G.U. Professor on Leave After Hateful Tweet
By • October 7, 2018 0 6029
C. Christine Fair, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, whose Sept. 29 tweet during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings celebrated the imaginary deaths of Republican senators and prompted criticism from students and alumni, was placed on research leave and is no longer teaching at the school.
Known for her pugnacious and outrageous comments online, Fair wrote of GOP senators on the Judiciary Committee: “Look at thus [sic] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes.”
On Fair’s Twitter page, which contains the headline, “Don’t Grab My Pussy,” and images of Presidents Trump and Putin, as well as a rattlesnake, she describes herself as a “Scholar of South Asian pol-mil affairs, inter-sectional feminist, pitbull apostle, scotch devotee, nontheist, resister,” and adds, “Views R mine. No rubes. RT≠endorsement.”
Besides campus criticism of her tweet, Fair was ripped by right-wing commentators, such as Laura Ingraham and Tucker Carlson of Fox News. In an email to the student newspaper, the Georgetown Voice, Fair shot back, writing that they had “conflate[d] anger at white male privilege with misandry … What they, Fox News, Daily Caller, and associated ilk, want to do is silence the voices of people who are outraged by this political movement, which is actively disenfranchising a majority of Americans at all level of governance.”
School of Foreign Service Dean Joel Hellman wrote to students that he had placed Fair on research leave, because of threats and “disruption to her students.”
“It’s become clear that incivility begets incivility,” Hellman wrote. “While we have received many legitimate concerns from members of our community and beyond regarding the social media posts Professor Fair has made in her personal capacity, many other complaints registered have been provocative and threatening. Our Threat Assessment Team and Georgetown University Police Department have taken preventive steps to secure our campus, conduct safety assessments, and continue to monitor the situation.”
Earlier, University President John DeGioia released a statement on Oct. 2 — which some called “tepid” — but did not name Fair: “We protect the right of our community members to exercise their freedom of expression. This does not mean the University endorses the content of their expression.”
Fair offered one parting tweet on Oct. 6: “Fox Hordes threatened my community w/ violence like other quotidian terrorists. I took leave to protect my community from right wing terrorists. So basically terrorists gave me paid research leave to finish this book manuscript. Thanks! Proceeds go to terror victims btw!”
