Academic freedom and

REPELLENT SPEECH
Team 4: Daniel Cornett, Carson Davis, Jacob Lequire, Maddie
Mcdonald, Makenzie Young

Author Profile
Author: David M. Perry is an Associate Professor of History at
Dominican University. I believe he published this article
because he wanted to contribute to the argument about what can be
a fireable offense for a professor? I dont believe that Perry
is defending the racist comments of Deborah OConner, but he is
comparing her incident to another and stating that she didnt
receive the due process that she deserved, while claiming that
she was basically forced to resign. The purpose of this article,
and the reason Perry took part in this discussion, is for people,
particularly people in the academia field, should take a look at
the margins of free speech use.

Authors Claim and reasons

Perry brought up these questions in his article: What are
professors allowed to say? Where are we allowed to say it? He
brought up offensive remarks Deborah OConnor made on a public
Facebook page that led to her resignation at Florida State. Perry
isnt saying that he supports the comments she made, but he says
that letting her resignation slide away is a danger to academic
freedom. He said this because he believes that a case like
OConnors case shouldve had a faculty-involved due process to
see if there was a link between her comments and her teaching.
This due process should show that her comments made her unfit to
be a professor, since that is her obligation to the institution.
Just claiming it made people feel uncomfortable isnt quite good
enough.

Genre and Conventions

Type of Article: The article has somewhat of a conversation in it
describing the author's view on how the situations should have
been handled with responses from the candidates.
Style: Journalistic/Newspaper-informal
 Format: The article has a chronological order starting with a
short introduction, including a question. A story of two
professors are explained and the article ends with somewhat of an
answer to the beginning question.

Audience
Place of Publication: The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a newspaper and
website that covers news, information, and jobs for college and
university faculty. Some articles are locked behind a
subscription. This particular article was presented in an online
format.
Intended Audience: Since the publication is geared more to
faculty of university, the primary audience would be those
involved in Universities. The article is also available to people
not involved in Academia, so other individuals not directly
involved in Universities could also be part of the audience. As
the article deals with the issue of free speech, individuals
concerned with that topic might be drawn to this article. I would
wager that people who are concerned about freedom of speech in
areas such as college campuses would care about this article.

Other Existing Perspectives Acknowledged

The author mentions that a professor from Florida State
University was forced to resign after making racist remarks,
bringing up the struggle between asking if we should de-hire
due to remarks people say, or if we should respect their right to
free speech. Following this, it is mentioned that a professor at
the University of Illinois was fired due to tweets about his
anger about the war in Gaza. After these two perspectives, the
author gives the audience more on how the two were different, as
in one was fired and one felt trapped into resigning, and how one
was a debate between responding people and the other were rude
remarks in class. Although it sounds bad, it says nowhere that
the two professors opinions affected how they taught, so then we
must think about how much freedom we actually have, and how our
time and place may restrict our freedoms.