We previously discussed the case of Dr. Allan Josephson, who was effectively terminated after he criticized transgender ideology and went on to secure an impressive victory for free speech before the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.Now, the University of Louisville has agreed to pay almost $1.6 million in damages and attorneys’ fees to settle the six-year-old lawsuit. While the university issued a statement that it has nothing further to say, donors and others should have many questions that need to be answered by a university that spent millions fighting against free speech. In the meantime, the fight for free speech seems to be heating up for another academic at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Starting in Louisville, Josephson was a professor of psychiatry at the medical school and had success at the school after serving as the Division Chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Louisville for nearly 15 years. He has 35 years of experience in the field.
His apparent good standing at the school changed dramatically when he participated in a discussion of the treatment of childhood gender dysphoria at an event in October 2017 sponsored by a conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. He expressed his reservations about some treatments, and his public comments were reported back to his colleagues.
Dr. Josephson argued that children are not mature enough to make such major, permanent decisions and that 80-95 percent of children claiming gender dysphoria eventually accept their biological sex over time without such treatment.
Those views are widely shared by others and have been cited as the basis for states adopting bans on conversion treatments for young children.
His commentary triggered a backlash at the school, which led to a decision not to renew his contract. When sued, the school invoked the Eleventh Amendment and claimed qualified immunity. The district court correctly rejected that claim and the Sixth Circuit just affirmed that denial.
Alliance Defending Freedom represented the doctor and secured this major victory.
University spokesman John Karman told Kentucky Today, “As this settlement is related to a personnel matter, the university is not able to provide additional comment.”
I hope that donors and faculty (as well as state legislators) will demand “additional comment.” We have seen colleges and universities burn millions in fighting against free speech or supporting cancel campaigns. One of the most notorious examples was Oberlin in targeting a small family grocery.
These settlements do not include massive legal fees and costs paid by the university to fight these claims. Administrators make these decisions knowing that they are rarely held accountable. They shrug and move on, and the cycle continues.
It appears to be continuing at UCLA this month.
Law Professor Richard Sander is being targeted by law students because he opposes race-based college admissions. In a rally this week, he was denounced as a vehicle of “racist repression,” an absurd claim for a widely respected academic with a long history of public interest work and research.
As a law student, Sander focused on fair housing issues (we both attended the same law school and served on the law review). Sander continued to work with communities to create better housing and served on the election effort and subsequent transition team of Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor.However, he objected to what he saw as a dangerous trend in academia in the use of race in admissions. The Supreme Court has declared such criteria as racial discrimination, and Sander recently joined others in alleging the University of California is discriminating against white and Asian American students in its admissions process.
The response was all too familiar. Law students attacked him as a racist for arguing against racial discrimination. Keep in mind that California voters have repeatedly rejected the use of race in admissions, but university administrators have repeatedly found ways to circumvent those referendums.
Sander is part of the group Students Against Racial Discrimination, which filed the lawsuit against the University of California. The lawsuit alleges that the UC system is continuing to allow “applicants with inferior academic credentials to obtain admission at the expense of rejected candidates with better academic credentials.”
Law student Noah Massillon is quoted as saying “What we’re doing is essentially rejecting Richard Sander and his position on campus as well as all that stands behind that – all of the racist repression.”
Various groups are targeting him.
The UCLA Black Law Students Association and other student groups organized the protest.
It takes great courage for faculty like Professor Sander to stand against these academic flash mobs. Most faculty either join the campaigns against these dissenters or remain conspicuously silent as they are pursued. An academic has to be prepared to put at risk everything that brings meaning to an intellectual life from teaching to publication opportunities. They are often targeted, shunned, investigated, and even fired.
However, for those of us who have been teaching for decades, we are seeing the ruination of higher education in a single generation of administrators and faculty. Free speech has been in a free fall on campuses. Conservative, libertarian, and dissenting faculty have been effectively purged from departments. Many of these faculty members are not conservative but simply voicing concerns over falling standards and rising orthodoxy on campuses.
It is particularly sad to see law students encouraging such a campaign against an academic who was willing to put his career and his standing at risk to fight for what he believes is in the best interest of the school. You can disagree with the merits of the lawsuit without labeling Sander and others as racists. Both sides of this debate clearly care about UCLA and its future. It should be possible to have a civil and respectful discussion of these issues.
Sander is offering these students the greatest lesson of his career: that it is sometimes necessary to stand against a mob; to refuse to be intimidated in seeking to do what you believe is right.
alas, another example of those in power who oppose the class struggle……true Marxists see all these debates as simply distractions from the immutable war between halves and wage slaves…..
The campus NeoMarxists with their critical legal theory, class struggle and identity politics are two giant steps behind the intellectual times. First came the post-modernists (Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard), with their radical skepticism of such ‘totalizing metanarratives’, favoring the absolute freedom of ideas (‘let a thousand flowers bloom’), anathema to the NeoMarxist censors of all things ‘politically incorrect’. Then came the pragmatists (Richard Rorty et al), who announced the failure of the 2000 year old Socratic ‘Truth’ with a capital ‘T’ project (totalizing metanarratives being an ideological instantiation of said thoroughly western intellectual tradition), arguing instead for the relativity of truth as a manifestation of a given ethnocultural milieu, a Wittgensteinian language game, as it were. As such, the campus NeoMarxists, their political power play notwithstanding, are condemned to the ashbin of intellectual history. There is no ‘end of history’ as per Francis Fukuyama. Rather, history keeps marching on, and, as Bob Dylan prophesied, you better keep swimming or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’.
another example of why we need to END
Federal Aid to colleges/students, cities, states, non-profits!
Right on. Federal support in multiple forms have made the universities so wealthy that they can ignore their conservative faculties and alumni. Federal largesse has also created massive campus bureaucracies whose motivation is far removed from teaching critical thinking, and it further supports useless majors that produce angry and unemployed young people. This is the apex of socialist intention: to separate work from constructive purposes.
As usual, Turley is diverting attention away from Trump’s legal defeats, the evidence of Hegseth’s utter incompetence, and the worst stock market in decades to throw chum to the disciples on transgender culture wars nonsense.
I DO have one request if anyone can get Trump to listen: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THE POPE’S FUNERAL–Please! We all know he can’t resist cameras, the need to be the center of attention, and perceiving himself as belonging in the company of world leaders, but as much as he is hated here in America, those feelings are even stronger in Europe. No one wants him. It’s hypocritcal–Trump is the antithesis of everything Francis stood for. The Pope made clear what he thinks of Trump when he called him out back in 2016 by saying that someone who builds walls instead of bridges isn’t a Christian. He also said that intentionally hurting migrants is a “grave sin”. Trump did NOT respect Pope Francis nor heed his message. Neither he nor his former stripper wife practices any kind of religion regularly. They don’t belong at the funeral of a humble man who is sure to be canonized as a saint some day, and are only going for their own personal reasons–to get attention and favorable publicity, they hope–to divert attention away from the damage he’s already done to our economy, our government, his flaunting of the Constitution and court orders and sagging poll numbers. Using the funeral of Pope Francis for these personal reasons is just plain wrong. Also, given that the majority of Americans oppose Trump and view him unfavorably, he doesn’t represent the United States either. Someone PLEASE get him to stay away from the funeral. He and Melania are literally like turds in a punch bowl. Seth Myers said it best when he said that we’d all be better off if Trump would just go and play golf all day instead of trying to pretend he is the President.
@Gigi
As usual, Gigi pops up with some utter nonsense that is in no way relevant to anything whatsoever. If you aren’t paid, you are the most bored and uninvolved person on the face of the earth to do this everyday. Nobody cares. Makes me think way back when, the Professor may have told you, ‘No.’, to go to the Sadie Hawkins dance. Really: you are a clown, even amongst those espousing leftist doctrine.
Excerpted from “People” Magazine:
“In Pope Francis’ official Easter address — which was written by the supreme pontiff but delivered by an aide due to his poor health — he doubled down on the importance of compassion for society’s discounted members.
In the address, which was delivered shortly after Vance left the Vatican, the pope wrote, “How much contempt is stirred up at times towards the vulnerable, the marginalized, and migrants!”
Pope Francis, who was born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1936, has spoken out against Trump’s immigration policies multiple times since the real estate mogul entered U.S. politics. During Trump’s first term, the pope said his plan to build a border wall between the U.S. and Mexico was “not Christian.”
He was rebuked by the president, who called him a “very political person.” However, Trump was happy to accept the pope’s 2017 invitation to visit Vatican City, calling it the “honor of a lifetime.”
POPE FRANCIS WAS “REBUKED” BY TRUMP for being “very political”–Trump did NOT respect the pontiff. Someone get Trump to stay away from the funeral–please! As with everything else in his pathetic existence, it’s all about him. The Pope only invited him in 2017 because he was holding the Office of President–something he cheated to get.
“Trump did NOT respect the pontiff. “
Trump and the Pope disagreed on many things, but saying that the President did not respect the Pope is in error. It is typical of you. You do not understand words, especially the difference between respect and disagreement.
“In the address, which was delivered shortly after Vance left the Vatican” And that’s where you lose it. Everything I’ve seen, even the ‘news’ places you love so much, admit Vance’s meeting was the last time the Pope was seen before he passed. How did he give another address when he was way out of it, and supposedly died before giving said address?
People making politics out of the dead, smfh
Pleaser take something for your TDS. You will be so glad you did.
Hurrah. May it continue and become exponentially larger and more severe as time goes by – money and power are the only things these tyrants understand. If our country were founded today, by these idiotic and shallow people, it wouldn’t last a season, just like CHAZ didn’t.
Nothing like more racism in order to deal with supposed racism. Somehow that just does not seem to be correct. I thought MLK Jr. told us that he wanted people to be judged by the strength of their character and not the color of their skin. I believed Dr King then and I still believe him today. Maybe UCLA should require all students of all ethnic and racial backgrounds to take a 1 semester course in the life and teachings of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. There will be plenty of audiovisual aids for those who are still reading challenged (modern education you know). And then there will be plenty of audiobooks also.
All students would be improved by the experience.
@GEB
Yup. Pot meeting kettle, but without any awareness to speak of. And with ramifications many of the people in question do not understand beyond junior high school. Meanwhile, the leadership know precisely which buttons they are pushing in their manipulation game.
I don’t know what to call it anymore but evil; communism has risen again. Drawing back the Iron Curtain appears to have been a temporary reprieve. Supporting the DNC is basically wishing we had lost the Cold War at this point, and I know several otherwise smart people old enough to know better who still persist due to their blue brain washing, they to this day hope for a ‘blue wave’; too many are too privileged and forgot how they got there in the first place.
Well it is nice to see the University of Louisville end up paying for the legal fees for Dr. Josephson. All he did was speak the truth. Medical Schools and Faculties have a problem in that their push for transition surgeries and hormones had no real scientific basis and yet there was an excellent amount of studies collected over the decades that clearly established that the treatment for transgenderism was allowing the children to “go through puberty”. How strange!
The other problem was entrepreneurs in Medicine latched on to surgery and hormonal therapy as a great revenue center. Because psychologic and psychiatric counseling are labor intensive and low revenue. It’s simply that. A cultural phenomenon excited the money makers in medicine who were then happy to oblige and then engage in building gender affirming centers. So you had cultural stupidity and medical greed come together. A lethal combination, obviously, that has no scruples if it is willing to sacrifice young children to surgery and hormones that damage them, often permanently.
A sad state for my chosen profession but frankly I am happy to see it being exposed. Medicine can trend towards arrogance at the best of times and this is not the best of times. Medicine needs to relearn some humility and maybe we should rethink the larger and larger size of medical corporations that encompass hospitals, physician groups, insurance subsidiaries , pharmaceuticals all in one. If the wrong power structure grabs control, when the train goes off the rails, it’s often too large to stop or even try to change direction.
The size of medical corporations are starting to look more like Google and their actions are mimicking those of the High Tech Monopolies.
Your doctors office is starting to look more like a computer interface rather than a place of safety, solace, help and empathy, and scientific treatment.
Both sides of this debate clearly care about UCLA and its future.
Come on JT. Stop with these olive branch statements already. Neither side “cares” about UCLA. It’s just another battlefield, not hallowed ground. Instead, use the access you’ve earned and go nuclear on anyone threatening this right.
The ones who stand up to these trananical mobs, the ones who point out the absurdity of the mob and their lack of semblence of critical thinking, subcoming to the hive mind of the non thinking mob are the truly brave ones. We need more like these professor’s and the good professor to call out the assault on free speech. The cancel culture the fascist leftists have adopted. They leftists are the antithisis of a free society, free markets and the Constitution. And the only way they can win is by their hate and rage drive to destroy, tear everything down. They hate all that America is. They want to tear America down and everyone with it. The little good news is all those moderate, traditional Democrats, Independents want nothing to do with the stupid and crazy far left wing wackos. I for one do not want to see any kind of one party rule of any kind. That is why i keep saying that moderate and traditional Democrats need to give these far left wing wackos the boot and get them out of the Democrat party. Or, leave the modern Democrat party and form a new party based on traditional Democrat party values. If the far leftists come sniffing around to join the new and improved Democrat party, tell the leftists no. You have had enough of their stupid and crazy.
Fascist leftists? Fascism is diabolically opposed to liberalism.
And woke leftist fascists have demostrated time and time again they are diabolically opposed to liberalism. That is why so many traditional and moderate Democrats want you out of their party. Bill Maher has been callling ypu stupid and crazy for years.
Yes, that’s true (although perhaps ‘diametrically’ might be better than ‘diabolically’ here). But liberalism has long ago been left in the dust by a Dem woke-ness that I would call ‘liberalistic’. And this liberalistic-wokeness, having achieved political strength, has now started simultaneously to turn a) backwards and b) downwards towards the very single-Party Fascism that we have seen so often before in the world’s political history. So for all his political novelties and personal quirks, Trump is performing the vital political task and service of returning the nation’s politics back to recover its center. And for that, actual and genuine liberals (Liberals, if you wish) should be thankful and should start trying to reclaim the Democrat Party from the woke-liberalistic swamp in which it is now so pathetically and repellently mired.
Wally, it depends on what type of liberalism you are talking about. Your type is fascism. My type is classical liberal thinking, as is Turley’s, Dershowitz and many other well-known people. Your type of liberalism is close to fascism. All you have to do is dissect the major ideological points to see yourself as a fascist and perhaps more. Choose your model: Stalin, Mussolini or Hitler. All of them have a lot of similarities. None of them resemble classical liberalism.
“Even as they destroy the host.”
The radical Left strangles everything they control. Milley wrecked military recruitment, Joy Reid shrank MSNBC, and Jake Tapper shriveled CNN.
They even do this on a cosmic scale: Mao suffocated China, Stalin mutilated Russia, and Pol Pot violently depopulated Kampuchea.
Now they want to control our children and make us pay for it. The same trial lawyers who back these leftwing groups will be merrily suing doctors and hospitals for damaging children after the trans mania wears itself out.
It astounds and sickens me that this many people can be this stupid and destructive and self-righteous about it.
I was responding in agreement to the 8:06 AM comment.
#. It’s just more evidence of insane people.
” The same trial lawyers who back these leftwing groups will be merrily suing doctors and hospitals for damaging children after the trans mania wears itself out.”
They have already started and will sue physicians, hospitals and university centers. The first claimants will have a lot of time since there is a statute of limitations plus the time it took for the child to come of age. Presently, the tide is pushing to do surgery but is declining. Once the tide turns the other way, I hope it bankrupts those involved, especially physicians, because they have an extra duty not to harm.
Yes!
The University of Louisville is given taxpayer funds to offer student tuition assistance, and also is the recipient of millions more taxpayer dollars channeled through NIH and NSA, among other Federal departments. So, that award will have minimal impact, and it is very doubtful it will cause UoL to budge an inch on their woke BS policies. IT IS PAST TIME TO CEASE ANY AND ALL FUNDING OF COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES WITH FUNDS EXTORTED FROM TAXPAYERS!
I want people FIRED!
I want the FASCISTS Democrats OUT!
Errrr….they prefer to be called communists.
Noone
Professor Turley offers example after example of how the power bestowed to the legal profession by Article 3 . . . is being abused.
On a daily basis…
– Attila D. Hun
The first citadel conquered by DEI discrimination was the administrative side of the academy. As the trojan horse (what are the required qualifications for administrators anyway – and no academic review), they invaded and are seemingly without consequence refusing to change – even as they destroy the host.
Thinking of history, –the rise of formal education from Roman, Greek Socratic days, -to eventually reach a millennial pinnacle of universities’ bestowments of specialized degrees, -and now on the downside of that mountain, -where formal education is being narrowed to/replaced with condescendingly “progressive” social justice curricula and indoctrination being deemed more meaningful and advantageous than a proficiency in the three RRRs…..
little did I know that kindergarten would later lead me down this path….
Ring-a-round the Rosie,
A pocket full of posies.
Ashes! Ashes!
And [We’ll] all fall down!
(“posey” means pretentious, affectatious)
Isn’t that what all parasites eventually do? Wasn’t this, as Margaret Thatcher stated so well, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other’s money?
Every other sort of culture, including the spoils system eventually succumbs to an empty coffer.
Only the capitalist system can sustain itself and ideologies that thrive on control (that include communism, spoils systems and feudal systems eventually collapse as resources are depleted and not renewed.