Which is worse for the University of Nebraska: Being censored by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) for failing to renew the teaching contract of English Department lecturer, Courtney Lawton, or having some of the university’s professors placed on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watch list for discriminating against conservative students? Actually, neither of these two lists should matter nearly as much as the opinion of the people of Nebraska. Because the University of Nebraska is a land-grant university, they are accountable only to the people of the State. Therefore, the only opinion which should really matter to the administration is the opinion of the people of the great state of Nebraska.

The AAUP has a radical agenda. The AAUP’s stated mission of “…promoting the economic security of those who teach and research in higher education…” is really nothing more than a bad euphemism for hiding the fact that they were created for the sole purpose of protecting the propagandizing, the indoctrinating, and the unhinged shenanigans of its far Left-wing, extremist professors. This is why the Nebraska chapter of the AAUP is comprised of some of the most radicalized professors from UNL’s English Department. Consequently, I would personally consider it to be a badge of honor to be censored by the AAUP.

Liberal-progressivist and extremist professors from UNL’s English department, such as Amanda Gailey, Julia Schleck and Stephen Ramsay, who represent the AAUP at UNL, have been threatening to recommend UNL for censorship by the AAUP. Unless they get their way, they will recommend that UNL be placed on the AAUP’s Censorship List. In their opinion UNL should be censored because of the way they handled the situation regarding the dismissal of English Department lecturer, Courtney Lawton, after she harassed and berated sophomore student, Kaitlyn Mullen, as she tabled for Turning Point USA last fall. Gailey, Schleck and Ramsay believe the university’s administration did not follow the proper policy and procedure for dismissing a lecturer, and they believe the administration simply caved into the political pressure placed upon them by politicians like me.

To their credit, University President Hank Bounds, and Chancellor Ronnie Green are not taking the criticism of the AAUP lying down. Last week they responded publicly by pointing out the inaccuracies of the AAUP’s evaluation of the situation. For instance, Chancellor Green submitted a letter to the AAUP on May 25 specifically pointing out how they had ignored corrections he had made to the record in a letter he had hand-delivered to them back on April 17. How refreshing it is to finally see the administration leading! I commend Bounds and Green for standing up to the AAUP.

The AAUP has never been concerned with the facts of this case. For instance, they have never recognized the fact that Lawton blocked access to Mullen’s TP-USA table, and in their Nov. 27 Open Letter to the University of Nebraska, which was signed by Gailey, Schleck, and Ramsay, they stated that I was “strongly tied to Governor Pete Ricketts,” even though I had never even talked with the Governor about this situation. Moreover, after Nebraska’s AAUP President, Donna Dufner, had stated that the university had handled the situation correctly, she found herself being bullied into resigning by Schleck, who replaced her after serving for only one month with Patricia Wonk Hill, the same UNL Sociology research professor who was found guilty last month in a Virginia court for spray painting the house of NRA spokesman, Chris Cox. Need I say more?

Julia Schleck