A prominent newspaper columnist giving a talk at a local university isn’t even slightly out of the ordinary. But in the case of New York Times columnist Bret Stephens accepting George Washington University’s invitation to speak on campus this semester, the circumstances are … unusual.

Stephens’ invite comes on the heels of his emails to GW higher-ups alerting them of a professor’s tweet that mentioned the columnist unfavorably. That professor, Dave Karpf, confirms to DCist that the event is being planned.

It was last week (was it really only last week?) when Karpf, an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs, made an offhand joke on Twitter about Stephens being a bedbug in the context of the Times newsroom having a bedbug infestation. “The bedbugs are a metaphor,” Karpf tweeted. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”

Karpf told DCist that the joke was inspired by the fact that, every time Stephens publishes a column, “my Twitter feed is full of people complaining about Bret Stephens, complaining about how annoying he is, how you can never get rid of Bret Stephens.” The tweet got very little traction, and most people scrolled on.

But Stephens, apparently, did not. He emailed Karpf to, bizarrely, invite him to “come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face.” Stephens cc’ed Forrest Maltzman, GW’s provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, and, according to Karpf, also emailed Frank Sesno, the director of GW’s School of Media and Public Affairs. Stephens later said on MSNBC that he wasn’t trying to get Karpf in trouble.

Karpf, a tenured professor, didn’t get in trouble. (He noted that if he hadn’t had that level of job security, “I would be terrified.”) Maltzman backed him. Stephens was widely mocked online, especially given that he gives ample column space to complaints about overly sensitive college students. The following day, President Donald Trump even tweeted about Stephens being a bedbug, which typically signals that a news cycle has reached its apex in 2019.

Not this time, though.

Karpf tells DCist he was “shocked” when he saw Stephens’ latest column on Friday, which compared the “spirit of certitude” from the era before World War II to our current time, not-so-subtly implying that being called a bedbug was akin to Nazi language. “Today, the rhetoric of infestation is back,” Stephens wrote.

“Before the Friday column, my feeling was the appropriate outcome were for him to be mocked informally and pulled aside by his bosses,” says Karpf. “Now that he took the extraordinary step of pursuing a personal vendetta in his New York Times column, they’ve got to suspend him. There’s a minimum standard of quality and him failing to meet it.”

In his response to Stephens last week, Maltzman invited the columnist to “visit our campus to speak about civil discourse in the digital age.”

While a GW spokesperson tells DCist that the university doesn’t have details to share publicly on any event with Stephens, Maltzman did say in a statement, “I extended the invitation after consulting with Professor Karpf because discussing issues such as how to enhance civil discourse is an important national conversation and is a conversation that our students should be a part of.”

The invite was met with some backlash online. “Ahhh yes, the best way to support your faculty is to give the person who tried to get him fired, a platform on your campus,” said one reply that typifies that line of thinking.

Karpf disagrees with that backlash. He says that he’d understand if Stephens were given an opportunity to “opine about civility” alone on a stage, but that the event is being planned as a moderated back-and-forth between him and Stephens.

“He invited me to come to his house and have this conversation,” says Karpf. “Now, he’s ostensibly going to come to my house and have this conversation.”

Previously:
Why Everyone Is Talking About Bedbugs, NYT Columnist Bret Stephens, And A GW Professor