Philosophy professor Stephen Kirshner is in academic purgatory.
Although he is still employed by the State University of New York at Fredonia, he has not taught in more than a year and is not even allowed on campus. This is the ramifications of a statement he made in a 2022 podcast about what is moral as an adult male. Having sex with a “willing” 12-year-old girl.
“It’s not clear to me that this is actually wrong,” he said on a philosophy podcast. Part of a broader thought experiment on ethics and consent. (As a matter of law, he said it should be criminalized.)
His remarks went viral after the right-wing social media account LibsofTikTok posted about it.
Sunny University Fredonia President Stephen H. Collison Jr. called the professor’s comments “abhorrent” and said Dr. Kirshner would be reassigned to a position that does not require contact with students. Dr. Kirshner said he announced an investigation and directed police to search his office and seize computers.
That was 19 months ago. Dr. Kirshner, a tenured professor who has taught at Fredonia since 1998, is currently suing for the right to return to campus, and trial in the case began Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York.
His lawsuit says university leaders are “using a social media heckler’s veto and allowing momentary public and political reactions to determine who teaches at public universities.” ing.
The lawsuit adds that Dr. Kirshner has never been cited, charged or arrested by any law enforcement agency, except for traffic violations.
Free speech advocates have backed the professor, calling the university’s move a brazen attack on academic freedom, and accusing NYU of using safety as a mere pretext.
One of his lawyers, Adam Steinbaugh of the free speech group Individual Rights and Expression Foundation, declined to comment for this article.
In court documents, the State University of New York at Fredonia cites the threats and argues that the ban is necessary both for the safety of Dr. Kirshner and the campus.
“If he returns, the public hatred will extend to this campus, and we will once again have many members of our community… It will be seen from there.” They are at risk of violence because they are sympathetic to Karshnar’s views. ”
There were other considerations as well. The university said students and alumni expressed anger over the remarks, leading to a decline in donations and enrollment.
University officials declined to comment for this article regarding the pending litigation.
The lawsuit reflects continuing tensions over how universities should deal with online flare-ups, freewheeling academic debate and campus safety. Can a public university bound by the First Amendment restrict a professor’s access to campus because of comments on a podcast? Should they do so if a threat is involved? ?What constitutes a real threat, anyway?
In January 2022, Dr. Kirshner appeared on a respected philosophy podcast. brain in the bat. Each episode follows a format in which a guest presents a thought experiment, and the host spends the remainder of the episode questioning the guest about it. Dr. Kirshner’s thought experiment was explosive.
“Imagine an adult man wanting to have sex with a 12-year-old girl. Imagine she is an active participant,” he said. “The pretty standard and widely accepted view is that there’s something deeply wrong with this. And whether it’s criminalized or not, it’s wrong. It’s not clear to me what’s actually wrong. I think this is wrong. And exploring why it’s wrong is important, not just about adult child sex or statutory rape, but about moral I think it will also teach you some basic principles.”
Dr. Kirshner has written extensively on this topic over the years. In 2017, he published a book titled “Pedophilia and Adult-Child Sex: A Philosophical Analysis.” The book’s summary explains that the book examines the “moral status” of such sex, which he intuitively describes as “disgusting, disgusting, wrong, and wrong.” He said he felt that there was.
Dr. Kirshner has built a career on tough, professional arguments while taking provocative positions that either frighten or amuse people. Is it morally okay to fake an orgasm? Do you prefer Asian romantic partners? How can I avoid leaving a tip? Yes, yes, and no, he concluded – unless you explicitly tell the server you don’t tip.
In an attempt to more clearly understand morality and why something is or isn’t wrong, Dr. Kirshner calls it a “Socratic” approach to questioning basic assumptions and often repeating questions to the point of great annoyance. “Abs,” said Justin Weinberg, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin. A native of South Carolina, he is the editor of the Daily Nous, a popular philosophy news website.
Controversies surrounding Dr. Kirshner frequently arise, and Dr. Weinberg coined a word for them: “Kirshner cycle”. Like hurricanes, he wrote, they vary in strength but are usually confined to the discipline of philosophy.
After LibsofTikTok posted a clip of Dr. Kirshner’s podcast remarks on X (formerly known as Twitter), the university was flooded with demands for immediate action.
Undergraduate students at Fredonia University started a petition They said it was not safe to be on campus and demanded that Dr. Kirshner leave. His views are “directly harmful to communities already grappling with sexual assault and the struggle for consent,” the petition says. More than 60,000 signatures have been collected online.
Alumni threatened to stop donating. The university wrote in court documents that the situation with Dr. Kirshner “undoubtedly” caused a decline in endowments and a decline in enrollment. According to the complaint, several members of the New York State Assembly’s Higher Education Committee sent a letter to all presidents of the State University of New York calling for the professor’s “immediate dismissal.”
Even more troubling, the university received what authorities described as threats of violence. “We know that when it comes to the issue of adult-child relationships, holding a shovel to the head can be effective,” said one witness quoted in a court filing. Another said: “I hope the parents tar and feathers him, cut out his internal organs and drag his body around town.”
Isaacson, the campus police chief at the time and a former FBI agent, recommended that Dr. Kirshner remain off campus for a “cooling off” period while police determined the threat. The university said in a statement that the recommendation would remain in place because protecting the professor would require an “unusual and financially prohibitive expansion” of campus police.
Responding to critics who said there was no viable threat of violence, Isaacson said that “hunters don’t howl,” meaning that an actual perpetrator of violence would not telegraph an attack.
Isaacson recently resigned, but the new interim police chief agrees with the policy.
Dr. Kirshner’s lawsuit argued that the messages cited by the university did not represent actual threats that would justify banning him from campus. And academic freedom advocates say it’s alarming that a vague possibility of violence could result in a professor being banned from campus indefinitely.
“As soon as you accept that principle, you can ban any speech,” said Mark Oppenheimer, a lawyer in Johannesburg, South Africa, and co-organizer of Brain in a Vat.
Philosophy is especially easy to misunderstand, he says, by the public.
Philosophers “say the most outlandish things and come up with the strangest cases, and any onlooker will say, ‘But you’re all crazy,'” Oppenheimer said. Told. “That’s what happened to Steve.”
