Georgetown Won’t Punish Prof Calling for Death, Castration of GOP Senators

Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia released a weak statement on Tuesday in response to Professor Christine Fair’s tweet calling for the death and castration of GOP Senators.

“Look at [this] chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement,” Fair wrote in the since-deleted tweet. “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.”

In a statement published on Tuesday, Georgetown President John J. DeGioia failed to mention Fair by name. Instead, DeGioia vaguely condemned the use of “violent imagery, profanity, insensitive labeling of individuals based on gender, ethnicity or political affiliation.” He went on to suggest that Fair would only face disciplinary action if her speech affected her work at the university.

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. We can and do strongly condemn the use of violent imagery, profanity, and insensitive labeling of individuals based on gender, ethnicity or political affiliation in any form of discourse. Such expressions go against our values.

While the speech of our faculty members is protected, we are deeply committed to having our classrooms and interactions with students be free of bias and geared toward respectful dialogue. We take seriously our obligation to provide welcoming spaces for all students to learn.

If comments made by faculty members are determined to substantially affect their teaching, research, or University service, we will address them through established University procedures outlined in our Georgetown University Faculty Handbook.

Twitter users sounded off after the statement was posted to the Georgetown University Twitter account.

“You’re such a hypocrite,” one user wrote. “If Professor Christine Fair threatened to castrate any minority group, she would have been fired by now. However, as long as the targets of her threats are white men, she can keep her job.”