Broncs do not run from threats

CORRECTION: In the Sept. 24 article, The Rider News gave an incorrect title for Associate Professor-Lecturer Richard Zdan. The Rider News regrets this error.

By Richard Zdan

Imagine a hypothetical situation in which a Rider student is assaulted by a visitor after she consumed alcohol at a party on campus. Now imagine upon learning about this hypothetical incident, President John Loyack announces that the university is taking “swift and decisive action” to expel the student because underage drinking “does not reflect our expectations” and that “respect, accountability and community responsibility are non-negotiable.” In this proposed scenario, Provost Kelly Bidle further clarifies that the student was expelled because her assault was “the direct and foreseeable consequence” of “crossing a line” in the way she dressed in public and that “community standards matter.”

Would you be thankful that the university chose “to act decisively” and “ensure that our campus remains a safe environment for all?” Obviously, assault is bad, but we cannot allow someone to remain part of the Rider community if their failure to demonstrate “appropriate restraint” in their behavior attracts the attention of violent outsiders.

Does this hypothetical make you angry? Are you thinking it is ridiculous because university administration would never be that callous to the victim of a crime? Are you thinking that it cannot happen here? Well, last week, Rider’s administrators punished the victim of threats — Adjunct Professor Kate Ecke.

The analogy between my hypothetical and Ecke’s termination is neither a false equivalency nor hyperbole. Making terroristic threats may not be as serious as assault, but it is still a third-degree crime under the New Jersey Code of Criminal Justice. In response to some violent outsiders committing that crime, Loyack sent a campuswide email on Sept. 17, making exactly the announcement I described and, in an email sent to faculty the following day, Bidle provided exactly that context. According to Bidle, Ecke was terminated because of the “clear public safety risk” caused by terroristic threats to Ecke personally and the Rider community generally that “were the direct and foreseeable consequence of [her] crossing a line in her public comments.” In other words, she was terminated because she was the victim of a crime.

Instead of full-throated defense of a member of the Rider community and a defiant statement that Broncs do not run from threats, the president and provost instead chose to blame the victim.

Beyond having a threat directed at her, the university has not specified exactly what rule or policy Ecke violated to warrant her termination; we have only been told that she brought those threats upon herself through public speech that violated Loyack’s vague and undefined “expectations for respectful and civil discourse.” Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the views Ecke expressed, we all ought to find her termination for such specious reasoning to be chilling because it is an assault on the very concept of academic freedom.

To my colleagues and students in the arts — be careful what you create or perform. If the message conveyed in your art runs afoul of Loyack’s unstated “expectations,” you could be next.

To my colleagues and students in the natural sciences — be careful what research you do. If some religious fanatic threatens the university because your paper on the evolution of microbes does not conform to their creationist views, you could be next.

To my colleagues and students in the social sciences — be careful about speaking truth to power. If the powerful cannot handle the truth, you could be next.

If the president and provost decide that this essay is “crossing a line,” I could be next.

But silence is complicity. Faculty and students, regardless of our academic disciplines, regardless of our personal politics, need to stand together in solidarity to offer the full-throated defense of a fellow Bronc that the university administration was too cowardly to offer. The termination of Ecke represents the sacrifice of our essential academic freedom in a misguided effort to appease external terrorists. One does not need to be a historian to know how that invariably ends.

This Bronc does not run from threats. I know where I stand. Which side are you on?

Richard Zdan is an associate professor-lecturer at Rider University