Shame on The Arkansas Legislators Keeping UA from Taking More from SC Than Maalox Win

Arkansas’ Imaginary Enemy

Apparently, Arkansas is less forward-thinking than the flagship school of a state that flew the Confederate flag near its State House of Representatives until 2015. The same state where said Confederacy initiated our nation’s civil war by bombing Fort Sumter 165 years ago.

Suski, who has little to do with sports and a lot to do with the law, was neither a party nor a representative of a party in the transgender-athlete case, according to Clowney’s post. She was one of 17 academics who signed the document in support of one particular side, Clowney wrote.

The case of transgender athletes and with whom they play sports has been a political firestorm for the last several years. For most of the early 21st century, few batted an eye at whether biological girls played varsity athletics against biological boys or vice versa. Even fewer transgender athletes played varsity sports. In 2024, NCAA President Charlie Baker said only 10 transgender athletes existed at the NCAA level among the 510,000 athletes across the country.

Ten. Among over half a million.

Never mind that Arkansas ranks 47th out of 50 states in health care, 45th in child well-being, 36th in education and, despite the Natural State moniker, 32nd in air and water quality and 37th in pollution.

The focus and vitriol remain on this fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders proudly signed a 2021 bill that made Arkansas just the second state to ban transgender women and girls from competing on sports teams consistent with their gender identity. Attorney General Tim Griffin, however, was unable to point to any examples of transgender girls joining girls sports teams in Arkansas.

Lia Thomas, a swimmer at the University of Pennsylvania in 2017-22, was one of the first major public figures to bring the question to the forefront. Thomas won the women’s 500-yard freestyle national title in her final collegiate race about three years after she began transitioning. Last July, President Donald Trump’s administration cut UPenn’s federal funding in large part because of the school’s relationship to Thomas three years prior.

No threats to cut the University of Arkansas’ funding were ever formally made. Politicians and “stakeholders” had bandied disapproval privately. Now that they’ve gotten their way and the school buckled without a public pushback, the door is open to all manner of meddling. 

That is something the athletic department and previous athletic directors have been dealing with for ages. Academics had largely been insulated from these conniving lawmakers, who now feel they have carte blanche to tear the system down if it dares get in the way of their sociopolitical agenda.

The largest and most accomplished university in the state, which should stand for intellectual honesty and an array of opinions, instead caved.

Whatever side any particular reader has on the issue of transgender athletes in sports isn’t relevant. A school denying employment, after initial hiring, to a person simply because of his or her mainstream beliefs is relevant. 

Arkansas’ decision is very likely to reverberate in other arenas.

The Impact of the UA’s Cowardice

It wasn’t that long ago that the school, at least publicly, took the side of decency and free expression.

Back in 2016, six members of the Arkansas women’s basketball team chose to kneel during the playing of the national anthem before a game against Oklahoma Baptist. Some in the crowd booed, others applauded. Afterward, then-AD Jeff Long and then-head coach Jimmy Dykes stood up for their players publicly. 

“They had very, very strong, well-informed, educated opinions based on their real life experiences, their real life emotions,” Dykes said at the time. “I am very, very proud of them.”

The players’ act caused a rift on the roster, one of the participating players said the following spring. She also said the public support wasn’t quite as strong privately. Of the six players who participated, one, Jordan Danberry, transferred out in January and became an All-SEC player at Mississippi State. Two others left on their own volition at the end of the season. Dykes was fired that spring, and Long was let go later in the fall.

Almost 10 years later, it’s easy to envision immediate team dismissals for an overt political act in defiance of the current administration, especially after the school’s choice to renege on Suski this week.

The administrators who preach about the sanctity of women’s sports when transgender athletes enter the equation are the same ones who refuse to shell out the money to fund a competitive women’s basketball team. The Razorbacks went 10-22 (3-14 SEC) last season, and have lost their first four league games under new head coach Kelsi Musick by an average of 29 points.

The university has not even pretended to protect free speech and academic rigor in the last year. The UA has wiped its derriere with the separation of church and state by installing the Ten Commandments in every campus classroom.

Tenured UA professor Shirin Saeidi, the director of Middle East Studies, was fired for having the gall to speak out against her home country of Iran being bombed. It’s hard to even imagine the uproar if someone tried to put verses from the Quran on university walls. 

Perhaps the school’s defense — which it almost certainly won’t provide, citing non-comments on personnel decisions, as usual — is that Suski should not have made her politics public. Such a defense is flimsy; easily rebutted even if you’re not an accomplished law professor. The moment someone’s personal ethos or beliefs about the rule of law become the reason for any sort of punishment is the moment the system shows its cracks.

At this point, the University of Arkansas may as well be located on a fault line.

“This move will irrevocably undermine morale of faculty and staff who already live in a state of constant fear and retaliation for expressing their personal beliefs,” Clowney wrote. “It will frighten anyone who is considering moving to Arkansas to work at the U of A. And because it was successful, it will be the first in a long line of similar First Amendment violations until we stand up and say ‘no’.”

John Calipari had no problem moving to Arkansas in the spring of 2024 to take over an Arkansas basketball program whose leaders in recent decades had a history of doing the right thing. He walked into a program where legislators did not get in the way of what was in the best interest of the school. 

Razorback Nation would have raised a fit had any legislators tried to keep Calipari away and muck up what was clearly in Arkansas’ best interest. 

Now, it needs to do the same for Emily Suski. 

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