Campus Reform
June 30, 2017
Syracuse University believes that the professor who urged “Syracuse people” to “finish…off” anti-Sharia demonstrators was not promoting violence, but the protest’s organizer disagrees.
In a statement emailed to the school community last week, Chancellor Kent Syverud unequivocally rejected demands that he fire or otherwise discipline Professor Dana Cloud for her tweet, which was posted during a “March Against Sharia” that was met by “anti-fascist” (a.k.a., “antifa”) counter-protesters.
“We almost have the fascists in [sic] on the run,” Cloud tweeted. “Syracuse people come down to the federal building to finish them off.”
“The statement is susceptible to multiple interpretations,” Syverud noted at the beginning of his email. “Some have urged that, because their interpretations involve violence (interpretations the professor rejects), our university must discipline the professor.”
Remarking that some of those messages “are hard to interpret in any way other than to encourage violence,” he responds with an emphatic “No” to their insistence that he “denounce, censor, or dismiss the professor for her speech,” contending that Cloud’s comments did not rise to the level of legally prohibited speech.
“Our faculty must be able to say and write things—including things that provoke some or make others uncomfortable—up to the very limits of the law,” he concluded. “The statement at issue is, I believe, within those limits.”
- A d v e r t i s e m e n t
The leader of the Syracuse anti-Sharia protest, however, objected to Syverud’s statement, saying that those who were present at the event could easily view her tweet as an attempt to incite violence, or at the very least as a call to curtail their exercise of free speech.
“Did he understand she was there trying to shut down free speech and not the other way…