The university initiated a ‘termination process’ after Earnest suggested that a misunderstanding involving black students wasn’t a big deal.
Coastal Carolina University (CCU) recently bowed to a woke mob of theater students who demanded professor Steven Earnest be ousted from his role after 16 years at the university — because he suggested that a misunderstanding on campus was not a big deal.
The controversy began with a September 16 incident in which students discovered a list of names on a classroom whiteboard. The students, realizing that the names all belonged to students of color, quickly assumed that racial foul play was behind the list, and they organized a protest.
However, a prompt investigation by the university revealed that the list had come out of a discussion between a visiting artist and two students of color who said they were hoping to connect with other non-white students on campus. The trio wrote down the names of other students of color who might wish to form a group to discuss their shared experiences.
The committee explained the misunderstanding in an email to campus but wanted to make clear that the investigation — which revealed the whole to-do had been over nothing — “in no way undermines the feelings that any of you feel about this incident.”
“It should have never happened and the DEI committee will be discussing with faculty and students the gravity of the situation and how to handle these requests in the future,” the email said.
Earnest dared to question that pandering attitude, writing back: “Sorry but I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
“I’m just sad people get their feelings hurt so easily,” he said. “And they are going into theater?”
In a recent interview with National Review, Earnest, who has been an actor for 30 years, said his comment came from the mindset that, if you’re going to be an actor, “you’re going to get your feelings hurt every day.”
“I’ve always stressed that people have to have a little bit of a tough exoskeleton to even think about going into something like performing in theater,” he said.
Still, the mob had been awoken.
Two students on the committee shared the email with people “who then sent it out to the entire world,” Earnest said. People all the way from California were contacting him about it, saying they had seen it online.
Students saw the comment as racially insensitive and threatened to boycott class until Earnest was fired. They staged a protest on campus and got the local TV news stations involved.
Before Earnest knew it, his classes were reassigned and he was told not to come back to teach them. The university launched an investigation into the professor’s comments and later initiated a “termination process” against him.
The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education has stepped in on Earnest’s behalf, demanding that the university cease all punitive action.
“CCU has chosen a course denied to it by the First Amendment,” wrote FIRE. “We call upon CCU to abandon its current path.”
CCU declined to comment for this story, saying that it is “unable to provide information about personnel matters.”
Earnest said that while he has been surprised by the way the university has handled his situation, he recognizes that there has been a “big change in higher education” in recent years.
“It’s happening all around the world, this woke generation is trying to replace and cancel people within the universities to change the nature of just everything we do, I guess,” he said, noting that he has been in contact with educators from New Zealand, Paris, and the U.K.
“But I was surprised because the administration has protection, simply because of their power and who they are, and then the students have protections because they’re paying to go there,” Earnest said. “So who’s left in the middle are the faculty; we have no protection.”
Earnest is just the latest casualty in a war that has been brewing in the theater department since students launched a website with a list of diversity, equity, and inclusion demands in the spring of 2020, right after George Floyd was murdered by then–Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
The students argued that the department had been taught from a strictly white, Eurocentric standpoint and that casting had been unfair to minority students — a “whole laundry list of things that, frankly, weren’t true,” Earnest says.
The students demanded extensive and reoccurring diversity, equity, and inclusion training for faculty and staff with disciplinary consequences if not upheld, as well as a department-wide ban on phrases such as “colorblind casting.” They also advocated a requirement to hire two non-white faculty or staff members by 2025 and that the department issue a public apology to all students of color for all of the inequity and trauma they have experienced.
The faculty complied, transferring power into the hands of students. According to Earnest, a woke revolution has overtaken the department ever since.
“We all want diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Earnest said. “I couldn’t be any more for the general spirit of that. But I think at that point, it became a sort of attack on our department.”
Students now have in their minds that they have an “inherent right” to “just rise up and cancel somebody,” he said.
He notes that while initially the offensive wasn’t against him, he had always been in danger of running afoul of the students’ demands, given that he teaches Aristotle and Shakespeare and other “figures of Western canon that are deemed perhaps offensive, for whatever reason, in this current climate.”
He said the faculty underwent DEI training that defined the faculty members — who were all white at the time — as oppressors. The professor said he emerged at the top of the list of the oppressors as one of the only straight white Christian males in the department and as a Republican, though he says he never preaches politics in his classes.
Now, amid his own persecution, he says his department has stood unified against him, in what he believes is an effort to defend their own livelihoods. People outside of his department have come to his defense, saying they can’t understand how this situation has been so blown out of proportion.
He received an anonymous phone call on his university phone telling him that he better not back down against the woke movement, which the caller said is “ruining higher education.”
“I think there’s a sense that this is something bigger that we have to stand up and fight against,” Earnest said, adding that, while he has been willing to fight against the presence of racism in higher education, when those efforts go too far he has to “fight back.”
Still, even if Earnest gets to return to the classroom, he will do so knowing that any perceived wrong move could land him in an outsized world of trouble.
Next semester he is set to teach a class on dramatic theory and criticism. While he typically looks forward to teaching the class, which can sometimes include “fun” discussions of political issues, he knows now that there will be students in the class “who have said terrible things” about him.
“So I would have to walk on eggshells for a while,” he said. “The good thing about college is the people change.”