My CSU colleague emeritus Stuart Hurlbert (SDSU) is a highly cited 20th century ecologist, primarily because of his paper on pseudoreplication (cited over 8000 times!) He's also a Minutemen supporter, environmental fascist, and used his SDSU email to help dox a student.

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In 2007 when leaders of the Minutemen, an anti-immigrant militia group with whom Hurlbert has ties, were trying to dox a student protestor, he helped them identify her using his SDSU email account. He wasn't concerned about her safety, according to him. https://www.voiceofsandiego.org/topics/news/the-minuteman-professor/

Hurlbert is deeply involved in Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) and other related groups that are essentially environmental fascists. CAPS was excluded from tabling at an AAAS meeting because of their extremist views. The SPLC: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2012/02/07/nativist-%E2%80%98environmentalists%E2%80%99-enraged-exclusion-conference

Hurlbert was a supporter of SB 1070 in Arizona and wasn't afraid to use his university email to plug for it: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1THVuZWxrZvounNED7yUDkEr5fanUqHdB/view

Hurlbert published over a dozen articles in The Social Contract, which is a white nationalist publication. I read one and wouldn't recommend it to you, so here's the wiki page. SPLC calls them a hate group, too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Contract_Press

Last week Hurlbert wrote a letter criticizing the Ecological Society of America's (reasonable, positive) response to #BlackLivesMatter that's uh made some rounds. I don't recommend the letter but it accuses ESA of politicizing science, which takes some chutzpah given his history.

Hurlbert regularly uses his position as emeritus to send his work for right wing hate groups to SDSU's biology community using listervs and email lists, from an SDSU address. Ok, so one might say "academic freedom" or you may alternatively wonder why I care.

If public institutions allow Hurlberts to exist on their faculties, as they do, that means we get to spend time lampooning, calling out, and crticizing their hateful ideologies on Twitter. It's part of appropriately marginalizing them.

Yay.

Hurlbert regularly sends fascist drivel to SDSU biology graduate students, including many people of color, and they are over it. They have a petition going that you can sign. It has lots of details of Hurlbert's activities and a timeline of his behavior: https://sdsubgsa.weebly.com/petition.html 

Academia has a long tradition of protecting speech like Hurlbert's. My first encounter with it is personal: my father is a retired @NorthwesternU history prof, and I remember his outrage in the 1980s at NU's resident Holocaust denier faculty Arthur Butz. https://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2006/02/bienen.html

So it's a family tradition to call out colleagues for having hateful ideologies. I don't know what to do with Hurlbert. His 1984 paper is in my course (but I'm more of an Oksanen "Pseudoreplication is a pseudoissue" person) and it'll stay there with a note that he's a fascist.

The obvious problem is having people like Hurlbert or Butz around makes the academy hostile to people of color and Jews and LGBTQ people and all the other targets of their hate. And we have a responsibility to combat overt and systemic racism in the academy while reimagining it.

My beef with it is that each one of these Hurlberts undermines the work of dozens of other people around them working (and obviously not yet succeeding) to make academia and science more inclusive of people excluded by their ethnicity or race, and undermines individual students.

I'm not alone https://twitter.com/eirenkate/status/1272606185628340224?s=19

Anyway I look forward to a strongly worded letter from Hurlbert. If I get one I'll frame it. I just have to make sure he doesn't review the paper we submitted to an ESA journal today

Ya'll are retweeting up a storm, so I will use this space to say a couple more things:

1) Black Lives Matter
2)