RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s easy to get fired from an American college these days. Just make some innocent remark that a member of a recognized victim group claims to find offensive and you’ll be on your way to the unemployment office pronto.

On the other hand, it’s really, really tough to lose your college teaching job by spouting off leftist slogans. Which makes Kevin Allred a very special guy. He is a white man who, for several years, taught a course in the Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University entitled “Politicizing Beyoncé.”

Judging by all accounts, it was a perfect example of a thoroughly ridiculous 21st-century humanities course, heavy on pop culture and political correctness and light on anything remotely resembling academic or practical value. It was a very popular course with the Rutgers student body, doubtless because it was less challenging than, say, Quantum Mechanics.

(Sample student comments from Rate My Professors: “Awesome professor! Doesn’t believe in grades and is very lenient. No actual homework.” “BEST. PROFESSOR. AT RUTGERS. Like the second class the computer wasn’t working and he cancelled class.” “He doesn’t even lecture, we watch one or two of Beyonce’s music videos and then we discuss them … super easy.” “SUPER CHILL! Like literally, he let us choose our final grade!”)

Allred had a sweet deal. After studying his Twitter and Facebook accounts and listening to his idiotic podcast, I can testify that he has very little in the way of intellectual heft to offer. Indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, he’s a silly drama queen whose mind, such as it is, is a ratatouille of left-wing ideological clichés.

Nonetheless, he had succeeded in landing a job teaching – or, rather, “teaching” – at one of the best colleges in the country. Note well that a far more highly qualified individual with moderate or conservative political views would find it tough, if not impossible, to secure such a gig in a Rutgers humanities department.

In short, Allred was one lucky fluff-head. But his ivory-tower idyll would not last forever. In November, Trump’s election victory unhinged him so much that comments he made on campus – and on Twitter – led to a visit to his home (in Brooklyn, where else?) by members of the NYPD, who took him to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation.

“We were informed by Rutgers PD,” explained the NYPD in a statement, “that he made threats to kill white people.” Allred himself, in a piece published online last month, maintained that “[a]n anonymous complaint from a parent claimed I forced students to destroy an American flag, threatened every white student in class by saying I would shoot them all given the chance, then returned home and tweeted proof of my dangerous behavior.”

The tweet read as follows: “will the 2^nd amendment be as cool when I buy a gun and start shooting atrandom [sic] white people or no…?”

Although the doctors at Bellevue sent Allred home, he was later visited (he says) by members of the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. And Rutgers, after temporarily suspending him, gave him the heave-ho. In the aforementioned piece, in which he depicted himself (naturally) as a victim and rejected all the accusations made against him, Allred said that the whole episode “makes me want to teach harder, more ferociously, and more unapologetically than ever.”