This is going to be a political point, not a legal one:

I don't disagree with those here who perceive a left-leaning bias with respect to what speech is "acceptable" to the sensibilities of a university community. Universities are largely left-leaning institutions (the good ones, anyway ). So if Leebron were to say the Trump travel ban is wrong and terrible, you don't really get a lot of protest about that. However, if the Dean of Natural Sciences were to say the travel ban is justified and fantastic, I'm sure you'd get a lot of protest about that--with undoubtedly some quarters calling for the Dean's job, if not his/her head. So one view is okay to shout from the rooftops, but another view isn't. It's not fair, and I get that.

I mean to neither defend nor attack that dynamic. But I do mean to attack the notion that anyone really has intellectual purity and fairness on this topic. The easy example would be if a candidate for Dean of the Jones School of Business was a brilliant economist but was a very vocal activist about how the Holocaust didn't occur, and, even if it did, the murder of 6 million Jews was a good thing. Surely even the more conservative among us (who dislike the travel ban dynamic described in the above paragraph) would say, "Um, yeah, I don't care how great of an economist this guy is, I don't want Rice to hire him due to his anti-Semitic views and speech. If nothing else, it's bad PR that Rice just doesn't need."

I get that being against HERO, or being for the travel ban isn't necessarily morally equivalent to being a Nazi, and I'm not saying they are equivalent. (Though for many, there is moral reprehensibility to the anti-HERO and travel ban positions.) I'm just saying I think that almost everybody has a line where the intellectual purity of their position starts to erode. It's more a matter of degree (or specific issue) than of some inherent integrity of principle.