UNC Professor's Racist FB Posts
Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and a self-described “free speech advocate [and] pro-life speaker," has been posting hate speech against the LGBTQ community throughout his tenure at the college. He also named a student he’d allegedly never spoken to before as a jihadist in a blog post earlier this year. The Daily Beast reports the college is aware of Adams’s accounts and posts and that he’s in no violation of any school rules - or the First Amendment.
“Dr. Adams’s online column and social media presence represent his personal expressions and opinions on a variety of topics,” UNCW told The Daily Beast in a statement:
These expressions and opinions are neither within the requested scope of Dr. Adams’s duties with the university, nor do they represent the views of this institution. However, they are expressions protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. At this point, the university has not found evidence that Dr. Adams has improperly released any private or confidential information related to the student, or violated the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). There is no evidence of unlawful discrimination by Dr. Adams toward this student in UNCW’s working, living, or learning environment, per the university’s harassment prevention policy. Finally, Dr. Adams’s conduct and written material do not contain any evidence of a true threat toward this or any other student.
The Daily Beast also reports Adams sued the college in 2006 for religious and speech-based discrimination after he was not promoted to a full professor position at that time. Though he was originally dismissed, an appeals court reversed the decision in 2011, and in 2014 a jury awarded Adams the title he wanted as well as $50,000 retroactive pay and $600,000 in legal fees.
Nada Merghani, the black, queer Muslim student mentioned in Adams’s aforementioned post, told the site that was just one of many targeted attacks the professor launched against her online. She ended up leaving the school this month after nothing had been done about the hate speech for more than a year. Merghani said she felt unsafe on campus after Adams “[suggested] I’m a terrorist without a hint of truth or any regard for my personal safety” in this post.
A UNCW alumna launched a Change.org petition demanding the college president terminate Adams. One supporter asked Adams be fired not “because he speaks his mind, [but] because he personally attacks students in a distributed publication on topics well outside his realm of academic expertise using the authority of his position at the University to lend credibility to his childish and angry tirade.”
In response to the petition, Adams wrote, “Good luck with that …” on Facebook (where his bio explains his page “is the best way to get offended if you are so inclined”). He further defended naming Merghani in his article to the Daily Caller, saying the student had spoken on the issue he addresses in the post (terrorism, women’s reproductive health, LGBTQ rights) publicly and therefore his response was in line.
Adams also publicly responded to the UNCW Faculty Senate Steering Committee’s recent statement that “Public remarks by professors about a student’s race, color, national origin, religion, sex, gender identity, age, disability, political affiliation, or sexual orientation are inconsistent with our values,” alleging liberal professors at the college have attacked conservative students, but those incidents went unreported.
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