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While enjoying a cup of coffee and reading over the news in the internet, as is usual for me on a Saturday morning when I have access to the web, I ran across Matt Hamilton's 21 September 2013 article in the online LA Times, "Kansas Professor Put on Leave after Tweet Blaming NRA for DC Shooting."  The article notes that the University of Kansas chancellor decided to place journalism professor David Guth on administrative leave in the interest of maintaining an undisrupted learning environment for students.  It also cites a number of condemnations of Guth by his colleagues and others, ranging from disavowals of implied violence to calls for his termination.  Hamilton does note that the comments sparking actions against Guth appeared on Twitter and on Guth's personal blog, although his stance has softened since the administrative leave was enforced upon him.

There are many problems with this.  Not least of these is the chilling effect that silencing any speech has upon the freedom to give voice to opinion and inquiry, freedoms necessary to the improvement of any people and, ultimately, of us all.  Any censorship is a danger to freedom of mind, and thus to freedom of conscience and to freedom in its most rarefied and purest form--whatever that may be.

More specifically, Guth is an Associate Professor of Journalism, as his faculty information page notes.  Academic hierarchies are not always in the forefront of the general public mind, but in this case, the fact of Guth's position is relevant.  As an associate professor, Guth is tenured.  That means that he is supposed to be in a position of particular protection from persecution for voicing unpopular ideas, by tradition and, usually, by contract; tenure protections exist to allow the tenured to pursue truth without worrying that finding unpopular truths will result in their dismissal.  Tenure exists to prevent such things as happened to Galileo Galilei--to prevent truth from being silenced because some non-governmental political agency decides that it does not like what is revealed.  The free expression by a person of that person's opinion is an item of truth, one that should not be silenced because it happens to be unpopular--and one that should not be silenced even if it happens to be repugnant.

Also, Guth has a long history of public service, one that includes (per his faculty page) "years as the chief spokesman for the state's prison, probation and parole systems."  He is not speaking from the stereotypically-perceived professorial position of unending isolation in the mythical ivory tower, but as the result of years of work with some of the populations most directly impacted by guns and their use; he likely knows whereof he speaks from lived experience as much as from sustained academic study.  If he speaks out against a given group from such knowledge, his speech perhaps ought to be more closely attended--and if he speaks with authority, he ought not to be condemned.

Further, Guth is an Associate Professor of Journalism.  He teaches those who will become the press, people to whom particular protections are afforded by the highest laws of the United States.  As their teacher in the very thing that affords them their Constitutional protections, he has every right to consider himself also thusly protected--and his career suggests that he has done the work to earn those protections himself, not only through his students.  While Guth, according to the LA Times article, did not post his comments in his capacity as a member of the press or in his capacity as a professor, surely he had reason to expect that he would be able to give voice to what he saw as truth.

Ultimately, though, the University of Kansas, as a state school, is an adjunct of the state government and therefore, at some remove, of the government of the United States.  For a governmental agency to silence the speech uttered by a citizen in that citizen's capacity as a private citizen (i.e., not speaking through official channels, but through personal resources) is heinous, an abrogation of the principles underlying the First Amendment.  And if supposed proponents of the Second are offended by this, they are entitled to voice their opinions--but they ought to remember that the First Amendment is first for a reason.

The Second exists in service to the First, not the other way around.