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meustrus writes:

It looks like anybody can be against academic censorship, as this story [washingtonpost.com] in the Washington Post shows:

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court can soon right a flagrant wrong [will-law.org] stemming from events set in motion in 2014 [washingtonpost.com] at Milwaukee’s Marquette University by Cheryl Abbate. On Oct. 28, in an undergraduate course she was teaching on ethics, when the subject of same-sex marriage arose, there was no debate, because, a student said, Abbate insisted that there could be no defensible opposition to this.

McAdams, a tenured professor then in his 41st year at Marquette and a conservative who blogs about the school’s news, emailed Abbate seeking her version of the episode. Without responding to him, she immediately forwarded his email to some professors. She has called McAdams “the ringleader” of “extreme white [sic] wing, hateful people,” a “moron,” “a flaming bigot, sexist and homophobic idiot” and a “creepy homophobic person with bad argumentation skills.”

Because there is almost no Wisconsin case law concerning academic freedom that could have guided the circuit court, McAdams is asking the state supreme court [will-law.org] to bypass the appeals court and perform its function as the state’s “law-developing court.” He is also asking the court to be cognizant of the cultural context: Nationwide, colleges and universities “are under pressure” — all of it from within the institutions — “to enact or implement speech codes or otherwise restrict speech in various ways.”

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