Professor who wanted cops to be killed still somehow employed

If you haven’t heard of Joshua Clover before now, allow me to introduce him. Clover is a tenured professor at the University of California, Davis, and the author of nearly a dozen books. He’s also a big fan of social media, or at least he used to be. Before taking his Twitter account private, it seems that the professor really enjoyed mixing it up with other users, including a number of charming tweets where he wished that more police officers would be murdered. Even in California, that was a bridge too far for some, but Clover remains on the faculty to this day. (CBS Sacramento, emphasis added)

UC Davis is condemning a professor’s inflammatory statements where he said cops “need to be killed.” English professor Joshua Clover reportedly wrote several tweets and made comments in a 2015 interview with SF Weekly where he referenced violence against law enforcement officers.

“People think that cops need to be reformed. They need to be killed,” Clover said in response to the question “What’s wrong with society today?”

Several old tweets from Clover’s followed the same criticism of law enforcement.

“I am thankful that every living cop will one day be dead, some by their own hand, some by others, too many of old age #letsnotmakemore,” Clover reportedly tweeted on Nov. 27, 2014.

Clover wasn’t exactly beating around the bush there. Notice the date of that quoted tweet, by the way. That was Thanksgiving day. Clover decided to express his “thanks” for every living police officer one day being dead. That interview with the San Francisco Weekly wasn’t much better.

Of course, radical ideas aren’t some sort of new obsession for Clover. Take a look at the books that he’s published. Riot. Strike. Riot laments the inherent evils of capitalism and praises those who would resort to violent tactics to tear it down. Another book consists of “violent poetry” that sings the praises of Marxism. With those sorts of opinions as a backdrop, I suppose shooting some cops looks like no big deal.

UC Davis as issued a statement “condemning” Clover for his violent, anti-police rhetoric, but that doesn’t mean that he’ll be losing his job. When asked if he might be fired, a UC Davis spokeswoman said: “Public statements like those made by Professor Clover are accorded a high level of protection under the first amendment.”

That’s very interesting. I can think of any number of other professors with more conservative points of view who weren’t accorded nearly this level of First Amendment protection. Granted, none of Clover’s statements uncovered thus far would technically amount to a direct call for people to murder police officers. He’s just “thankful” that it’s going on. But still… C’mon, man. If you can’t show this guy the door, it says more about your school than it does about one sociopathic Marxist.