Dr. Emily Taylor gave Laurens County Democrats a harrowing account last Saturday of her departure from Presbyterian College after she wrote a Substack article about toxic masculinity, and its bad effects on young men in America, in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination.
She said Laurens County State Rep. Luke Rankin used her words, to the effect of, if you are a young man, you prove yourself a man by violence, and conservative commentator Kirk promoted violence even if he was just urging young men to prove themselves and take risks, and the final words of her statement, “I’m sorry Kirk died” to mean that she was celebrating his assassination at a Utah university.
She quickly became one of the 600 professors, and myriad other K-12 teachers and others, labeled radical leftists by conservative figures who demanded that they be fired, especially after MS magazine picked up her commentary for publication.
“This was an op-ed. Obviously, I’m not a social scientist,” said Taylor, who taught English and gender studies at the Christian college in Clinton at the time of publication. She said action against her words, then, also is a free press issue.
She said, in addition to social media condemnation, Rankin spearheaded a threat to PC signed by him and 3 other lawmakers to strip away private-college tuition money assistance (SC Tuition Grant Program) from the students of Presbyterian College. This could be done, the lawmakers threatened, through a state budget proviso; it was not the only time that colleges’ money was threatened in this way by South Carolina officials.
“Rankin is a symptom of a much bigger action,” she said. As the first person in her family to attend college and earn an advanced degree, and accept scholarship money, she could not allow PC to be damaged in this way. She resigned her position, she says among many threats to herself and her children, on December 18.
The lawmakers sent PC their threat letter in October.
PC protected her, Taylor said, by following the academic freedom provisions in the college-faculty handbook. “I don’t want to see the college hurt,” she said.
Elsewhere in her 30-minute talk, Taylor said, “I worked all my life to get this job at PC. ... PC is ecumenical and, as such, it is a huge resource in Laurens County. ... I totally support PC. They are doing good work.”
Taylor insisted that she followed the rules in the college-faculty handbook as she wrote her thoughts after the fall of the Roe vs Wade decision at the United States Supreme Court and then “broadened out” her expressions to include other national, state and local issues.
She admitted that in her commentaries she did write that far-right conservatives are part of a “radical death cult” and said, “I guess that triggered them.”
Without being specific about the threats she and her family faced because of her views, Taylor added, “It’s been difficult to live through this, to be targeted by your state government.”
