Twitter is exposing academics in ways never before possible, not through the tweets of such as we but through their own pronouncements as they succumb to the apparently irresistible urge to be “public intellectuals.” Panic-stricken presidents then look for a casualty to offer up to critics.
That, essentially, is what happened to the former chair of the women’s studies department at Montclair State. “Then one of the adjuncts who had been hired by my predecessor, Kevin Allred, tweeted about how President Trump was an [sic] ‘f….g joke’ and ‘why doesn’t someone shoot him already’ and right wing bloggers took to social media immediately, splashing this news item and expressing their outrage,” Fawzia Afzal-Khan wrote on the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “Subsequently, I was told by my dean that I had to step down because university president Susan Cole had ‘decreed’ it be so—even though everyone knew I personally had had nothing to do with hiring him.
