And I might add: why is she still allowed on Twitter?
Those questions are rhetorical—I know the answer, which is that her vicious hatred is directed towards the correct people.
Here’s the author’s Wiki entry. And here’s Georgetown’s response to her tweet:
“The views of faculty members expressed in their private capacities are their own and not the views of the University. Our policy does not prohibit speech based on the person presenting ideas or the content of those ideas, even when those ideas may be difficult, controversial or objectionable. While faculty members may exercise freedom of speech, we expect that their classrooms and interaction with students be free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”
That is a ludicrous response on Georgetown’s part. This is not a situation in which it is even remotely possible that someone expressing such thoughts in a public forum will be able to “interact” with students in a manner that is “free of bias and geared toward thoughtful, respectful dialogue.”
Fair’s student evaluations from before this ever happened indicate that she already wasn’t interacting with students in such a way.
Fair is also the person who was responsible for Richard Spencer being thrown out of his health club, as well as several other disputes that got some press. According to Fair’s Wiki entry:
In January 2017, Fair was involved in a Twitter dispute with Asra Q. Nomani [Nomani is another professor; you can find her Wiki entry here]. In response to Nomani’s tweet that as a Muslim, she voted for President Trump, Fair tweeted that she had “written [Nomani] off as a human being” and that Nomani had “pimped herself out to all media outlets.” Nomani responded by filing a complaint with Georgetown University, Fair’s employer, alleging discrimination and harassment.
In May 2017, Fair began an altercation with white nationalist Richard B. Spencer at a gym in Alexandria, Virginia. While the two were working out, Fair approached Spencer and accused him of being a Nazi, along with a number of other accusations, leading a third gym patron to intervene on behalf of him. This incident resulted in Spencer’s membership being terminated by the manager of the gym.
In January 2018, Fair was involved in an incident at Frankfurt Airport. When her bag was flagged for possibly containing explosives, it was searched and German Federal Police instructed Fair that she would have to dispose of a liquid deodorant or transfer it to her checked bag. German police stated that Fair was uncooperative, as she accused them of sexism, of being Nazis and thugs, and directed expletives at them. Fair was charged with slander under Germany’s defamation law. She subsequently published an article on HuffPost partially rejecting the police account of the incident.
Interesting that Fair’s favorite term of opprobrium seems to be to call people Nazis. If you want to see the tenor of her dispute with Nomani (in which the Nazi-name-calling was also quite prominent on Fair’s part) please see this. And yet Fair retained her position at Georgetown after that.
Now, Richard Spencer (not to be confused with Robert Spencer) is in fact a white supremacist (a discussion of Richard Spencer occurs in a comment thread beginning here). If not an actual Nazi, he seems rather Nazi-esque. But he should be allowed to work out at a gym, where he basically minds his own business and lives his life.
But Christine Fair, the woman who doesn’t limit the word “Nazi” to the likes of Richard Spencer but who uses it for just about everyone who doesn’t share her extreme political point of view, and who has called for the murder and castration of a group based on their sex and race, exhibits that true Nazi spirit herself.
I’m not aware of Georgetown’s specific rules regarding when a tenured professor can be dismissed, but this article indicates that “moral turpitude” is one reason that generally suffices. Moral turpitude is defined this way:
The concept of “moral turpitude” might escape precise definition, but it has been described as an “act of baseness, vileness, or depravity in the private and social duties which a man owes to his fellowmen, or to society in general, contrary to the accepted and customary rule of right and duty between man and man.”
The rest of the article has to do with crimes involving moral turpitude. Obviously, nothing Fair has written is a crime, although it states a desire to commit the crime of mass murder and then defacement of bodies, based on sex and race. In this country we don’t criminalize speech, except in very rare instances that her tweets would not fall into. But in terms of tenure, wouldn’t those tweets constitute moral turpitude by almost any definition? It’s a judgment call, of course, but I cannot imagine that if the sex and/or race of her targets were different—say, if she was calling for the murder and mutilation of blacks and/or women—that she would be retaining her job.
[NOTE: One solution might be for students to simply boycott her class. But it wouldn’t surprise me at this point if her notoriety attracts a lot of students rather than repels them. And it might be that her class is required for some degree program, which might make it difficult for students in that major to avoid it.
Another possibility is for Georgetown alums to threaten to stop giving money to the school.
More here about some of Fair’s previous tweets.]
[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr.]
[ADDENDUM: A little more searching has turned up an article Fair wrote that sheds some light on the origins of her towering rage. Her family apparently wasn’t just dysfunctional, it was horrifically so. She admits that she was highly damaged by it and lives in a constant state of rage. Not an excuse for her own behavior as a 50-year-old woman, but a terribly sad story.]
[ADDENDUM II: Fair’s Twitter account has been suspended.]