Big League Politics has learned that Dr. John Eastman, former professor and dean of the Chapman University law school who is said to have retired following outrage over a brief speech he gave at the January 6 Trump rally in Washington DC, was actually forced to resign by university president Daniele Struppa following sickening smear and pressure campaigns.
A source familiar with Eastman’s situation spoke to Big League Politics in order to correct the joint university and media narrative that he retired of his own volition. Eastman was instead forced out by a president who caved to a mob of professors who signed a defamatory letter against him.
172 Chapman University faculty and Board of Trustees members in total signed the letter, which was later published in the Los Angeles Times. None of the signatories are affiliated with the law school; many of them are professors in English, film, communication, psychology, sociology, art, and political science—fields typically chock full of leftists.
“He does not belong on our campus,” the letter bluntly concludes after decrying his remarks in DC on January 6 as helping “incite a riot against the U.S. government” and which “should disqualify him from the privilege of teaching law to Chapman students and strip him of the honor of an endowed chair.”
“We call on Chapman’s faculty senate, president, provost and law school dean to promptly take action against Eastman for his role in the events of Jan. 6. Any failure to act by the university would hurt the careers of all faculty, alumni and staff at Chapman. Our research could be associated with extremism thanks to Eastman’s actions,” the letter moaned.
Chapman University, located in Orange, CA, was founded in 1861 and has long maintained a quasi-Christian and conservative character, especially in comparison to many other US universities. But since James Doti retired from his role as president in 2016, a mathematician by the name of Daniele Struppa has taken over—and conservatives on campus generally believe Struppa is running the university into the ground.
Struppa wants Chapman University to be a beacon of diversity and inclusion at the expense of academic performance, his critics allege. They believe Chapman is no longer as prestigious as it once was and that its reputation is suffering among the very people Chapman is supposed to attract.
President Struppa released no less than four statements on Dr. Eastman from mid-December 2020 to mid-January of this year. The first statement came in response to Eastman assisting then president Donald Trump’s attempt at intervening in the Texas v. Pennsylvania case filed with the Supreme Court. The court soon decided not to take up the case because they deemed that the lawsuit lacked standing.
Struppa’s subsequent three statements all came out in a matter of six days. On January 8, two days after the Capitol breach, he said Eastman’s remarks in DC were “in direct opposition to the values and beliefs of our institution” and that “this week has also demonstrated that this country has a great deal of work to do for social justice and equity.”
It should be noted, however, that Eastman’s remarks simply stated that we should follow constitutional and other legal remedies to investigate allegations of election fraud. But if this is “in direct opposition to the values and beliefs of our institution,” as Struppa says, then it is evident that Chapman University does not care a whit about supporting and defending the law and the US Constitution.
The next day’s statement attempted to answer an “emotional response” from students, parents, faculty, staff, and alumni—read: a leftist mob who believed his second statement did not go far enough. In it Struppa clarified that he is “bound by laws and processes that are clearly spelled out in our Faculty Manual.”
“The Manual does not allow me to decide on my own that any faculty is a criminal or that they should be disbarred and therefore fired, which is what I am being asked to do,” he said.
The last statement, on January 13, said that “Dr. John Eastman and Chapman University have reached an agreement pursuant to which he will retire from Chapman, effective immediately.”
“The university is not able to comment further on the specifics of confidential personnel matters and will make no further statements on this matter.”
This is a standard but curious statement. It sounds like a politically correct way of saying that they forced him to retire, which is for all intents and purposes the same as firing.
“Despite Struppa’s assurances in his third and fourth statements, Dr. Eastman was nevertheless given a professional death sentence for utilizing his tenure-protected free-speech rights in an effort to defend the constitutionality of our elections,” our source tells us.
Dr. Eastman is understood to be heartbroken about the loss of his position and the harm done to his reputation. He poured his heart and soul into Chapman University’s law school after becoming a faculty member in 1999, a mere four years after its founding. He also served as dean of the law school from 2007 to 2010, boosting it up into the top 100 throughout the entire United States. Dr. Eastman touted this accomplishment in a statement of his own, saying that the law school’s ranking moved “from 163rd to 93rd in that short three-year period between 2007 and 2010.” Unfortunately it has since slipped to 111th, according to U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Although courteously acknowledging President Struppa’s initial defense of him and of academic freedom in general, Dr. Eastman said that he could not “extend such praise to some of my ‘colleagues’ on the campus or to the few members of the Board of Trustees who have published false, defamatory statements about me without even the courtesy of contacting me beforehand to discuss.” He singled out the political science department in particular for their “numerous false statements of fact and law in their diatribe against me.”
“Had they bothered to discuss the matter with me, they could have learned that every statement I have made is backed up with documentary and/or expert evidence, and solidly grounded in law,” Eastman wrote.
Unsurprisingly, Eastman’s participation in Chapman University’s annual Law Review Symposium was recently canceled. His statement on the matter reads in part:
“Some have speculated that I withdrew from the conference of my own accord. That is false. I have been prohibited from participating by the university, in what is the latest manifestation of its capitulation to “cancel culture.” The university has done a disservice not only to me, but to the students on the Chapman Law Review who have worked so hard to bring to fruition what was an ideologically balanced conference on an important and current topic of constitutional law. Those students deserved better, as did I.”
This sad situation is indicative of a troubling trend, namely the serious decline of education and academic freedom in the United States, even at supposedly Christian universities like Chapman. Higher education plays a crucial role in developing and solidifying the worldviews of young adults, and when higher education rots, so does our society.