The Volokh Conspiracy provides a series of links to the Kreshnar promotion contretemps here.

In short, Kreshnar is a conservative philosopher who has been publicly critical about some of SUNY Fredonia’s policies, including affirmative action. Kreshnar was recommended by his peers for promotion to full professor, but the college president, overturning the factulty recommendation, denied Kreshnar’s promotion. In his denial, the president acknowledged that Kreshnar’s teaching was excellent, that his publication record merited promotion, but then said that he was denying that promotion because Kreshnar had “misrepresented” the university’s positions and harmed the university’s reputation.

You can read all the primary source documents here. (Never, ever, mess with a PhD and leave a paper trail)

The good news is that the release of the related memos and the public attention they have garnered has forced the president to reverse his position and Kreshnar has received his promotion.

I just want to comment on a tiny little part of the while topic. During the conflict, Kreshnar offered to submit his newspaper columns to be reviewed for purposeful factual inaccuracies. The president wanted a a vaguer, open-ended review process. Interestingly, Kreshnar wanted a process that was open and the president wanted a process that was secret.

A commenter at Inside Higher Education said:

“President Hefner admitted his mistake, to his credit, but Professor Kershnar seems to see no contradiction in first offering to have his articles vetted by a censorship committee prior to publication and then when the offer is accepted with an add-on complains that the uniersity attempted to stifle his speech. Faustian bargains of the sort that President Hefner and Professor Kershnar made behind closed doors have no place in the academy.”

Um.

If the commenter had actually read the primary documents, he would have seen Kushnar’s proposal in a different light. I read it as a very clear smack to the president. Kreshner’s proposal, focusing on “factual inaccuracies” was simply a way to show that the president’s claims of misrepresentation were bunk - in order to stop his newspaper columns from being published, the committee would have to demonstrate what factual inaccuracies were in the proposed article. Since the president’s claims that Kreshnar was misrepresenting the university’s policies were never supported, one imagines that the president’s real problem was the Kreshnar accurately represented the univerisity’s policies in an unfavorable light. Kreshnar’s proposal was calling the president’s bluff: Show me the misrepresentation. Oh, you can’t? Then give me my promotion, you free-speech-squelching jackass.

I find it heartening that Kreshnar’s liberal colleagues went to bat for a colleague with an opposing but intellectually valid viewpoint and that the administration’s attempted denial was the product of asinine bureauratic impulse rather than a direct political motivation.