So, should a racist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi tenured professor be allowed to teach at the University of Vermont?

And suppose he isn’t any of those things. Suppose he just studies, writes about, and (apparently) admires some racist, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazis while pursuing his own scholarly interest in “the status of European heritage, or white Americans, including the way they are educated.”  Should he be allowed on the UVM faculty?

The questions arise because of an excellent piece of reporting by Daniel Barlow in the Sunday, June 14, Barre-Montpelier Times Argus about Robert S. Griffin, who has been teaching education courses at the university since 1974, and who at the very least maintains close professional contacts with white supremacists, anti-Semites, and maybe even neo-Nazis.

The answer to the questions is: Yes.

Griffin is tenured faculty, meaning the university has confirmed his academic credentials and his competence as a teacher.  That means he can only be fired for cause-not showing up for class (or at least not showing up sober),  failing to grade papers, abusing students, inciting violence, or the like.

Not for whatever belief or opinion he expresses. That’s the whole purpose of tenure-to protect academics from being dismissed for their views, however unpopular, bizarre, offensive, outrageous, or even disgusting those views may be.

Come to think of it, that’s one of the purposes of a university or college to begin with – to serve as a forum for ideas and opinions, however….(see list above).

Since, as far as we know, there has never been a formal complaint by a student that Griffin has committed any of the above-named offenses, his job is and ought to be safe.

But wait a minute! Suppose he tries – whether openly or surreptitiously – to convert his impressionable young students to his (seemingly) revolting way of thinking? Shouldn’t that be grounds for dismissal?

Nope. Not unless he does so with threats, intimidation, or by giving low grades to students who voice their disagreement. Again, there seems to be no record of students officially suggesting he has behaved in this way. There is one unofficial suggestion. On the ‘ratemyprofessors.com‘ web site, one student complained, “If you don’t agree with his thoughts, you get a bad grade.”

But as almost any faculty member will attest, it’s the students who don’t like a professor who are more likely to contribute to these sites. This student apparently got a bad grade, and may have been seeking revenge. At any rate, that one complaint hardly qualifies as sufficient evidence even to start a disciplinary proceeding, much less to take any action.

Final objection. Suppose a non-white student had to take one of his classes but felt intimidated. Wouldn’t some disciplinary action, if not dismissal, be in order.

Not unless Griffin took some overt action to intimidate. In a free society, there is no guarantee against feeling intimidated, any more than there is a guarantee against being insulted.

So Griffin gets to keep his job, despite complaints from some letter-to-the-editor writers and at least one web site.  (UVM was lucky that the story came out during summer vacation; five will get you ten that had it appeared in October, there would have been at least one small “Griffin Must Go” rally on campus).

But job security is the simplest question this case provokes, and therefore the least interesting. Start, for instance, with the question of just what kind of guy Griffin really is. Here matters grow more complex.

The case against him – the case for him being a real bigot – is compelling if just short of conclusive. Barlow lays it out in detail. To state just one of the more obvious examples, among the links on Griffin’s web site, robertsgriffin.com, is one to the Vanguard News Network, whose slogan is “No Jews. Just Right.”

Nor does Griffin always help his own case. Writing two years ago in Vermont Commons (the journal of the Vermont secessionist movement, the racist associations of which were discussed in an earlier post, Secessionist Delusions, February 12), Griffin said, “I think it is fair to say that the victors in the competition to insert their perspective into school programs have been the egalitarians, collectivists, multiculturalists, feminists, gays, environmentalists, internationalists, secularists, and Holocaust promoters.”

Holocaust promoters? That’s pretty strong evidence that he is a Holocaust denier, the ultimate combination of bigotry and willful ignorance.

But then take a look at his web site, where he links, admiringly, to a quote by Philip Roth, the novelist whose Jewishness is central to his fiction.

In fact, the Robert Griffin of the web site seems to be less a raging bigot than an interesting guy.

“My writings have been vehicles for an investigation of the whole of American society and culture and the way we conduct our individual lives,” he writes. ”That has involved me in considerations related to history, philosophy, race, religion, the arts, the mass media, parenting, the process of growing up, gender, education, sports, and personal health and fulfillment.

As to his racial views, “while I have written often about race this last decade, I do not consider myself to be a racial writer… I write whatever is there to be written, and if it is about race, so be it, but I don’t consider myself linked to that subject.”

Though he responded neither to Barlow nor to the News Guy, Griffin did email the Inside Higher Ed web site, denying that he was a racist and insisting that “even the most cursory review of my writings would show that I deplore violence.”

Inside Higher Ed also reached UVM education professor David Shiman, the head of the faculty union at the university, who is Jewish. Shiman  said that in the 35 years he has known his colleague he has “never seen from him an anti-Semitic remark, never heard him make a racist remark.”

Shiman said he once assigned Griffin’s 2001 article “Rearing Honorable White Children” in some of his multicultural education classes, and invited Griffin to answer students’ questions.

“I think the students need to hear diverse perspectives, need to challenge themselves and be exposed to views that cause them to reflect on the views they think they hold — and maybe get stronger holding them, but at least challenge themselves,” Shiman said.

All this apparent civility though, can not completely offset the rest of Griffin’s profile. He is the author of what Barlow called “a fawning biography” of  William Pierce, the author of the white supremacist novel  ”The Turner Diaries,” which helped inspire Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal office building in Oklahoma City.

“I found Pierce to be a person of remarkable capability, decency, integrity, courage, and dedication,” Griffin writes on his Web site.” And the Vanguard News Network is not the only white supremacist web site to which he links.

Perhaps the most interesting way to look at l’affaire Griffin is to take him at his word that he is not a bigot, but only someone who teaches and and advocates white culture. On the face of it, that should be no more objectionable than teaching and advocating black or Latino culture, which has attained a modicum of respect in academia.

But no less objectionable either. It isn’t that there aren’t racial and ethnic subcultures worthy of study. Black and Hispanic, obviously, but also Appalachian, Italian-American, French-Canadian, rural New England.

In the final analysis, though, culture is neither racial nor ethnic. If it were, then, for instance, Sarah Chang, whose biological ancestry is Korean, could not so brilliantly play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, a work steeped in the German musical tradition (if, for that matter, Mendelssohn, who didn’t have a drop of Teutonic blood in his veins, could have composed a concerto). Culture is a product of  intellect and consciousness, internal qualities indifferent to the color of the outer layer.

No one has to be English to appreciate Shakespeare, Dutch to understand Rembrandt, or African-American to dig Charlie Parker. From a university’s perspective, the problem with Robert Griffin is not that his beliefs are abhorrent, but that they are ignorant.