How hard was it for Nick Wolfinger to find contributors to the new book, Professors Speak Out: The Truth about Campus Investigations?

Not difficult at all, he said in yesterday’s Heterodox Academy webinar. So many professors have been through so many disorienting, unjust, and damaging investigations at American universities that – even though some potential authors could not participate in the book out of legal gag orders or fear of retaliation – he was able to include 22 first-person stories. And, he says, he could easily do a second volume.

“This book reveals an academy under siege, with attacks coming from across the political spectrum,” writes Wolfinger, Professor of Family and Consumer Studies and Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the University of Utah, in the volume’s introduction. “Universities have responded by developing Byzantine bureaucracies for investigating and punishing [alleged] academic misconduct, often through muddled and opaque disciplinary proceedings.”

Stephen Porter, Professor of Higher Education at North Carolina State University, went through just such a tortured process, as he details in the book and talked about in yesterday’s live event. Porter found himself targeted for his conservative views, including for referring to a national disciplinary meeting as a “woke joke.” He ended up punished with extra teaching and isolation in his program. Although he attempted to sue his university, North Carolina State managed to get the case dismissed.

The experience led Porter to give others advice about how to protect themselves, including by keeping careful records, avoiding exhibiting weaknesses that can be exploited, filing grievances, and being honest about the psychological toll these trials take. On that last point, he spoke about working with a therapist. (In the book, Porter recalls the case of fellow staff member and conservative at North Carolina State Chadwick Seagraves, who committed suicide following targeting by what Porter calls a woke mob.)

In yesterday’s webinar, Patti Adler, Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, shared her own harrowing tale of having her academic life essentially demolished over the course of a week. Adler was targeted by a “concerned” teaching assistant who tried, with allied feminist faculty, to take Adler to task for a skit she’d been using for 25 years in a course on deviance. The skit involved volunteers acting out various sex worker personas to help students understand the complex and varied motivations for sex work.

When those working against Adler could not find – after much searching – anyone qualified to file a claim of sexual harassment over the skit, the group targeting her turned to claims that the classroom exercise put at risk various vulnerable groups, including gay men and women. Once the administration got involved, she was given one week to decide between retiring “voluntarily” with a buyout and retention of retirement health benefits or risk being terminated.

In her written reflection on her case, Adler writes, “Threats to academic freedom come not only from the Left and the Right, but also from institutional authority, as university counsel is neither leftist nor rightist but institutionalist, in a very limiting, reactive sense. In many respects the greatest dangers come from ‘establishments’ that are motivated not by ideology but by more mundane concerns with ‘risk’ and ‘brand.’”

In Adler’s case, a colleague claimed she had violated ethics rules by not getting Institutional Review Board permission for the class skit – even though IRBs regulate research, not teaching. Meanwhile, Porter’s case shows how claims about alleged lack of “collegiality” can be used against people who try to defend themselves (and get understandably angry in the process). The cases recounted in the book clearly demonstrate the chilling effect these “off the rails” investigations can result in across campuses.

Participants in the webinar noted there’s no doubt there are instances of real sexual abuse and discrimination. In terms of Title IX, the infamous cases of serial molesters Larry Nassar and Jerry Sandusky come to mind. But Wolfinger argued that the fact that Nassar got away with what he was doing for years despite being reported under Title IX shows how broken the systems are.

Audience members at the webinar mulled the question of how the situation could be improved. But when so many universities now get away with lack of appropriate due process – including dragging out investigations for years (when they are supposed to be time-limited), as faculty members’ professional and personal lives are upended and sometimes destroyed – it is hard to know where to start.

In the Q&A, the University of Wyoming’s Martha McCaughey (who was one of our guests last week) suggested that perhaps faculty committees could first assess whether charges are interfering with academic freedom rights of the accused. According to HxA’s Director of Research Alex Arnold, at least at some institutions, this kind of approach exists in the written procedures, but it’s not clear it’s being used in practice. Moreover, in our webinar, some questioned whether one could trust universities to establish faculty committees truly dedicated to that task instead of the witch-hunting we too often see. To have such a committee work, it would need to include people truly dedicated to protecting academic freedom, regardless of their own politics.

As the webinar’s moderator, I told our panelists before we started that one thing could help might be if those involved with these investigations were required to read Professors Speak Out, to see just how wrong and harmful these inquiries can be.

We’ll have another panel on this book at HxA’s conference next month. There, Nick Wolfinger will host a panel including two other contributors to the book: Florida Atlantic University’s Deandre Poole and Rutger’s Lee Jussim. Attending the conference means not just getting to hear this panel but being able to talk, one-on-one, with peers who have been through investigations that have gone off the rails. So, if you’ve been through one of these trials, consider joining us in New York June 23-25.