AAUP’S JOAN SCOTT FLOPS ‘RACISM’ ATTACK ON FIRE. In the AAUP bigshot’s hit piece on FIRE in today’s Inside Higher Ed, she writes, “An initial motivating force [in FIRE’s founding] was the endorsement of the right of racist expression on the University of Pennsylvania campus. This is a telling choice of where [FIRE’s] political affiliations lie.”

Prof. Scott needs to pick up a book. The “water buffalo affair” at Penn was so deeply disturbing not just because Penn was punishing speech, “racist” or not, but because it was trying to punish a student for “racist” speech that it knew was not even racist. As the Daily Pennsylvanian wrote in a 10-year retrospective:

[L]legally minded individuals were upset by the fact that a student was charged with harassment for calling someone by a term that had no known racial connotations and were disturbed by what they perceived as the University justice system’s mishandling of the case.

That false accusation of racism in 1993 ultimately became FIRE’s “origin story.” Yet 31 years later, one of the AAUP’s leading lights on “academic freedom” parrots only the lie, now repurposed to falsely accuse FIRE instead of a hapless freshman from Long Island. It’s hard to imagine a better reminder of the need for a principled defense of free speech and due process.