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‘Education is never neutral,’ scholar wrote in announcing resignation
A professor specializing in queer studies at Colorado Mesa University recently resigned early rather than teach classes this spring semester after a dispute with administrators over academic censorship concerns.
The controversy stems from comments the professor made at the start of her fall semester Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies sociology class.
She had criticized Christian churches that do not accept LGBTQ people, and noted some students in her class might have voted for Donald Trump, according to various reports on the matter.
The comments prompted a student in Jennifer Miller’s class to complain to the university president during his office hours, and led to two separate investigations in recent months — one looking into the professor’s comments, and a second reviewing how administrators handled that probe.
In February, the internal review found that administrators did nothing wrong during their investigation, according to a memo to faculty from CMU President John Marshall reviewed by The College Fix.
The controversy centered on Miller, an adjunct professor of social and behavioral sciences at the school who had taught at the school for nearly a decade.
“A university that cannot tolerate critical pedagogy is not committed to learning; it is committed to self-preservation,” Miller stated in a Jan. 8 letter to the editor of the campus newspaper announcing her early retirement.
“When institutions feel threatened, they call for caution or moderation; in reality, these are tools used to protect power,” Miller wrote.
Miller declined an interview request from The College Fix.
According to Miller’s letter, she was told by administrators to be “’neutral’—to mute my voice—because of two sentences from my first-day lecture that were taken out of context.”
“In one, I welcomed all students and acknowledged that some local churches are queer allies while others require critical interrogation, informed by students’ experiences of religious trauma. In the other, I noted it was ‘likely that one of you voted for Trump,’ immediately followed by affirming that you have the right to be here and that this classroom is a safe space in which to engage with difficult issues,” Miller wrote in her letter.
Miller, who describes herself as “queer” in the letter, wrote she was already planning to retire after the spring semester of this year, but did so early because “the intellectual and human work I do in the classroom is no longer protected by the institution I served.”
She disagreed with administrators who asked her to be neutral.
“Education is never neutral,” Miller wrote in her letter. “[I]t challenges, provokes, and destabilizes. A university that cannot tolerate critical pedagogy is not committed to learning; it is committed to self-preservation. When institutions feel threatened, they call for caution or moderation; in reality, these are tools used to protect power.”
Colorado Mesa University, which earned a good free speech rating for colleges in 2025, went “above and beyond” by investigating the handling of the student complaint, according to Marshall.
In his February email to faculty, President Marshall said that when “the good work of our colleagues is called into question on fundamental issues of academic freedom, professional ethics, and personal integrity, I believe a response is warranted.”
The review panel, he added, “independently validates what I know to be true of the work happening all across this campus everyday: That people of good faith and differing views of the world are working hard to support both colleagues and students as we all try and sort out the truth and make space for one another in our disagreements.”
The student newspaper, in reporting on the review panel’s conclusion, noted that it had filed a public records request, and through that determined “this was not the first time a student has complained about Miller.”
Email correspondence among administrators showed a student raised concerns about comments made by Miller in a class in 2023, the Criterion reported.
“The complaints alleged that Miller made comments about faculty having ‘vanilla sex,’ comments about the bisexual community perceived as disparaging and that she ‘used the N word’ in class,” the newspaper reported.
When asked about these complaints, Miller told the newspaper she has never used the “N word” in class, and that the “discourse regarding bisexuals and ‘vanilla sex’ is part of queer pedagogy, not her personal values, and the comments were decontextualized from a broader educational setting.”
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