Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an article originally published by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on May 23, 2025. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style guidelines, it is crossposted here with permission.
At one time, most Americans—and virtually all academics—would have agreed with the famous saying, often attributed to Voltaire, “While I disagree with what you say, I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Over the last several decades, that has dramatically changed. Many academics now seem to embrace the opposite view—something like, “Since I disagree with what you say, I will do everything possible to silence you.”
Is that an exaggeration? You won’t think so after reading Nicholas Wolfinger’s new book, Professors Speak Out: The Truth About Campus Investigations. Wolfinger, a sociology professor at the University of Utah, was the target of a vicious attack by people on campus who wanted to “cancel” him because they didn’t like his thinking. That spurred him to seek out other professors who have similarly suffered through groundless, one-sided investigations over trivial or nonexistent affronts to students, administrators, or outsiders with political pull.
During Stalin’s reign, his chief henchman, Lavrentiy Beria, had this saying: “Show me the man and I’ll find out the crime.” Under the vague Soviet criminal code, almost anything could be declared “anti-Soviet” activity, and since there was no such thing as an objective, independent judiciary, millions were sent to firing squads or the slave-labor camps of the Gulag simply because people with power wanted them gone. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago is filled with horrifying examples.)
[RELATED: Sidky’s Postmodern Purge: Right on Anthropology, Wrong on Balance]
American colleges and universities have become shockingly like that. It’s easy for any disaffected individual to lodge a complaint against a professor for a host of vague offenses, such as “discrimination,” “harassment,” or some other vaporous misdeed. The complaint then triggers procedures that are extremely one-sided, onerous, and potentially career-ending. As Wolfinger states, “An army of digital soldiers now stands ready to target faculty members,” and university officials usually take their side.
In the book’s 18 chapters, we have cases of left-leaning professors in the crosshairs of conservatives and of right-leaning professors under attack from “progressives.” The common thread is that people who didn’t like them were able to abuse the system to hound and damage them, purely for vengeance.
The cases are all worth reading, and I will summarize just a few of them…
Continue reading here.
Cover designed by Jared Gould using the cover of Professors Speak Out: The Truth About Campus Investigations and bookshelf background by Stasys on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 370157316
An excellent essay. It ties in to some extent with Jared Gould’s smart article on university degrees and their utility. One might say that the underlying problem in both cases is centered around student maturity. I wrote a short opinion in the New York Times several years ago: “Colleges are used to having enormous influence over young students, but “in loco parentis” was upended decades ago. Higher education thrives best when students and professors are on equal adult terms regarding independence and, especially, initiative” (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/25/opinion/letters/benefits-college.html). I use Henry Kissinger as an example, who didn’t graduate from Harvard until he was 27 years old, had worked, and served in the military. It may be that gaining some life and work experience before enrolling in a formal university degree program, alleviates to some extent the intellectual disadvantages that students have when they enter college otherwise as a teenager. This also applies equally to professors, and in both business and law, for example, it is the experienced adjunct and lecturer class that tends to represent more stable and mature behavior, versus tenure-track academic faculty. The MBA degree for example, requires a 5-year experience CV before acceptance, even in the full-time campus programs. It has proven remarkably beneficial, and puts the student and professor on more equal footing and therefore with less student dependence, which tends to promote emotional interference (see FT, “EMBAs are a collaboration of executives and faculty:” https://archive.is/ql5Bq). This also reinforces new knowledge creation. Student use of digital devices is also largely counterproductive on campus and contributes to what psychologist Stanley Milgram called the “Cyrano” effect, whereby individuals lose control of self-directed thought. See WSJ, https://www.wsj.com/opinion/cancel-culture-controversy-courtesy-of-social-media-phones-laptops-c04b0a1f. Otherwise, I would add to this provocative article the idea that the best defense is offense.