DETROIT (LifeSiteNews) — An English professor at Wayne State University (WSU) was suspended Monday after encouraging the murder of conservative speakers on college campuses.
“This morning, I was made aware of a social media post by a Wayne State University professor in our Department of English,” reads a statement from WSU president Dr. M. Roy Wilson.
“The post stated that rather than ‘shouting down’ those with whom we disagree, one would be justified to commit murder to silence them,” the statement continued. “We have on many occasions defended the right of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but we feel this post far exceeds the bounds of reasonable or protected speech. It is, at best, morally reprehensible and, at worst, criminal.”
“We have referred this to law enforcement agencies for further review and investigation,” Wilson concluded. “Pending their review, we have suspended the professor with pay, effective immediately.”
The announcement came after Steven Shaviro, a professor at WSU’s English department, advocated for killing conservative speakers on college campuses in a social media post. It is unclear, however, if the professor referenced in Wilson’s statement is Shaviro, and Shaviro has since deleted all his social media posts dating back to 2015.
Shaviro made the post on Facebook over the weekend, saying “Although I do not advocate violating federal and state criminal codes, I think it is far more admirable to kill a racist, homophobic, or transphobic speaker than it is to shout them down.”
“When right-wing groups invite such speakers to campus, it is precisely because they want to provoke an incident that discredits the left, and gives more publicity and validation to these reprehensible views than they could otherwise attain,“ the post continued.
“The protesters get blamed instead of the bigoted speaker; the university administration finds a perfect excuse to side publicly with the racists or phobes; the national and international press has a field day saying that bigots are the ones being oppressed, rather than the people those bigots actually hate being the victims of oppression,“ Shaviro wrote.
Shaviro further alluded to the 1926 murder of former president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic Symon Petliura by Sholem Schwarzbard, a Russian-born French poet and anarchist, in Paris. “The exemplary historical figure in this regard is Sholem Schwarzbard, who assassinated the anti-Semitic butcher Symon Petliura, rather than try to shout him down,” the post read. “Remember that Schwarzbard was acquitted by a jury, which found his actions justified.”
Shaviro’s post follows an incident that occurred at Stanford Law School in which a Trump-appointed federal district judge, Kyle Duncan, was shouted down at a lecture he was scheduled to give at the invitation of the school’s Federalist Society. When Duncan attempted to call in an administrator to restore order, Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach arrived and took the side of the disruptive students, proceeding to lecture the federal judge about his alleged errors.
Jenny Martinez, Dean of Stanford Law School, issued an apology letter to Duncan, though has faced intimidation as a result, including a “makeshift walk of shame,” with students silently lining hallways staring her down after a class.