MILWAUKEE – Professor John McAdams has refused to apologize for exercising his right to free speech and academic expression in a manner that defied political correctness.

Now the professor, in conjunction with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), is suing Marquette University for “illegally suspending him in the fall of 2014 and making the decision to terminate his tenure and fire him from Marquette.”

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In 2014, McAdams was suspended with pay and banned from campus after using an Internet blog to publicly criticize an assistant instructor who prevented an open discussion of gay marriage in her class, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

The instructor, Cheryl Abbate, reportedly refused to let a student express his opposition to gay marriage, then later indicated that such statements would be considered “homophobic.”

McAdams was initially suspended and was told he would be fired for criticizing Abbate, according to news reports. But in February the university accepted the recommendation of a faculty committee, which determined that McAdams was initially suspended without proper due process.

The committee recommended that McAdams be suspended through the fall semester of 2016 without pay, then be reinstated – but only if he apologized for making his statement about Abbate’s classroom policies.

McAdams has refused to apologize, and the two sides have been at a standoff for several weeks.

He and WILL announced the filing of the lawsuit on Monday.

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“For blogging and defending an undergraduate student, Professor McAdams is being suspended,” WILL President and General Counsel Rick Esenberg said in a prepared statement. “But it is worse than that. He is being told that he will be fired unless, in the manner of a Soviet show trial, he confesses guilt and admits that his conduct was ‘reckless.’”

“Professor McAdams will not do that. He wrote an accurate blog post about an issue – the treatment of certain points of view as offensive or beyond the pale.  The issue is one of great public interest. The university has said that it welcomes debate and self-criticism. That is precisely what Professor McAdams was engaged in.”

Adams, in a prepared statement, noted that the initial complaint of the student who was not allowed to express his views on gay marriage has not been addressed.

“I think the most overlooked aspect of this matter is that no one in the Marquette administration has taken seriously the complaint of the undergraduate student who was silenced by the instructor,” McAdams’ statement said.

“I’m saddened that Marquette’s treatment of the undergraduate student at the center of this controversy failed to adhere to its guiding principle of Cura Personalis.”