Put to the Test
ERIC RASMUSEN isn’t in the mood to talk, which is out of character for the IU economics professor. Until late last year, Rasmusen was a social media gadfly. His venue of choice was usually Twitter, where his tweets on everything from politics to academia largely went unnoticed. That changed on November 19, when a Twitter user with more than 475,000 followers retweeted a screenshot of one of Rasmusen’s posts. Suddenly, he was the center of attention—and not in a good way.
The tweet in question included a link to an article headlined “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably.” For his tweet, Rasmusen excerpted a quote from the article: “Geniuses are over-whelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness.” Later, Rasmusen told the Indiana Daily Student he simply found the quote “interesting” and “worth keeping note of.” He invoked a common Twitter caveat (“retweets are not endorsements”), saying: “It seems strange to me because I didn’t say anything myself—I just quoted something.”
On campus, however, Rasmusen became persona non grata. Students and faculty both called for his firing. But because IU is a government-funded institution, it is obligated to protect Rasmusen’s First Amendment rights. As long as Rasmusen hadn’t violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy, IU had no case for dismissing the tenured professor.
The day after Rasmusen’s tweet went viral, the university announced
