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Why I Won’t Be Quiet
My colleagues are afraid our employer will retaliate against their free speech, so I’m gonna keep talking…and tweeting
My byline is uniform across the internet — L.D. Burnett — so many of my readers here have probably found me from my Twitter feed or my posts at the U.S. Intellectual History blog or my editorial work at The Mudsill.
Some readers here may have found me through a couple of my essays published recently in The Chronicle Review: “Right-Wing Trolls Attacked Me. My Administration Buckled” and “When My College Attacked Me, Professional Insurance Saved My Bacon.” Those essays reference the fact that during the Vice Presidential debates last fall, I tweeted that the moderator should keep talking over the constantly-going-over-his-time Mike Pence until “he shuts his little demon mouth.” For that tweet I was publicly reprimanded and disciplined by my school.
And newer readers here may have found me through a recent piece written about me by Chronicle senior reporter Emma Pettit: “A College Warned a Professor About Her Tweet. She Says That’s Retaliation.”
Some of my readers, not to mention a few of my friends, might feel bemused or even mystified by one motif running through all those Chronicle pieces: through it all, I keep tweeting. Not only that…
