Hey thanks for the response!
Professionalism
Kneeling vs. a glib email
Reasoning
Engaging in protest vs. making a completely unforced error
PR Flames Fanned By
The President of the United States vs. 20,000 people signing an online petition
Terms of Employment
Collectively bargained issue vs. General expectation of professionalism for university professors
I'm going to focus here and then talk a bit about your last paragraph, because I think this touches on a lot of the divergence between our points of view.
With regards to professionalism, I think it is important to keep in mind that the NFL players have had a lot longer to optimize their form of expression. This whole thing started with photos of just sitting through the anthem, which, whether intentionally or not, came off as a lot less of a principled protest. Over time he (and later others) converged on kneeling as something that made a clear statement, but didn't come off as "I just cannot be bothered to stand."
Give Gordon Klein 5-6 shots at drafting that e-mail and I bet he could come up with a much more compelling way to convey the points that 1) Both I and the university are ethically and legally opposed to assigning differential work based on student's race and 2) Even if I didn't have moral qualms, logistically there is no way to do it since we don't track the race of students and I don't want to be in a position of either asking students to prove their race (all sorts of legal/ethical/moral problems) or for it to come out I was giving white students access to special privileges reserved for black students (a Rachel Dolezal situation). <-- you said that you think the sentiment Klein expressed was wrong. Do you actually think either of these points are wrong? Or do you take away a different meaning from his e-mail than what I have written and if so, what intended meaning did you get from reading his e-mail? Or is your concern primarily with the tone of the e-mail.
(I do agree he sounds sarcastic and frustrated and that clearly wasn't the right tone for him to have used).
Also keep in mind that this happened right as schools all over the country were switched from in person to online instruction with no lead time and no prior planning. The first time you teach a single brand new course, all the extra prep work can eat up well more than half of your days. Profs all over the country were having to redesign anywhere from 2-5 courses simultaneously on the fly. Which again I think makes expressing oneself in an ill-considered way a lot more likely and, to me anyway, understandable.
In an ideal world, everything would be adjudicated on first principles, but I hope you understand why a professor getting benched for a few weeks does not alarm me about "cancel culture run wild" in the same way that the president making personal vendettas against free speech does. While they are related, I simply do not see these as the same issue. I'm making a judgment call based on the points outlined above and my judgement is to show a little less leniency/care a little less about Klein than I do about Kaep. Worth mentioning though once again, that I hope Klein gets reinstated to whatever position he feels he deserves after this all gets settled.
Klein is a lecturer not a professor. As such he almost certainly does not benefit from tenure. You seem very confident that he will ultimately get his job back. In the cases that I have seen, both at my university and elsewhere, a lecturer or other contingent faculty being suspended is the first step followed by a simple non-renewal of contract in the coming semester. You are, of course, welcome to disagree with me, but really the only way to resolve it would be to set a reminder on each of our calendars to come back in September and see if he's teaching/getting paid by UCLA.
The reason I, and a lot of folks in academia, feel strongly about this is that doing our jobs right, whether on the research or the teaching side, involves a lot of telling people things they don't want to hear. Telling one student that you caught their plagiarism. Telling another student who tried really hard that they still bombed the final. Telling a congressman that sea levels really are rising in her or his district and that no, climate change isn't going to stop next year. Tell a third student that yes, I know you personally don't believe in evolution, but the test is going to cover this material anyway. Telling an activist that no, CRISPR isn't going to make his or her food poisonous... and so on.
These necessary actions simply don't work within a "the customer is always right" framework.
The reason concepts like academic freedom, and tenure, are exist, and are enforced (to the extent they are which is iffy), is that we've decided that education and society work better when there are people who are able to tell students, and government, and the public things they don't want to hear. Some of those things are stupid and wrong.* Some are expressing true thoughts but framed badly.** Some are true, framed beautifully, and draw lots of flack from the public, or government, or both.***
Unfortunately there is no way to chip away at the protection for ideas and concepts one disagrees with without equally weakening it for good ideas and concepts that other people (whether a politician or angry people on twitter) disagree with.
*I went to grad school with a prof who still claimed HIV didn't cause aids.
**Schools should not start assigning differential course work based on a student's race. They really really shouldn't.
***Phil Jones's climate research is a good example of this last case. And he was still suspended, questioned, and demoted, although thankfully not fired.