Agreed on all those points–even if he’d been 100% he was still waaayyyy out of line.
Personally I favor RP/RJ style interventions wherein the harmed parties and the parties that caused the harm are brought together for a conversation (if they’re willing to have the conversation) to process through what was going on at the time, what they’ve been thinking about since, what the impacts were and how/if they could have been avoided, and what needs to be done to repair the harm.
In this case, I do disagree with the removal of the professor from their tenured position. Although they acted badly, incited hateful messages to be sent to the graduate student in question (for which he isn’t legally liable…), and otherwise has shown themselves to be a deplorable human being, unless the university is able to furnish an obvious violation of a code of conduct I think they stand in violation of the AAUP Academic Freedom constraints. They may have found a violation, but for some reason I thought that the hearings tended to not show that there was one.
To me, the way that this should have gone would have required robust criticism from *within* the professor’s respective discipline, as there was from the TA’s discipline given that they were in different departments. As awful as it sounds, I think that “punishment” would have had to come from peers, not an institution, for this to avoid becoming a “look at the liberal educational system being against conservatives” mess.
