bullet.” One wished, in all-caps, “Hopefully you get robbed and killed by an illegal immigrant that was deported five times and he leaves you to bleed to death slowly so you have time [to] realize how fucking stupid you were all along.” There have also been repeated and likely actionable defamation attempts, which I’m still dealing with. (It’s also worth noting that I’m a straight, white, male, tenure-track professor at a top-tier institution that supports my public engagement, which is to say my experience with strangers eroticizing my slow death has been less traumatic than most professors’. I can only imagine—though I’d rather not—the bile directed privately at Durden.)

This was all in response to my careful argument about how campuses should handle invitations to speakers who are intentional provocateurs. Indeed, I had to remind Carlson and his audience no fewer than three times, in a roughly seven-minute TV segment, that I stand emphatically opposed to any sort of violence, from the left or the right, that would shut down free speech. While the right was calling for my job (and my head), I was meeting and corresponding with members of Colby’s chapter of the Young America’s Foundation, a conservative youth organization, to discuss campus free speech issues. Over five years, in hundreds of pages of teaching evaluations by my students, I haven’t received a single complaint about political bias.