The Rare Justifiable "Cancellation"?
Daniel Povey, a John Hopkins University associate professor, was just fired purportedly for organizing a “counterprotest”. Students at JHU organized a sit-in by taking over and chaining doors shut at the main administrative building on campus. The intent was to protest a proposal for JHU establishing its own armed police force (currently they use off-duty Baltimore City police officers).
Povey claims he needed to access servers in the occupied building, and he brought along bolt cutters to force his way inside. The university, in turn, is accusing him of violent behavior that put students in physical danger.
In a lengthy post about the termination, Povey tries to angle his involvement as yet another example of campus activists going too far:
I am aware that some people are trying to “cancel” me and get me fired from my next job. See if I care! I have lots of other career options. When this whole thing started I told my friends, if the worst comes to the worst I can always go to China or Russia. I'll tell you this, though: whatever happens, I will never apologize and I will never back down. I know the normal script is that I am supposed to get down on my knees and beg, “Please accept me back into your midst, liberal America! No way. Fuck you.
Now, I'm generally in the camp of "campus activists are going too far" and also inclined to roll my eyes at the basis of the protest, but I don't think Povey is a good martyr to herald on this case. I agree it must have been painfully frustrating to be locked out of your office, but the way he went about rectifying that issue shows a dramatic amount of ill-judgment.
He chose to do it around midnight, when presumably a significant number of people are sleeping. He also chose to bring along some random "outsiders" (Povey does not elaborate on who these people are) presumably as bodyguards. In the effort of breaking open the chains with bolt cutters, he also lays his hands on someone trying to keep the door closed. He and his band of outsiders get pushed outside of the building where one of his group seems to punch one of the students in the face without any apparent provocation. This is all on video. Povey's only response to the video is that it is "misleadingly captioned":
They have now posted some video of the incident. Misleadingly captioned, but if you look at the video itself, and bear in mind it's what they felt was most advantageous to release from the much larger amount of video they collected, it doesn't really bolster their story that I attacked them. For me the funniest part is where they ominously zoom in on— da da da dah! — a Guns'N'Roses t-shirt. Like it proves we're white supremacists or something. Dudes! Guns'N'Roses isn't even metal; it's just mainstream hard rock. Plus I'm pretty sure that Axl Rose is Jewish. Did you guys even realize that it was the name of a band? (shakes head). Also: when they say I am pulling on one of their people, I believed I was pulling on the arm of the guy with me in the blue shirt. When I freeze-frame the video, it does actually look like the hand of a black person; I might have been confused.
Whether or not he technically attacked them, the entire set of circumstances shows some laughably bad judgment from a professor when dealing with the student body of his employer. This guy is an absurd liability to have around.