California lecturer slams college head over anti-Bush tweet

FRESNO, Calif. (AP) — A Fresno State lecturer who says he was demoted to teaching online courses after posting a negative tweet about Donald Trump says the university’s president is again failing to defend academic freedom, this time over a professor who called former First Lady Barbara Bush an “amazing racist.”

In an opinion posted Thursday by The Fresno Bee, Lars Maischak says university President Joseph Castro is siding with attackers of English professor Randa Jarrar instead of standing up to the “fascist threat to academic freedom.”

Maischak is a history lecturer at California State University, Fresno. His classes were converted into online courses after the university discovered in April 2017 a tweet that said in part, “to save American democracy, Trump must hang.”

University spokeswoman Patti Waid did not have an immediate response.