University of Kansas lecturer, Phil Lowcock, is a go-along get-along kinda guy. Judging by dozens of anonymous reviews on RateMyProfessors.com, his class is easy, his lectures are fun and engaging and he’s a fair grader who makes accommodations for students with different abilities.
When he made a joke about shooting male voters who won’t vote for women, he probably wasn’t trying to upset anybody. That’s not his M.O. He thought his class and colleagues would agree. Fusty deans might not like it, he realized after making the comments, but no biggie, it was just a few laughs at the expense of the kind of right-wing troglodytes out there in Kansas who pay his salary and will vote for Donald Trump over Kamala Harris.
And that’s the problem. Lowcock is not some crazed Marxist out to indoctrinate farm kids. He’s academia’s lowest common denominator.
Lowcock told a joke about killing people he disagrees with because he figured that is the kind of thing that goes over well these days in the classrooms of KU. He was placed on leave.
The Kansas attorney general and Republican chieftains want Lowcock fired, but that won’t change one thing that’s wrong in Lawrence.
The problem with the University of Kansas is that what was once a relatively apolitical faculty with diverse views is now an activist political monoculture where some doofus can tell a joke about shooting conservatives and expect a hearty laugh.
It wasn’t so long ago that you could count the number of $1,000 or more political donations from University of Kansas faculty and administrators on one hand and which party would get more in a given cycle was an open question.
Things have changed. Donations are measured in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and 24 of the top 25 recipients this year are on the left. Twenty-three of them Democratic campaigns or political committees led by Kamala Harris — you know the person you can vote for without getting shot.
If it weren’t for an Indian-American University of Kansas med school grad running for Congress as a Republican getting donations from Indian-American faculty, there would be no Republicans on that list.
In 2020, the six-figure donations to Joe Biden’s presidential campaign outnumbered donations to Trump by 22 to 1.
Firing a lecturer won’t change the fact that the University of Kansas doesn’t seem to hire professors or administrators who show any signs of conservatism or are willing to show that conservatism publicly. It hasn’t for a long time.
Kansas politicos and the Board of Regents need to stop with silly demands to investigate, suspend or fire the periodic stupid liberal whose politics make waves in the Sunflower State and start asking why conservative faculty are apparently so vanishingly rare (or if they are there, why they are so shy) and what can be done to remake the school into a campus with a vibrant, intellectual and diverse faculty.
One thing that can be done right now is to reform the school’s free speech culture to empower right-leaning students to speak up and counter-balance the one-sided faculty. The Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression rates the University of Kansas in the bottom quarter of schools nationally for free speech.
The next step that should be taken is to broaden the pool of people involved in hiring at the school beyond the self-replicating left-wing faculty. The people who pay for the school and hire its graduates deserve a say in how the school runs regardless of how much the faculty will scream about the rights they have misused.
Smart people at the school should recognize that a red-leaning state won’t fork over a quarter of a billion dollars to a bright blue institution in perpetuity without some accountability. When the University of Kansas reflects the diverse values and ideas of the state’s people, maybe there won’t be jokes about killing the thousands of Trump voters who pay the bills.
David Mastio, a former editor and columnist for USA Today, is a regional editor for The Center Square and a regular Star Opinion correspondent. Follow him on X: @DavidMastio or email him at dmastio1@yahoo.com
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