Via the LAT: Teacher fired for refusing to sign loyalty oath

She lost the job because she did not sign a loyalty oath swearing to “defend” the U.S. and California constitutions “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The loyalty oath was added to the state Constitution by voters in 1952 to root out communists in public jobs. Now, 16 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main effect is to weed out religious believers, particularly Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

As a Quaker from Pennsylvania and a lifelong pacifist, Gonaver objected to the California oath as an infringement of her rights of free speech and religious freedom. She offered to sign the pledge if she could attach a brief statement expressing her views, a practice allowed by other state institutions. But Cal State Fullerton rejected her statement and insisted that she sign the oath if she wanted the job.

[...]

In February, another Cal State instructor, Quaker math teacher Marianne Kearney-Brown, was fired because she inserted the word “nonviolently” when she signed the oath. She was quickly rehired after her case attracted media attention.

(There are some additional examples in the piece.)

Good thing that the State of California, and Cal State Fullerton in particular, is protecting American college students from Quakers and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

I’ll be honest: I am not sure how an instructor’s willingness to swear loyalty to the constitution is relevant to their ability to teach. Specifically: what about visiting foreign faculty or resident aliens? Does California require that Canadian with the green card to sign such an oath? I guess they must.

And really, there is something untoward about loyalty oaths, except in very limited circumstances (such as for elected officials or for members of the military). Certainly a loyalty oath designed to make sure that common citizens hold the “correct” ideas is plain creepy and decidedly un-American.

An irony of such oaths is that if someone really is a traitor who is seeking to infiltrate American higher ed so as to corrupt the minds of our youth, one suspects that they wouldn’t have any trouble lying and signing the piece the of paper. As such, these kinds of things are worthless as a defense against such a threat.

Perhaps the grandest irony of all is that making the signing of the oath a pro forma exercise for all employees in the state, the state constitutional provision cheapens the idea of loyalty to the values of the US Constitution as it makes such a oath mean absolutely nothing but just something one “has to do” to get a job. What’s the value of such an oath?

Update: James Joyner weighs in:

I swore to protect the Constitution from its enemies three times — upon matriculating as a cadet, upon enlisting in the Army Reserve, and upon commissioning — and actually deployed to a combat zone pursuant to that oath. Several times in the ensuing years, I also signed contracts to teach at various colleges and universities. None of them asked to to sign any oaths and I’d have laughed at them if they had.

So, too, do John Cole and Fontana Labs, who amusingly notes:

Enemies foreign and domestic should be warned that I will throw heavy anthologies at them if they endanger my beloved constitution.