BSU is right to stand up for academic freedom, but we should call Yenor what he is
Boise State University professor Scott Yenor recently tweeted a video of a vile speech he gave at the National Conservatism Conference.
He declared that modern women were “more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be.”
The project of national greatness, he seemed to say, will require putting women back in their place, which is the home.
The backlash was immediate to Yenor’s misogyny. And it’s not the first time Yenor, who has made a personal brand of homophobia, transphobia and sexism, has faced such a backlash. But for all the claims that “cancel culture” is a hegemonic menace, Yenor will face no professional consequences for his statements.
In statements to the media, BSU spokesperson Mike Sharp made clear that the university will stand for academic freedom, that professors will not be fired for the political views they express.
“Recently, academic freedom has faced challenges in universities around the country,” he said. “We stand fully in support of academic freedom. Academic freedom is the bedrock of the university and higher education, and our faculty hold a wide range of opinions and perspectives.”
BSU is right to stand up for academic and intellectual freedom — values that Yenor has worked to undermine but will hide behind, hypocrite that he is. Like free speech, academic and intellectual freedom are the sorts of values that are meaningful only if they are upheld in the case of detested views.
It is vital to hold tightly to those values at a time when the academy in Idaho is under sustained political attack, much of it led by Yenor himself from his perch on Lt. Gov. Janice McGeachin’s “indoctrination” task force.
The country does not lack putative censors today: Some claiming that Critical Race Theory has infested the school system — as Yenor does — are burning books. We should not join him at the pyre.
However, as a professor, Yenor is responsible for treating his students equally. So BSU should carefully review Yenor’s grading records to see whether he systematically treats men and women, or straight and LGBTQ students, differently. His conduct within his department, through institutions like tenure review committees, should receive similar scrutiny.
And it should be made clear what Yenor’s views are, based on his published works.
Yenor has called to reverse what he calls the “rolling (sexual) revolution” by instituting state policy discriminating against the LGBTQ community and women. He seems obsessed with the idea that female employment is driving the country to demographic destruction through low birth rates (the birth rate has, in fact, changed minimally since the mid-1970s). Over time, this obsession with women’s fecundity has driven him to views bordering on fascism.
Yenor consistently attacks governmental deference to “human autonomy” — that is, freedom. In the background is the goal of a transformation like that underway in Viktor Orban’s Hungary, which he cites approvingly. He has similarly touted policies instituted by Vladamir Putin in response to low Russian birth rates.
Orban, a tyrant who has succeeded there in undoing most constitutional, legislative and judicial checks on his power under the banner of Christian mores, plays a central role in the “National Conservatism” Yenor seeks to promote.
Orban himself was featured in a sympathetic interview at the National Conservatism Conference in Rome last year.
Yenor seems ready to follow him. The central theme of his speech was not simply an attack on the idea of independent women but on the necessity of restoring a discriminatory regime of “public man and private woman” in order to somehow solve the imagined crisis of low birth rates and to render the ineffable quality of “greatness” to the nation.
This is blood and soil, dressed up in the language of the academy Yenor seeks to dismantle.
This story was originally published November 30, 2021 at 4:00 AM.