According to an article in The Federalist, MacDonald has evidently learned the hard way that members of any racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual group are strictly forbidden by the stringent rules governing political correctness to say anything even mildly critical of members of any group ranked higher than they in the PC pecking order.
After class one day, MacDonald got into a conversation with some other grad students in which the topic of Islam came up, and he expressed, as he later put it, that “I was bothered that I could be killed in ten Muslim countries.” MacDonald is bisexual, and there are in fact Muslim countries in which homosexuality is punishable by death.
MacDonald's infraction led to him being called on the carpet by the head of the philosophy department, a department which supposedly wears the mantle of free and open thinkers from Socrates to Voltaire.
When the chair, Eve Browning, refused to tell him by e-mail what the meeting was about he decided to record it. The transcript of their meeting reveals MacDonald to be a somewhat troubled and mediocre student, but what's fascinating about it is how Kafkaesque the exchange is between Browning and MacDonald, especially when they start discussing the Muslim fiance.
Bear in mind as you read it that the offended parties in this are all adults. They're professors and grad students, not elementary school children.
After some introductory remarks Browning gets to the point:
EVE BROWNING: Well, the reason why we’re meeting and why I asked to meet is that several faculty and several other graduate students have expressed concerns about things you’re doing in class and out of class, and the nature of the concerns ....There’s a concern about your having made some inappropriate comments to other graduate students…This is a ludicrous exchange and surprisingly full of non-sequiturs on the part of a chair of a philosophy department, but it gets worse. Her next tactic is to appeal to threats:
ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t talk to anybody and I haven’t in a long time.
EVE BROWNING: Sorry?
ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t talk to anybody. I don’t know what inappropriate comments I made.
EVE BROWNING: Well this was an episode in professor Chen’s class or afterwards …
ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t have that class.
EVE BROWNING: What?
ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t have that class.
EVE BROWNING: Well… the complaint came from him about this partic-
ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t even know who that is. Professor Chen? Like C-H-...
EVE BROWNING: Shunwu Chen?
ALFRED MACDONALD: I don’t know who that is. I have no idea how I could’ve… I’m not even registered for his classes, you can check. I’m in two of Almeida’s classes, and Josh’s…
EVE BROWNING: … so it was a conversation you had with a couple of other students that you weren’t originally part of, and you joined it, and the topic of… the topic of one student being engaged to a Muslim came up, and it was alleged that you made offensive comments about Islam to that student -- and this is all, I represent this all as alleged because I wasn’t there....
ALFRED MACDONALD: ....I don’t even know. I’m totally mystified. I really don’t talk to people -- at this program -- much at all.
EVE BROWNING: You don’t recall the topic of a Muslim fiance ever coming up?
ALFRED MACDONALD: That yes,...I said that I was bothered that I could be killed in ten Muslim countries. I’m bisexual. So they’d definitely do that in the ten countries where I would be -- you know.
EVE BROWNING: Doesn’t that strike you as an inappropriate thing to say about someone’s fiance?
ALFRED MACDONALD: I wasn’t talking about the fiance. The fiance could have whatever interpretation of the religion that they want....it wasn’t about the fiance, it was about the religious practices in those countries.
EVE BROWNING: How is it appropriate to bring that up in connection with someone’s fiance?
ALFRED MACDONALD: They brought it up. The Islam part.
EVE BROWNING: And you brought up the threat to your life as posed by this fiance?
ALFRED MACDONALD: No. We got to the subject of Islam, not the fiance.
EVE BROWNING: Do you understand how someone would find that offensive?
ALFRED MACDONALD: How someone would FIND that offensive, yeah; how they could perceive it, yeah; yeah, I mean, if I…
EVE BROWNING: It’s a confusing comment to me because Muslims do not all live in countries in which bisexuals are executed. Muslims live in the United States--
ALFRED MACDONALD: Sure.
EVE BROWNING: --Muslims live in France, Muslims live in every country in the world -- it’s the fastest growing world religion.
ALFRED MACDONALD: Yeah, one of my good friends at the university is Muslim.
EVE BROWNING: And do you tell him that you object to his religion because there are places on earth where gay, lesbian and bisexual people are discriminated against, including your own country?
ALFRED MACDONALD: Well, “her.” And my verbiage was “killed” not “discriminated against.” I mean, Death penalty’s pretty severe.
EVE BROWNING: What does that have to do with her being engaged to a Muslim?
ALFRED MACDONALD: Nothing. I wasn’t talking about the engagement to the Muslim. I was talking about Islam in that particular moment.
EVE BROWNING: Well, let me just say that kind of thing is not going to be tolerated in our department. We’re not going to tolerate graduate students trying to make other graduate students feel terrible for our emotional attachments.
EVE BROWNING: And, if you don’t understand why that is, I can explain fully, or I can refer you to the Behavior Intervention Team on our campus which consists of a counselor, faculty member, and person from student affairs who are trained on talking to people about what’s appropriate or what isn’t.The dialogue continues for some time in this vein, finally concluding with this exchange:
ALFRED MACDONALD: I just won’t bring anything up about Islam again. That’s pretty simple. Although I’m not sure what you mean by.... what do you mean by “it won’t be tolerated?” Like I’ll be straight up prevented from registering? Or the team that you mention, the behavior intervention team, they’re going to do something or… what exactly is the penalty for breaking that, assuming that I’m in some other situation where I say something that someone else finds offensive and you...
EVE BROWNING: We’d put it either before the behavior intervention team or the student conduct board and ask them to make a recommendation.
ALFRED MACDONALD: Ask them to make a recommendation? What does that mean?
EVE BROWNING: Whether they would refer you for counseling; whether they would recommend that you be academically dismissed; they would assess the damage. They would probably try to speak to the students who are complaining and the faculty that are complaining and make a recommendation. In any case…
ALFRED MACDONALD: And this is over… I thought that UTSA was a public university with first amendment protections? So I could be dismissed for stuff like that? Just…
EVE BROWNING: Making derogatory comments? Yes.
EVE BROWNING: Those are things that would get you fired if you were working in my office. The Islam comment would get you fired.Well, Mr. MacDonald is a bit naive about that last point. Philosophy is obviously not a truth-seeking discipline at UTSA. Truth, at least the notion of objective truth, is an outmoded concept in some precincts in the contemporary academy. Nowadays, at places like the University of Texas, apparently, a bisexual student can get drummed out of the philosophy department simply for observing that bisexuals are executed in many Muslim countries which is, of course, manifestly true, but in a post-fact world there are some things one is simply forbidden to criticize and one of those sacrosanct topics is Islam, whether what one says about it is objectively true or not.
ALFRED MACDONALD: ...Would it really get me fired to say that I could be killed somewhere?
EVE BROWNING: In that situation as you’ve described it, absolutely yes.
ALFRED MACDONALD: How?
EVE BROWNING: Don’t even ask. It’s clear you’re not taking my word for it. I don’t care to convince you. If I can’t persuade you that it’s in your interest to behave in ways that other people don’t find offensive and objectionable, then at least I’ve done my job.
ALFRED MACDONALD: Well I know that it’s in my interest. I’m just trying to understand the reasoning.
EVE BROWNING: You don’t have to.
ALFRED MACDONALD: Well, this is a truth-seeking discipline!
I wonder what Dr. Browning would have said had Mr. MacDonald asked her to explain to him what he said that was false, and if nothing was false, why, in a philosophy graduate program, true propositions are verboten.
I also marvel at how fragile these UT students and professors must be that they need to be insulated from any speech that might hurt their feelings. These are adults, after all, but they must possess the delicate psyches of children if Mr. MacDonald's assessment of the Islamic world caused them so much pain and grief.
