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There are many marvelous professors here at Indiana University, many glittering luminaries of the academic world. Some, I'm sure, will shimmer with tenure for years to come. Alas, others just can’t seem to stay employed.
Jessica Adams lectured at the IU School of Social Work. On June 30, she lost her job for showing a graphic in class that identified sayings like “Make America Great Again” and “Columbus Day” as covert forms of white supremacy.
Sen. Jim Banks’ office brought the incident to IU’s attention when a student complained.
Now, Banks and other Indiana Republicans — including Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and U.S. Rep. Erin Houchin, whose 9th Congressional District covers Bloomington — demand that IU fire Elizabeth Booker Houston, an adjunct professor at the McKinney School of Law.
Three days after Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, died, Houston delivered a “congratudolences” cake to his office. Then, on X, Houston wrote in a post directed at Graham’s sister, “Your brother is burning in hell.”
I’m not saying Houston brought this persecution on herself. (A tour of her X page suggests she doesn’t mind, anyway.) Though objectively, a “congratudolences” cake is tactless. And even Christ’s vicar refrains from delivering such anathemas as she uttered. (The equinanimous Pope St. John Paul II not only blessed his mortal enemies, but visited them in prison.)
I’m not saying Houston should have been more reticent because, after all, this is a free country. Among this country’s chief freedoms is that of speech. Which is not to suggest that the Constitution guarantees our right to say anything whatsoever. The right to free speech, sacrosanct as it is, is downstream of the more awesome duty to true speech. Thus, we may sue charlatans among our fellow citizens for offenses such as slander.
But it’s true that our species has — compared to, say, the angels — a dull sense of the truth. Because of this impairment, and because it contradicts truth’s spiritual nature to compel knowledge by brute means, it’s also true that our right to free speech must be liberally, nearly plenarily, padded. Let God judge the truth and love in our words, and Houston’s words; let us stick to guarding our own tongues.
Alas, that is not the puritan mindset.
The United States has always carried on a sober, yet somewhat messy, love affair with puritanism. This black belt-buckle hatted romance stretches from the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s exile of Anne Hutchinson in 1638 through 20th-century Prohibition and McCarthyism and into cancel culture during our own lifetimes.
The puritan impulse, with its overheated moralism and apocalyptic fervor, is alive and well. See Beckwith’s fulsome doom-mongering about the demonic mire he calls public education for proof of life.
Puritans’ confidence in their judgments of others is so immense that their devil ceases to be Satan, the “adversary” in Hebrew, the one who causes divisions. Instead, the paramount foe becomes cooperation, specifically with any iota of wrong-think or -do, as all human communities are destined to have. Hence, Sen. Banks and Lt. Gov. Beckwith, time and again, antagonize their left-of-center constituents rather than collaborate.
Houston, too, one may surmise, has a smidgen of puritanism. But its expression, however vivid, should not cost her her job. Political speech, even the kind that could disrupt the classroom or cause controversy among students — though more likely among the professional political class and their partisan-news-watching audiences — is protected for public employees.
Because of this, Ball State University is stuck paying a $225,000 settlement to an employee it fired for criticizing conservative activist Charlie Kirk on social media after he was killed.
Nevertheless, settling for $225,000 is probably more palatable to state institutions like Ball State or IU than losing “ALL PUBLIC FUNDING,” as Beckwith has called for, or more realistic forms of retribution — if Beckwith could bring them about.
While Indiana’s Republican-held legislature is interested in managing IU, as clearly shown by the last budget it passed, it isn’t clear that Banks, Beckwith and their party’s puritan wing have the numbers to see through more personal vendettas like this one.
Still, IU being even notionally pressured to choose between unjustly firing an employee or facing retaliation suggests Houston’s case is a degree worse than Adams’. Students didn’t complain. Nor did lawyers. Politicians did. And only select politicians. Indiana’s less puritanical, more cooperative Republicans, Gov. Mike Braun and Sen. Todd Young, have not engaged in the Salem-style witch hunt.
In a saner world, educators’ job security would depend wholly on a free market arrangement, accounting for their own satisfaction and their students’. (Only academics can judge the academy, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal.) Dissatisfied students would find other teachers. Teachers fed up with their classroom heathens would find other, less monstrous 20-somethings — like St. Augustine when he moved his rhetoric school from Carthage to Rome.
The notable thing about such a world is that teachers and students would be the judges, not politicians. Indeed, a future where politicians instead of teachers — instead of students — drive higher education holds a dangerous outlook for our inviolable duty to truth.
Eric Cannon (he/him) is a junior studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government. His song recommendations to you, dear reader, are France Gall’s “Il jouait du piano debout” and Ella Langley’s “Dandelion.” Take your pick.
