Mark Figley: Free speech not compromised
By Mark Figley - Guest Columnist
In today’s wacky world, the preponderance of news that gets reported is that which promotes the narrative of the left. Short of being misrepresented, stories that impede this are customarily ignored. That was certainly the case with some recent good news from Portsmouth, Ohio.
Shawnee State political philosophy professor Nicholas Meriwether sued the university in November 2018 after it formally charged him with violating Title IX. Specifically, he was alleged to have created a hostile environment in January 2018 for refusing to refer to a male student as a woman with feminine titles and pronouns.
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Last month, a conservative panel of judges on the 6
th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the First Amendment grants professors a right to intentionally misgender trans students in class. The decision, authored by Donald Trump-nominee and Mitch McConnell protégé Amul Thapar, had a triumphant tone: Thapar depicted himself as a champion of free speech combatting the “classroom thought police” at modern universities who seek to turn their campuses into “enclaves of totalitarianism” by prohibiting discrimination against LGBTQ students.
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The facts tell a much more nuanced story than Thapar’s simplistic tale of academic freedom versus totalitarianism. The case centers on professor Nicholas Meriwether, a philosophy professor at Shawnee State University in Ohio. In 2018, Meriwether misgendered a trans student, known in litigation as Jane Doe, in class; she asked that he use her correct pronouns and honorifics in the future, but he refused. The university fou