A KU instructor who told a class that if men won’t vote for Kamala Harris because she is a woman, “we could line all those guys up and shoot them,” has left the university.
KU Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Barbara Bichelmeyer announced the news in an email Friday.
“We are working to identify a new instructor to assume responsibility for his classes, and we are working with the students impacted by this change,” Bichelmeyer wrote.
The staff member was Phil Lowcock, the director of international student-athlete support and an academic adviser for the baseball team. He also worked with a handful of other sports programs and was an instructor of some classes in the Department of Health, Sport and Exercise Sciences.
A video circulating online showed Lowcock making the comments during a class.
“There are going to be some males in our society that will refuse to vote for a potential female president because they don’t think females are smart enough to be president,” he said in the recording. “We could line all those guys up and shoot them.”
He then quickly asks for the comment to be scratched from the class recording because he doesn’t want a dean to hear it.
The video surfaced Wednesday, and Lowcock was placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.
“The instructor has apologized to me and other university leaders. He has explained to us that his intent was to emphasize his advocacy for women’s rights and equality, and he recognizes he did a very poor job of doing so,” Bichelmeyer said in her email.
“The free expression of ideas is essential to the functioning of our university, and we fully support the academic freedom of our teachers as they engage in classroom instruction,” Bichelmeyer’s email continued. “Academic freedom, however, is not a license for suggestions of violence like we saw in the video. While we embrace our university’s role as a place for all kinds of dialogue, violent rhetoric is never acceptable.”
Lowcock and a representative for the Department of Health, Sport and Exercise Sciences did not respond to requests for comment.
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