The College Fix

Nearly two dozen professors investigated by their universities are now sounding the alarm on what they say were essentially witch hunts against them for doing something that upset the campus status quo.

The recently published book “Professors Speak Out: The Truth About Campus Investigations” contains 20 personal vignettes authored by professors who argue that the probes were largely unnecessary and unfounded, in some cases malicious, and certainly biased against them.

The topics of the probes centered around three main issues: sex; race and ethnicity; and religion and politics.

Edited by Nicholas Wolfinger, a professor of family and consumer studies at the University of Utah, the book details the experiences of scholars who faced so-called kangaroo courts, and some were fired from their jobs.

“The book features conservatives attacked for their views, and progressives attacked for theirs. Other cases, such as mine, were essentially apolitical,” Wolfinger told The College Fix in an email interview.

Anyone concerned with cancel culture or academic freedom, or who’s been critical of the modern academy, should read the book, he said, adding administrators who want to improve their institutions should also get a copy.

The Martin Center for Academic Renewal will host a panel on May 22 featuring some of the professors in the book.

Center President Jenna Robinson told The Fix that “university faculty have broad rights of academic freedom and free speech in order to encourage open inquiry and protect the integrity of research and teaching.”

“Disciplining faculty for speech erodes these protections and undermines the university’s mission. In many cases, it’s also illegal,” she said via email.

Wolfinger wrote in an op-ed on the Unsafe Science Substack that the investigations represent a “new McCarthyism” that “has descended on higher education.”

According to a 2023 report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, faculty members today are 3 to 4 times as likely as their McCarthy-era colleagues to self-censor. A 2022 report by FIRE also noted that professors investigated for their speech jumped from four in 2000 to 145 in 2022.

Wolfinger pointed out that the number of persecuted professors is probably even higher because the public hears about these cases only because the victim is famous, files suit against his or her employer or former employer, or chooses “to raise a fuss.”

Wolfinger, however, is not staying silent about the University of Utah opening up investigations into him three times between 2016 and 2021.

According to Wolfinger, his university opened the first investigation into his “Title IX sexual misconduct” because, 20 years ago, he told some of his colleagues that he had proposed to his ex-wife at a strip club. The dean of the University of Utah opened a second investigation into Wolfinger’s eye rolls and a profane comment, classifying these as “hostile body language in faculty meetings.” The university opened the third investigation over an alleged “bad tweet.”

Wolfinger said that the university opened these investigations because it had a “rocky” relationship with him for “decades.”

Because of his personal negative experience, Wolfinger began to volunteer for Families Advocating for Campus Equality, “a nonprofit that provides peer counseling to faculty, students, and staff falsely accused of sexual misconduct, and lobbies for better state and federal policy.”

Professors in the book victimized by their employers for alleged racism, “salty language,” or sexual misconduct include Jason Kilborn, Lee Jussim, Patanjali Kambhampati, Mark Mercer, Stephen Porter, Frances Widdowson, Teresa Buchanan, Elizabeth Weiss, Robert Frodeman and Deandre Poole.

Professor Kilborn told The College Fix he thinks that his university opened a case against him not because university officials believed he was guilty but because “college administrators are craven politicians” who are “all too easily have fallen prey to political pressure to do things they know are wrong” and “were under intense political pressure at the time to ‘do something’ to sideline me—which led them to trump up a pretextual case of ‘harassment’ against me.”

“I strongly believe this is the case in virtually all of the nonsense cancellation cases we’ve all seen circulating on the internet over the past four years,” he said. “The industry is not what it used to be. We all need to get back to the business of educating students rather than engaging in dirty politics.”

MORE: Nearly 650 college students, groups punished or investigated for speech over last five years

IMAGE CAPTION AND CREDIT: A screenshot of the book “Professors Speak Out.”

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter