John J. Miller's National Review article on DePaul and Klocek finally online

It's on the FIRE site, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Pariahs, Martyrs — and Fighters Back, Conservative professors in America is the article. The Klocek case is featured, but Miller also discusses other PC attacks on non-liberal academics.

An excerpt:

Klocek’s case is particularly striking because the DePaul administration has left a long paper trail that demonstrates its disdain for his ideas as well as its disregard for the principles of academic freedom. A little more than a week after his encounter with the anti-Israel activists, Klocek found himself summoned to the office of Susanne Dumbleton, a dean at DePaul (who refused to speak to National Review). According to Klocek, Dumbleton said she had received letters complaining about Klocek’s behavior. She wouldn’t show them to Klocek, but the students who wrote them evidently felt “hurt” by Klocek’s attempts to “impose” his views on them.

Dumbleton suspended Klocek with pay and urged him to stay off campus (where he had not only been teaching, but attending daily Mass for years). She did this without arranging the formal hearing that DePaul’s own employment guidelines would seem to require. She also told Klocek not to talk to the media — a prohibition that she did not apply to Klocek’s accusers, or even to herself. “We do not respect the unfair use of faculty power over students,” she said in an interview with the DePaulia, a student newspaper. A week later, with her gag order still silencing Klocek, Dumbleton wrote to the DePaulia: “The university must serve as a forum at which individuals are able to express contrary ideas, debate opposing positions, challenge assumptions, press areas of the unknown, and consider unimagined possibilities.” This was no defense of a besieged Klocek. Instead, Dumbleton was in the process of issuing one of several apologies to the SJP and UMMA students “for the insult and disrespect they had endured.”


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