Louisiana Tech’s motto is “Ever Loyal Be.” This month I learned those words come with an asterisk. When a politically motivated outrage mob deliberately twisted and misrepresented my words in an effort to get me fired and chill free speech on college campuses, Louisiana Tech’s leaders caved. In the process they demonstrated an alarming deficit of loyalty not only to the university’s students and faculty but also to the principles of free speech and academic freedom they purport to uphold.

In other words, Ever Loyal Be, but terms and conditions apply.

It all started, as every controversy now does, with a tweet. I woke on October 2 to see many people on my Twitter timeline appearing to celebrate the president’s COVID-19 diagnosis. In the ironic voice that characterizes many of my 62,000 tweets, I fired off a rebuttal: 

“I thought we had all agreed we wanted to see him die in prison” 

The meaning was unambiguous: President Trump should survive his illness so that he can be held accountable for his many documented crimes and spend the remainder of his days—may they be healthy and long!—in prison. Of course, you may disagree with me, but my opinion on the president’s criminality could hardly be called radical in the current political climate. 

Within a few hours, however, the tweet had caught the eye of Campus Reform, a self-proclaimed news organization that in reality exists to generate online outrage mobs that attempt to provoke university administrators into knee-jerk defensive reactions like firing professors. The group published an article claiming that I, along with several other academics across the country, had wished the worst upon the president during his illness—despite the fact that no sincere reading of my tweet could lead to that conclusion.

But these illiberal activists cared less about what my words meant than how they might be weaponized against me. I was told I had made a “death threat” against the president, and soon I started receiving actual threats of violence. When Campus Reform’s article was republished on the infamous conspiracy theory site Infowars, which was banned from Twitter in 2018 for abusive behavior, the barrage of angry messages escalated. 

My employer, Louisiana Tech, was flooded with messages claiming I had “threatened” President Trump and calling for me to be fired. Rageful tweeters gloated that I was about to be “canceled.”

Several days later in his daily email to the campus, Louisiana Tech’s president, Les Guice, described my tweet as “threatening, harassing, and bullying speech.” He also lumped my tweet with another that had generated “negative national attention” for the university that week: A student was caught on video in a racist tirade, using the n-word to describe other students on campus.  

The president’s email equated my political speech with an unhinged racist rant, alleging both were “not representative of our values and culture at Tech.” 

On the contrary, this kind of false equivalency does not represent the values of a research university. It profanes the “Tenets of Tech” that shape the university’s mission. It smacks of the “both-sides-ism” made infamous in President Trump’s claim that there were “fine people on both sides” of the 2017 clash between white supremacists and counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Va. 

Louisiana Tech’s failure to question who made these claims against me, and why they would make them, also represents an abandonment of our institution’s values. University leaders accepted the deliberate misrepresentation of my words without doing the sort of independent critical thinking we demand of first-year college students. Administrators failed a basic information literacy test. They got duped.