This is how North Carolina–Wilmington Prof. Mike Adams introduces himself to his classes:

Welcome back to class, students! I am Mike Adams, your criminology professor here at UNC-Wilmington. Before we get started with the course I need to address an issue that is causing problems here at UNCW and in higher education all across the country. I am talking about the growing minority of students who believe they have a right to be free from being offended. If we don’t reverse this dangerous trend in our society there will soon be a majority of young people who will need to walk around in plastic bubble suits to protect them in the event that they come into contact with a dissenting viewpoint. That mentality is unworthy of an American. It’s hardly worthy of a Frenchman.

Let’s get something straight right now. You have no right to be unoffended. You have a right to be offended with regularity. It is the price you pay for living in a free society. If you don’t understand that you are confused and dangerously so. In part, I blame your high school teachers for failing to teach you basic civics before you got your diploma. Most of you went to the public high schools, which are a disaster. Don’t tell me that offended you. I went to a public high school.

Of course, your high school might not be the problem. It is entirely possible that the main reason why so many of you are confused about free speech is that piece of paper hanging on the wall right over there. Please turn your attention to that ridiculous document that is framed and hanging by the door. In fact, take a few minutes to read it before you leave class today. It is our campus speech code. It specifically says that there is a requirement that everyone must only engage in discourse that is “respectful.” That assertion is as ludicrous as it is illegal. I plan to have that thing ripped down from every classroom on campus before I retire.

One of my grandfathers served in World War I. My step-grandfather served in World War II. My sixth great grandfather enlisted in the American Revolution when he was only thirteen. These great men did not fight so we could simply relinquish our rights to the enemy within our borders. That enemy is the Marxists who run our public universities. If you are a Marxist and I just offended you, well, that’s tough. I guess they don’t make communists like they used to.

Of course, this ban on “disrespectful” speech is really only illusory. The university that created these speech restrictions then turns around and sponsors plays likeThe Vagina Monologues, which is loaded with profanity including the c-word – the most offensive and disrespectful word a person could ever possibly apply to a woman. It is pure, unadulterated hypocrisy.

So, the university position can be roughly summarized as follows: Public university administrators have a First Amendment right to use disrespectful profanity but public university students do not. This turns the First Amendment on its head. The university has its free speech analysis completely backwards. And that’s why they need to be sued.

Before we go, let us take a few minutes to look at the last page of your syllabus where I explain the importance of coming to class on time, turning off your cell phone, and refraining from talking during lectures. In that section, I explain that each of you has God-given talents and that your Creator endowed you with a purpose in life that is thwarted when you develop these bad habits.

Unbelievably, a student once complained to the Department chairwoman that my mention of God and a Creator was a violation of Separation of Church and State. Let me be as clear as I possibly can: If any of you actually think that my decision to paraphrase the Declaration of Independence in the course syllabus is unconstitutional then you suffer from severe intellectual hernia.

Indeed, it takes hard work to become stupid enough to think the Declaration of Independence is unconstitutional. If you agree with the student who made that complaint then you are probably just an anti-religious zealot. Therefore, I am going to ask you to do exactly three things and do them in the exact order that I specify.

First, get out of my class. You can fill out the drop slip over at James Hall. Just tell them you don’t believe in true diversity and you want to be surrounded by people who agree with your twisted interpretation of the Constitution simply because they are the kind of people who will protect you from having your beliefs challenged or your feelings hurt.

Second, withdraw from the university. If you find that you are actually relieved because you will no longer be in a class where your beliefs might be challenged then you aren’t ready for college. Go get a job building houses so you can work with some illegal aliens who will help you gain a better appreciation of what this country has to offer.

Finally, if this doesn’t work then I would simply ask you to get the hell out of the country. The ever-growing thinned-skinned minority you have joined is simply ruining life in this once-great nation. Please move to some place like Cuba where you can enjoy the company of communists and get excellent health care. Just hop on a leaky boat and start paddling your way towards utopia. You will not be missed.

Thank you for your time. I’ll see most of you when classes resume on Monday.

When I first read that, and then read where Adams is employed, I assumed he wouldn’t be employed much longer at a taxpayer-funded university. As it turns out, though, Adams has already taken on the PC dragons and won, as Legal Insurrection reports:

University of North Carolina at Wilmington professor Michael Adams has won his discrimination lawsuit. …

Adams was the professor who wrote the viral response to another professor who called Adams an “embarrassment” to higher education.

The case involved claims that Adams was subjected to discriminatory retaliation for expressing his Christian religious and politically conservative views. …

Alliance Defending Freedom, which represented Adams, described the case as follows:

Dr. Mike Adams, a criminology professor at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington, frequently received accolades from his colleagues after the university hired him as an assistant professor in 1993 and promoted him to associate professor in 1998. At the time he was an atheist, but his conversion to Christianity in 2000 impacted his views on political and social issues. After this, he was subjected to intrusive investigations, baseless accusations, and the denial of promotion to full professor even though his scholarly output surpassed that of almost all of his colleagues. In a lawsuit filed against the university on Adams’ behalf, Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys contended that the university denied Adams a promotion because his nationally syndicated opinion columns espoused religious and political views that ran contrary to the opinions held by university officials.

The jury found that Adams’ “speech activity [was] a substantial or motivating factor in the defendants’ decision to not promote” Adams, and that the defendants’ would not have reached the same decision “in the absence of the plaintiff’s speech activity”.

That prompted an unexpected response from a lefty at Slate:

Mike Adams is a tenured associate professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington. He is also a regular contributor to TownHall.com, and the author of such august tomes asFeminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts “Womyn” on Campus and Welcome to the Ivory Tower of Babel. He seems to me, in his public writings and attitudes, to be a virulently right-wing jerk.

Mike Adams is also extraordinarily popular among students, and he has many peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Nonetheless, Adams’ application for promotion to full professor in 2006 was allegedly denied on the basis of his public engagement. Despite my distaste for Adams’ dumb ideas about feminism, diversity, and homosexuality, I’m glad that Adams sued the university, and am delighted that last month he won, in an important ruling that (for now) preserves a vestige of academic freedom in this country.

For although I find his views as repugnant as many found the anti-NRA tweet of University of Kansas professor Don Guth (whose kerfuffle resulted in one of the most restrictive social-media policies in all of academia), Adams’ spirited public engagement should have helped, rather than hindered, his bid. There’s precious little academic freedom left (what with fewer than 20 percent of American professors currently enjoying tenure)—but it sure as hell should include the freedom to be a schmuck.* (An email to Mike Adams seeking comment, and to confirm or deny said schmuckitude, was not returned.)

Adams’ TownHall bio boasts the classic young-lefty-sees-the-light creation myth—a “light” that shone brightest in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when he responded to a lengthy and pained diatribe emailed to the entire UNCW faculty by student Rosa Fuller. Both emails—full copies of which were provided to me by the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE—are hopped up on the visceral emotion and overblown historical self-importance you might recall from your own communications in the final months of 2001. The student launches into an extended litany of U.S. misdeeds in the Muslim world; Adams responds, “The Constitution protects your speech just as it has protected bigoted, unintelligent, and immature speech for many years.”

The back-and-forth was apparently forwarded to every Fox News–watching uncle in the nation, and a gleefully self-avowed “anti-diversity” celebrity was born. The book deals soon followed, the Web presence grew, and when it came time for Adams to apply for what academics call promotion to capital-F Full, he included his record of public engagement in his portfolio. For when a scholar has—in addition to teaching and publishing the requisite three-audience-member research—dedicated himself (or herself, as Adams would hate me reminding you) to discourse with the public, that can count as intellectual service to the university and community, especially at a nonflagship public institution such as UNCW. Alas, Adams’ committee was, apparently, unimpressed with “service” that included a book with a chapter cheekily titled “Behind Every Successful Man, There’s a Fat Stupid Woman,” and the rest is history.

What is particularly important about this case is that, according to the legal finding, it was the “speech activity” of Adams’ public-engagement material submitted—and not, say, a tweet fired off (too soon?) in his capacity as a private citizen—that prevented Adams’ promotion. This excerpt of the verdict on Eugene Volokh’s blog gets to the heart of why the case matters:

[T]he plaintiff’s speech activity [was] a substantial or motivating factor in the defendants’ decision to not promote the plaintiff, [and] the defendants [would not] have reached the same decision not to promote the plaintiff in the absence of the plaintiff’s speech activity.

I find every sentence Mike Adams writes to be abhorrent. (“The institution [of heterosexual marriage] is good. It tames men. It protects women. It is good for children. Therefore, it is worth promoting.”) But who are we to rule him unworthy of a place in the public discourse, which is all he endeavored to prove by submitting his portfolio?

Indeed, the outcome of Adams v. Trustees of the University of North Carolina–Wilmington is a striking and unexpected victory for academic freedom in its final throes. Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE and author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate, tells me that the ruling is especially sweet in light of the 2006 Supreme Court case Garcetti v. Ceballos, in which a 5–4 majority opinion (written by Justice Anthony Kennedy) asserted that a public employee’s speech was not protected by the First Amendment if that speech pertained to his or her job.

What troubled free speech advocates—and academic-freedom watchdogs in particular, Lukianoff says—is that Garcetti contained only weak protection of public-university professors, whose every word or idea could be construed as pertaining to their jobs. With Adams v. Trustees, organizations such as FIRE, the American Association of University Professors, and the American Civil Liberties Union are relieved that Garcetti, as Lukianoff says, has been “put back in its place,” setting legal precedent for a narrower circumscription that preserves what’s left of academic freedom—for now.

As a very tenure-less adjunct, the only—and I mean only—reason that my own frank writing about academia has not gotten me banned from the profession is that I happen to work for a one-in-a-million dean, who, being a self-professed card-carrying member of the ACLU, finds going to the mat for his adjuncts sporting. Instead, today academic freedom is a privilege of the very few, and even that is being eroded. So the Kansas Board of Regents doesn’t like Don Guth shooting from the hip (too soon?) about the NRA? Neither do I. So the UNCW criminology department doesn’t like Mike Adams arguing that all collegiate rape victims be “charged with criminal libel”? Join the very large club. But guess what? Academic freedom is more important than my taste (or yours).

The Slate writer may well be the only lefty in academia who actually favors academic freedom for non-leftists. Off the top of my head from my five years at UW–Madison (taking four or five classes per semester, with four profs who taught two or more of my classes), I can recall two who I’m pretty sure were conservatives (though they didn’t come out and say they were). There were others who clearly were not but didn’t oppose the free speech rights of those whose views were more conservative than theirs. Of course, this was in the 1980s, when those with opposing views didn’t try to eliminate the opponent’s ability to express those views, and an era in which people didn’t swoon every time they heard something that may have offended their delicate sensibilities.

Adams’ Wilmington page lists that his “Professional Associations” includes the National Rifle Association. He apparently teaches a class called “The First Amendment and Crime,” which I would have loved to have taken as a student. I’m following him now on Facebook, which means you may be reading his thoughts soon.