The University of Colorado will keep John C. Eastman in his position as a 2020-2021 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy, despite his asking whether U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who is a U.S. citizen, is eligible for the vice presidency given that she is the daughter of immigrants.

“So before we so cavalierly accept Senator Harris’ eligibility for the office of vice president, we should ask her a few questions about the status of her parents at the time of her birth,” Eastman wrote in an Aug. 12 essay that Newsweek later apologized for as “a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia.”

The Denver Post reported on Monday that Boulder campus Chancellor Phillip DiStefano wrote to faculty about how he wanted to avoid “a narrative that our university suppresses speech it does not like and would undermine the principles of freedom of expression and academic freedom that make it possible for us to fulfill our mission.”

Eastman is a longtime proponent of the notion that the Fourteenth Amendment does not provide “birthright citizenship,” in which anyone is a citizen who is born on U.S. soil.

In Eastman’s view, which he expressed to a U.S. House of Representatives’ subcommittee in 2005, adults who are “temporary visitors to this country” should have their children remain “a citizen or subject of the parents’ home country” instead of an American citizen.

It was a point of view he reiterated in the Newsweek article, when he wrote that “derivatively from her parents, Harris was not subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States at birth, but instead owed her allegiance to a foreign power or powers — Jamaica, in the case of her father, and India, in the case of her mother.”

Eastman’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment is not the way it has been applied in practice, and countries other than the United States similarly confer citizenship on those born inside their borders. In a tweet, the Colorado Democratic Party referenced President Donald Trump’s past efforts to delegitimize former President Barack Obama through questioning his citizenship after Trump said he had “no idea” if Eastman’s theory about Harris was correct.

“Donald Trump — the same guy who pushed the racist birther conspiracy against President Obama — is now pushing a baseless claim that Kamala Harris wasn’t born in the US,” the party wrote. “What do you suppose those two have in common that’s making Trump do this?”