Speaker 1:
Welcome to our panel on the Cost of Academic Dissent. You may notice there’s an empty chair here and it is for Mike Adams. Let me briefly explain. Mike Adams was a professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina Wilmington or UNCW. In 2020 in a tweet he protested against the COVID-19 restrictions, comparing them to slavery, and writing, “Massa Cooper, let my people go.” This led to an uproar of protests against him. On June 29th 2020, UNCW announced that Adams retire effective August 1st, and receive a settlement of $500,000. On July 23rd 2020, Mike Adams was found alone in his house with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was 55.
To me, this tragic story points to the potentially dramatic consequence of being drawn into the center of a protest storm. Let us then hear from the four panelists who were here and will kindly volunteer to speak about their own experiences. Joshua Katz is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Joshua Katz:
Hello, the cost of Academic Dissent, that’s the title of this final panel of a controversial conference devoted to a matter that I still have a hard time believing is controversial, namely the desirability of free speech and expression on campus and also off, and the cost is before you. Mike Adams is dead, Francis and I have been dismissed from the professorate, and Amy and Elizabeth are under siege. I would like to use my brief time to speak about three things. First, the awfulness of what happened to me. Second, the good that has come out of the awfulness. And third, how we can all be most effective in restoring sanity to a world gone mad. I have been asked to say more than a little about the first, but would like at least in the questions to spend as much time as possible on the last since our goal should be to fix what is broken rather than rehearse grievances.
How did I become overnight a non-person, both at Princeton University where I was an effective and frankly popular member of the faculty for nearly a quarter of a century, and in the wider anglosphere of my two academic disciplines, linguistics and classics. The story of my cancellation has received so much press. Nearly all of it sympathetic to me and incredulous about Princeton’s motives and actions, that I expect I can dispense with all but the barest outline. In July 2020, a few hundred of my colleagues signed an open letter to the administration that made a number of illegal, and in my view, immoral demands in the name of anti-racism, which we should all understand is a new term for racism. I published a response that I believed and still believe was mild, and who’s every word I stand by to this day. Princeton’s president decided to hang me out to dry despite knowing full well that what I wrote was accurate. From that day forward I was a condemned man, reviled by nearly everyone connected in one way or another to the academic orbit.
Still, I expected to keep my job, but seven months later in February 2021, after an unprecedented investigation into my private life that began immediately after I published my dissent, two reporters at the main student newspaper published a revolting piece of yellow journalism filled with untruths and malicious innuendo. The article did get one thing right. I had had a consensual relationship with a student a decade and a half earlier. A relationship for which I was and am sincerely remorseful and for which I had already been punished with a one-year suspension without pay. The mob, which had never gone quiet, was stirred up all over again and the administration relitigated the old case over 14 months of kangaroo proceedings, going so far as to doctor a quotation of mine in the course of officially presenting me to the entire incoming freshman class as the prime example of Princeton evil.
This past May, the trustees, one of whom, the Dean of Yale Law School, is certainly a candidate for the most embarrassing academic kangaroo of the last couple of years, took the highly unusual step of revoking my tenure and firing me. So I could talk about the ins and outs of all this for hours, about the cowardice of people I believed were friends, about the mendacity of certain administrators and colleagues who ignored and deliberately twisted evidence in order to get rid of me on a pretext about the obvious double jeopardy to which I was subjected. But let me hammer home two important points. First of all, I have perhaps a special standing here today by virtue of being the one person on stage who actually did do something wrong. Some may wish to argue that one or more, Francis, Elizabeth, and Amy made unwise remarks, but to my knowledge, their professional records are unblemished.
By contrast, when I weighed into the culture wars, my record at Princeton was not unblemished. To be sure, the relationship with the student had happened long before and was resurrected in a new censorious environment. My actions were not against the law, only against Princeton’s rules and there is no taint of Title IX. But it was a mistake, a sin, and I have regretted it ever since. I stress my culpability because no one should wish to live in a world in which only the putatively pure are free to speak their mind. My mother-in-law told me that if I published my dissent, the disciplinary action against me, which the university had kept private in keeping with longstanding policy, would be revealed. She was right, but I don’t regret it. Someone had to speak up and it might as well have been me. Indeed, I regret not speaking up sooner.
My point, if I could be vocal despite being a flawed and unusually conflict-averse person, so can pretty much everyone, so can you. A second thing to hammer home, to my knowledge, I lost no friends as a result of the revelation that I had once had a relationship with a student, and that Princeton had already suspended me for this infraction. Every last person who stopped speaking to me, this includes my supposedly best friends, all but one colleague in my department, and nearly all Americans in my main academic subfield, every last person who stopped speaking to me did so already in July 2020 as a result of my dissent. In fact, a few people who had dropped me decided to be in touch again in 2021, once it became clear that I was being railroaded. In other words, people did not make my life hell because of my actual mistake, which many of them knew about anyway. People made my life hell because I spoke the truth when no one else would.
Now, I said at the start that I would tell you about the good that has come from my travails. Look, I’m here alive and kicking. I have a great new job at the American Enterprise Institute where I’m trying to bring about change in ways I could not have done while an inward-looking library rat in the ivory tower. The daily reports from Princeton about intolerance students, professors who think education is activism, and hoards of minor but powerful administrators who have no business being anywhere near an educational institution, make me thankful on a daily basis that I am no longer a member of what can no longer be called a functional community.
And if you think I’m exaggerating, speak with four wonderful people in the audience, undergraduate seniors, Abigail Anthony and Miles McKnight, and Professors Sergiu Klainerman and John Lundrigan, all of whom are working overtime on campus and in the national media to call attention to, and help solve the problems. Furthermore, outside the professional sphere, I have a terrific wife, Solveig Gold, who addressed us all yesterday. We’re expecting a child, it’s not that difficult actually, and I have a lot of friends, true friends.
Speaker 3:
We’re clapping for you, we’re not laughing.
Joshua Katz:
Yeah, fair enough, fair enough, right? Well look, the fact is that I have a lot of friends, many of them unconnected, thank God, to academia because of course they’re all me and like Amy right here. Just a week ago, the Jewish Journal SAPIR, whose latest issue is entirely about cancellation, published a little essay of mine titled The Culture of the Canceled, in which I go into a bit more detail about my friends and the upside of academic death. Go to SAPIR journal, sapirjournal.org and read it. Read not just my piece, but the whole issue.
Speaker 4:
It’s excellent.
Joshua Katz:
So what is to be done? We are dealing with a major problem, which means there is no simple fix. Gratifying recent developments are the creation of dozens of organizations to combat one or another problem in our academic and broader culture, and the proliferation of alternative outlets for expression, especially substacks and podcasts.
Some of these will prove especially effective and survive, others won’t. That’s inevitable. Choose the group or groups you like and get to work. Either throw yourself wholeheartedly into one battle or give as much as you can on as many fronts as possible, and then monitor what is working and what is not. Perhaps the biggest question all of us need to answer for ourselves, and this keeps coming up in these two days, is whether we are fighting to establish or reestablish heterodoxy in the academy or whether the staggering takeover of our cultural institutions by the left demands a powerful conservative response that downplays the excesses on the right. I am by nature an amiable chap and have always preferred heterodoxy. Anyone who gives a fair reading to that supposedly right wing dissent of mine from July 2020, should be able to see this. But I confess that I am growing tired of standing on principle while watching academia get sacked by latter-day Visigoths.
Is it time for me and for other classical liberals to concede that reality must triumph over principle? I don’t like this. But we are in an emergency situation and I feel the need to pose this awkward question in my own voice, and to do so publicly. So let me conclude. If you make a mistake, apologize, but, and I follow Jordan Peterson here, if your so-called mistake is nothing more than speaking your mind, do not apologize. Never, ever apologize. The way forward is to stand firm, to show the bastards that you have the strength of your convictions, and that mob rule won’t prevail. And it won’t.
I have no fear of my reputation on this earth or beyond vis-à-vis the reputations of most of my former academic colleagues. Many of them are truly horrible people, and if I were as horrible as they are, I could dish up serious dirt on dozens of them. And that, is what makes this whole thing so extraordinary. The willingness of deeply flawed people to be mendacious merciless toward others while acting as though they themselves were invincible, honest actors. They are not honest, and they are not invincible. This is war, and our job is to vanquish them. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
Amy Wax is Professor of Law at Penn.
Amy Wax:
I’m going to stand at the podium just to hide my green tights, which I really like, but I know other people don’t feel the same way, also to stay awake. So we’re supposed to address the cost of dissent, and of course everyone knows, and I don’t need to recap, that they are heavy indeed in the current environment. I too am reluctant to talk about myself too much anyway. So I want to start by noting something that should be abundantly obvious and perhaps is not too original, but still bears repeating, which is that the cost of dissent in the academy could be very much reduced, not to zero, as private disapproval will persist, as John Stuart Mill noted, but to a fraction of what the people on this panel and others are experiencing today. How? Just by university officials, deans, provosts, presidents, doing their job and standing up to the woke mob. A simple statement. The basics of academic freedom would do it.
Professors are entitled to express their views. The university does not vilify or penalize faculty for their opinions. The university does not take positions on disputed questions. If you disagree, explain why. Don’t seek to punish. Nothing more need be said. And of course, the byproducts of such a stance are that it will educate students about the function of the university. It will discourage the cancel culture, it will deprive administrators of anything to do and it will bore the media to death.
But of course this doesn’t happen, certainly not consistently and far from it at my own university. We can talk endlessly about why that is. But I want to bring up one topic, one possible semi explanation that has not really been touched on in this conference. And I think at least it needs to be mentioned. Now, Steven Pinker told us that new babies are born every day, but the problem is that those babies go to kindergarten and they make their way through the K through 12 educational system. And from talking to students, and I talk to students and undergraduates in Law students a lot, many of them seek me out, and more on that later, that system is catastrophically broken. It fails to teach the students the fundamentals of our system.
And one central pillar is the tolerance, however grudging of people who don’t agree with you, of dissent, the importance of free speech principles, not just to participating in knowledge creating institutions like the university, but participating in our very democracy. And instead, we spend time on the 12 genders, the five pronouns, and all sorts of topics that are really completely irrelevant to the functioning of our universities and our democracies. So I really would like people to think about how to reform the K through 12 system and why it is broken.
Now, returning to the topic at hand, we know that our dean’s, provosts and presidents have repeatedly failed to stand up for these basics of free speech and free expression. They themselves are given to bullying of people like me, and more on that in a moment. But the thing that really disconcerts me and dismays me about my own experience is not that I have been a target of misrepresentation, of dishonesty, of duplicity, but the general dismaying lack of candor and intellectual integrity that I have seen develop in the academy over the decades that I have been teaching. And perhaps the most disturbing is the lack of linguistic integrity and honesty across the board, and this was alluded to in the prior panel, on hot button issues and more. The pronouncements issuing from our lavish elite universities are riddled with double-talk, half-truths, undefined labels and slurs, linguistic malfeasance, and egregious indifference to truth.
I’ll give you one typical example. This is something that was brought to me just a week or two ago. A student recently asked me about one of my colleagues’ statements to the media, that the Dobbs abortion decision represented a fatal blow to democracy. He asked me, “How can that be? I thought that Dobbs returned abortion to the states and to the democratic process and to the decision making of the good people of the United States.” I didn’t know what to say to him. Instead, I asked a question, “Have you talked to the professor about it?” ” Well, no.” He was afraid to. And we all know why he was afraid. He was afraid to challenge this egregiously 180 degree opposite to the truth, false statement. Now, he did bring it to me, and that’s important, and more on that in a moment.
Now on the question of free speech and academic freedom, my law school does pay abundant lip service to strong protections and traditional respect, but in all sorts of ways, it shows that it doesn’t mean it. And here I am exhibit A, my school, my dean for years has attempted to penalize me simply for my speech and my unapproved opinions. Now I have been formally charged by my dean with violations of all kinds. It’s something out of the Mikado. The indictment against me goes on for pages and pages, and my dean is seeking major sanctions against me, which could include firing me and stripping me of tenure. So much of what is said in this indictment is just absurd. My school has publicly called me every name in the book, racist, sexist, white supremacist, bigot, xenophobe, etcetera, etcetera, never bothering to define these terms, never explaining what rules I have violated, never referring to my tenure contract, to the faculty handbook.
They don’t feel the need to do that. Their intellectual dishonesty, their laxity, their inconsistency, is everywhere. And I could give you lots of examples. I will only briefly give you two. My dean claims I made false statements about the racial profile of student performance at my school and in my classes. But he staunchly refuses to back up the accusation with data that is in the school’s possession. But he’s also publicly stated in the very same emails, that the law school keeps no records of student grades, by race. But then of course, how can he know that what I said is false? This blatant contradiction seems not to perturb him or his progressive minions at all.
Second, my dean has forbid me from teaching first year law courses based on his repeated assertion that minority students have good reason to fear that I am biased against them, that I will evaluate them unfairly. But what he has failed to reveal is that an outside investigator employed by the law school a year ago wrote a report concluding that there was no evidence that I was biased or had ever been biased against any student. And in any event, my courses were blind graded as the law school requires, so any bias was impossible. Now, this report was kept secret from me for almost eight months. I only found out about it and obtained a copy by going to the investigator directly.
The dean still continues to tell the students that they can expect me to be biased against them.
Now note that this behavior comes from the dean of a law school, not a vet school, not an engineering school, not a cosmetology school. A man who is required and is charged with teaching and educating future lawyers in all the rigors and requirements of our system, due process, fairness, honesty, integrity. And yet he himself falls far short of those standards. This laxity is not just carelessness or desire to punish unpopular views, my views, it is much darker and more sinister and threatening than that. The goal of the progressive left today, and we’ve heard about this on the prior panel, is to destroy and demolish our legal system with its safeguards, procedures, and practices, a system that is the envy of the world.
Why? That justice system is oppressive and bigoted? A cover for hatred, for racism, for white privilege? Our legal system represents whiteness, and whiteness has to go. It has to be replaced. But replaced with what? Well, with some corrupt, unprincipled, arbitrary, unpredictable, fact-free system, driven by identity politics, by preferment, by power, by tribalism. The goal is to take our carefully constructed first world legal system and send it back to third world status. And the only upside I can see of this project, well, it might alleviate our immigration problem. Why would people want to come to us for the same miseries and injustices they have at home? That’s the mystery.
Now, there is one more aspect of my cancellation experience that really is important to comment on. Students from Penn and elsewhere, repeatedly reach out to me for advice on how to resist the depredations and humiliations of woke conformity, not just in the academy, but in the elite world that they will eventually occupy. And of course, we have Woke Inc. We have the woke financial system, the nonprofit system, entertainment. There’s no escape. There’s absolutely no escape. Now, unfortunately, I don’t have very encouraging words to offer. In my pastoral role, and that is the role that I have assumed in my university, I tell them, “Well, this is a culture war. What about war don’t you understand? War has casualties. People get hurt. Can you avoid it? Well, you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” Yet I don’t encourage or expect them…
Oh, how much time do I have?
Speaker 1:
Mine is three minutes.
Amy Wax:
Oh, okay, then I’m going to finish up. I don’t expect them to stick their neck out because they’re vulnerable. But there is one group I’m very disappointed who are in a position to stick their neck out. And that’s other tenured professors like me. And here I am talking about the old mostly white guys who regularly tell me in private how much they hate wokeness, how stupid it is, how destructive. But do they do anything about it? No. Do they speak up? No. They’re just too comfortable. Is it selfishness? Is it cowardice? Let me just say one thing about the cowardice part, all right? The elephant in the room at this conference, the one subject that has not come up, is race.
The centerpiece of wokeness is that all disparities, all group disparities are due to racism. Racism, racism, racism. If people on the right want to embrace meritocracy and fight wokeness and be colorblind, they have to have an answer to that. They have to face up to the fact that the meritocracy will produce different outcomes by group, and they can’t shrink from that. I think that is where I see them some stumbling.
Finally, I will leave you with a Latin motto, which is the motto of some of my children’s very overpriced, fancy, and expensive boarding school.
That Latin motto is non sibi. That means not for ourselves. I hope that we here at this conference are not here for ourselves, but rather to preserve, protect and defend the system that has been bequeathed to us by those who have come before, to the next generation. I know that’s why I’m here. People say, why don’t you leave? Why don’t you quit? Why don’t you retire? Why do you tolerate these sling and arrows? And my answer to them is non sibi. I am here for them. And that requires a certain degree of sacrifice. So if I leave you with one wish, a forlorn hope, I guess, it would be, let’s see, more tenured professors stand up and be counted by opposing what is happening in the university today. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
Elizabeth Weiss is Professor of anthropology at San Jose State University.
Elizabeth Weiss:
Thank you. Since December 2020, I’ve been the target of a cancel culture campaign mainly because of my book, Repatriation and Erasing the Past, which I co-authored with James W Springer. We argue that skeletal remains should be studied and not reburied. Repatriation may seem like a niche topic relevant only to those studying skeletal remains, but it isn’t just about burying human remains. Repatriation is a post-modern identity-driven ideology that places victim narratives above scientific truths. Our perspective is that who tells the story is not important. What is important is whether the story is true. Whether someone is Native American or not has no actual bearing on the validity of their statements. Activists attacked our views with strawman arguments about grave robbing and accusations of racism. They started an open letter which has about a thousand signatures, including more than half of my department and most of the graduate students, to try to force the publishers into retracting the book or prevent publishers from making it available at libraries.
Although the publishers didn’t pull the book, they did issue an apology. Cancel culture activists also using using Twitter threads, that described our work as white supremacy, also tried to prevent a talk of mine, Has Creationism Crept Back into Archeology, from being shown at the 2021 Society for American Archeology Conference, and to take it off the SAA website. The talk ran, but activists complained to the SAA Board about its inclusion, causing them to cave in to pressure, issue an apology, and depart form the talk.
Another cancellation attempt came from a campaign against the tweet of my Mercury News op-ed on California repatriation laws. After over a thousand comments, I received an email from Twitter that a complaint had been filed in Germany and they investigated the tweet as required by the Network Enforcement Act.
I also conduct uncontroversial research on bones. I submitted a case study of an anomaly on a California Indian skull prior to the cancel culture campaign. The reviewers recommended publication, but the editors overturned this decision. Having editors veto the decision of reviewers to publish a manuscript has never happened to me before. Although I cannot be certain that the manuscript was rejected because of my position on repatriation, the editors who rejected the manuscript also called for the banning of the book. Then the attack continued after a photo of me holding a skull led activists to urge San Jose State to fire me. My provost condemned the photo in an email to the university without reaching out to me, though he lacked an understanding of the photos context and my academic fields standards of human remains treatments. The university issued a directive, that access to the collection now requires tribal authority, barring any photography, not only of skeletal remains, but even of the boxes containing them. And they literally changed the locks.
During the summer of 2021, my chair and dean held a talk, what to do when your tenured colleague is branded a racist, at a conference for chairs and deans. Although they used the pseudonym Professor Jones, it was clear they were talking about me. Their advice was to cut off resources and isolate me, both of which they tried to do repeatedly. They lamented that I was tenured, but spoke of giving me an incompetent review and trying to take me out of the classroom if I taught my book. Retaliation has continued. My provost blocked me from access to X-rays. Even scans of X-rays are not allowed. He stated that the Native American tribes claim that X-rays, photos and reports are sacred, and will be destroyed when repatriation occurs. It seems that whatever I request turns sacred. Furthermore, he said that no research, even using previously collected data, will be allowed.
Of course, this can only apply to me. How could my university control what others do with their data? I find that getting legal help has been critical. With the help of Pacific Legal Foundation. I’m suing my university. Although I disagree with repatriation laws, I’ve always complied with these laws. So my lawsuit against San Jose State is not in regard to any planned repatriations, but rather about the actions taken against me by my university for expressing these views. It’s odd, going through these attacks hasn’t really affected me or caused me much anxiety, and I’ve laughed a lot at the absurdity of it all. But what surprised me most throughout these two years are the lies from those who know me, like my chair. He acted as if he had no idea about controversial views, and yet previously he praised me for them. The turnaround from the university in general was perhaps surprising.
Previously, they’d asked me to pose with skeletal remains for promotional material, and now they say that same act is abhorrent. I also didn’t expect the constant moving goalposts, like redefining normal things like animal bones as sacred just to keep me away. Also, trying to prevent me from researching even non-Native American site materials, like keeping me away from a Carthage collection for months. Throughout this time, my co-author Jim, has been extremely supportive. He never wavered. He’s one of the finest people I know, honest, smart, and full of integrity. I’m proud to have co-authored works with him. Others outside my university have also been very supportive and I’ve made many great connections, some of whom I’ve published with. I also have what we call the quiet supporters. They’re the ones who stop me on the street to tell me that they support me and send me emails from their non university accounts.
I did have one rather vocal supportive colleague who then later denounced me. I didn’t react to this. After a few weeks he called to tell me that he had never been so frightened as when his support for me became public knowledge. New colleagues are probably the most hostile. For instance, when the department chair held a meeting to try to get a no photo policy in place, the two junior colleagues were the strongest voices. One suggested I should have signed waivers from all the people that I photograph. You have to realize that she knew perfectly well that I deal with ancient human remains who’ve died thousands of years ago, in this case. They also stated that photos of any bones could be traumatizing to Native Americans. I fought tooth and nail to keep the ability to photograph remains. After all, I study bone pathologies that are best understood when photos are used.
So my advice for those facing an attack is to prepare for the worst, but celebrate all your victories. For instance, the first day in front of the judge in which the university lawyer sought for the case to be dismissed, the judge ruled in their favor, but allowed me to amend my complaint. The second time in front of that same judge, I was sure the case would be dismissed, but it wasn’t. Another victory was when the new protocols to access the curation facility were put in place, they read like a list of everything I hate. One of these things was barring menstruating personnel. Their words. They couldn’t even bring themselves to use the word, woman, from handling remains. When my attorneys and I saw this, we immediately thought that this would be a Title IX violation and said that I would consider filing a Title IX complaint.
The university quickly deleted this rule. I tried to respond to all important attacks. When my provost sent out the letter condemning my actions, I wrote a strong reply and asked that he send it out to the same people who got the first letter, which he did. I tried to take the high road and don’t go tit-for-tat, even though sometimes it’s tempting. For example, even though my colleagues won’t support guest speakers that I propose, I still support speakers from them. But one of my tactics is to put on the speaker series anyways, like the one I did just the other month with the NAS, on cancel culture. I spent a pleasant afternoon going around campus and hanging up as many posters as I could for it. Finally, never apologize and don’t retreat. Remember, you may lose a battle but still win the war. Thank you.
Frances Widdowson:
Thank you so much for sticking around. Anyway, I’d like to talk to you today about my case. Mike Adams is the chair that has been set aside. I didn’t know Mike Adams. I felt terrible when I heard about it, but I also wanted to say, I think we should see this chair as representing all faculty members who have suffered from this horrible assaultive cancellation. I personally know two colleagues who were pushed out before me. That enabled me to prepare myself. One colleague, a wonderful scholar who was pursued by what Jordan Peterson calls narcissist, psychopathic machiavellians. His life was destroyed. He is suffering from post stress traumatic disorder. He never recovered. He did finish his career, but the last five years of his life, he spent in fear, expecting to be fired at any moment for having another crime that he might utter. So it’s not just the people we hear about it’s many, many others, which I wanted to point out.
Anyway, so in terms of my situation, I just wanted to talk about three things, my firing, my advice, and third, some recommendations of the way forward. A website for my case is www.wokeacademy.info. There are 18 episodes. I believe 16 have been completed about my case. They give [inaudible 00:39:55] in much more detail. This presentation itself is posted on that website, which can be looked at if in case I don’t get to everything I want to talk about. So in terms of my firing, how is it possible that a tenured professor in Calgary, Alberta, Canada could be fired? There were three reasons given. This is in the termination letter that you can see on the wokeacademy.info website in the Frances Widdowson firing area.
Three reasons, harassment and code of conduct violation. Two, filing a complaint that was frivolous and vexatious. And three, creating a toxic workplace environment. I’m not going to talk about the second one because it makes things too complicated. There is some information on the website about that, and you’re thinking it’s a good thing she’s gone. Harasser, discriminator, creator of a toxic environment. Good, she’s gone. But what we don’t understand is these words don’t mean what they used to mean. And also, the workplace was redefined as private social media activity. And in my case, I had been defamed on social media for four years by my colleagues. I had alerted the administration on this, not because I wanted them punished, but I wanted to create a record of what was happening to me because I thought in the end I could be pursued. I thought that might protect me. It did not. And even though I had talked about this for years, I was pursued on social media activities and fired for social media activities.
The second problem was viewpoints. So harassment you would think would be directed at a particular individual, berating them, preventing them from pursuing their workplace goals. No, it is having the viewpoints, their viewpoints. They felt that their viewpoints were denigrated, especially in the cases of indigenous academics too, and one trans activist felt that their viewpoints were denigrated. So those two things resulted in the harassment and toxic workplace types of accusations. Two very, very important recordings that I wanted to draw your attention to on the website. People might not know this, one is the last disciplinary meeting with the acting provost, where she tried to get me to accept responsibility and show remorse for my actions. It was pure 1984.
The whole thing is quite a shocking recording. Second one, the night I was fired I was lured into a classroom by administrators. I was forcibly confined in that classroom. I told them they were forcibly confining me. I rushed out and I went back to my office and was pursued by a group of administrators and two security guards. I was so terrorized that evening that I called 911.
The account that I gave the next day of that situation is recorded and is available on that website. I just don’t know what to say about that. I was very shaken at the time, but I will not be shaken anymore. That was an absolute outrage. I cannot understand that. They are going to be held to account for [inaudible 00:43:58] night. So why was I fired for satirical activities? That was the social media, private social media activities.
First one was a Facebook post about mandatory anti-racism training, which was being proposed to be brought in, which led me to write a satirical letter saying that George Orwell had come to me in a dream, and he had told me that although he knew that I was a fan of his, this was not the right way, and it was intersectional postmodern theory that was the right way forward. And therefore, this had made me develop an oppression point system where faculty members would be evaluating according to one point for being male, one point for being cis, one for being white. And if you scored high on the oppression point scale, you should resign and make room for the BIPOC faculty. That caused a lot of anger. Then I tried to defend the journalist, Wendy Mesley, for referring to the book title. That resulted in a mob forming.
As a result of this I could not rationally discuss this, and I turned my Twitter account into a satirical character, modeled on Andrew Doyle’s character, Titania McGrath, and mocked the people who were trying to fire me. They would call me, for example, an epistemic terrorist, a hateful harasser, evil, an unwell person. And I would say, “Yes, you should fire that terrible epistemic terrorist, Frances Widdowson.” That resulted in harassment complaints against me and resulted in me being fired.
What is used is what I call the weapons of wokeness, harassment, human rights, which is discrimination, charges of discrimination and also code of conduct. One tweet, where what happened is that a colleague of mine, who was a faculty association representative, was going to be giving a workshop on white supremacy culture. How it was infiltrating the union. This resulted in Jonathan Kay, the Quillette editor, making fun of this workshop. He found that this faculty member was also giving pronouns workshops and used the pronouns they/them. He referred to they/them, and this resulted in a troll saying, “How can John Kay refer to they/them of our colleague?” And I said, “I don’t know why this troll is upset with Jonathan Kay for insisting on the gender identity of this colleague. They have hinted that they’re suffering from misgendering fatigue.”
This was a cartoon in their pronoun workshop which talked about bricks being put into your backpack if you’re misgendered, and at the end of the day you have so many bricks you have to lay down because you’re exhausted and you can’t get up. And I said, “Jonathan Kay is just tweeting. He’s just amplifying a silence, TGBQ2SLMNOP voice.” Which is of course, just getting at this ever expanding alphabet soup of letters, which I think is an absurd thing that’s happening.
So that one tweet was found to violate three policies, three university policies and two laws, Alberta Occupational Health and Safety Act, Alberta Human Rights Act. There’s no way that can stand. But that was an investigator that was hired by Mount Royal University, essentially, to find me guilty of harassment. And that’s what those weapons do. So in terms of what to do, I actually had 10 points. For some reason this got cut off in the formatting, but it’s on the Woke Academy site. But I explain it’s three things. Be strategic. Well, I got fired, so maybe my advice, you might not want to follow it, but this is my advice. Be strategic, be principled, and most importantly, be tough. You’ve got to toughen up and you’ve got to think in the future.
And Gad Saad, I know he is here, so is the Honey Badger, which I think is a very good idea. The thing about the honey badger is they have loose skin around their neck, which means if you are attacked, you can turn and pivot to the offense. Anytime someone hits me, I hit them back harder. And of course, this is a dangerous thing. I’m not in favor of niceness, compassion. I think someone has said, we’re at war. I think we are at war and we have to stand firm, hold the line and fight back with everything that we have. That is my view on this situation.
And then finally, in terms of what is to be done in the situation. Well, first of all, my case, I have a fundraiser. I know that’s a bit self-glorious, not for me, it’s for my research assistant who is just fantastic, Kirsten Kramer, who has a background in these areas, and my lawyer, Carol Crosson, who is doing the Freedom of [inaudible 00:50:01] briefs for the Canadian Association of University Teachers.
My case has to be fought through the union. It’ll have to be argued through the unions, but I can provide a good case to them. Secondly, these official political statements, we’ve mentioned this before, I believe it’s called the Calvin Report. Dorian Abbott was mentioning this. This is an absolutely terrible thing with these statements. This happened to me. My area of research is the residential schools. We had the president of the university saying that 215 children have been found in Kamloops. That didn’t happen. So it put me in a terrible position being a dissenting academic. Organization, very, very important. We need an umbrella organization for faculty. We also need to communicate with the public about the importance of universities. This is not understood, and it’s not just about stem, it’s about the enlightenment. We need to fight for the enlightenment, and universities are part of the enlightenment, the heritage of the enlightenment. This is incredibly important. And finally, be principled.
One thing I wanted to end on, and I’ve said this a couple of times in this conference, stop going after the left. I’m a socialist. I know people will find this hard that there’s an actual socialist in this building here, but George Orwell was a socialist. Don’t exclude George Orwell from our coalition that we need. It’s authoritarianism that we need to fight. You can be left wing and have liberal ideas. We should be fighting authoritarianism, not left wing, right wing, those kinds of things. It’s really, we want to have free speech and it is the fundamental value that allows us to discuss all other values in the university. Thank you very much.
Speaker 8:
Thanks everyone for your stories. I wanted to give you each a chance to, as Francis just did, to talk about best practices because I can say that from my experience when something like this happens, you never know when it does, the first hour matters, the first few hours, the first 24 hours, 48. You have to be strategic about things. You have to think about what your ultimate goal is, and everything has to go in that direction. You have to understand what the public game’s going to be, what the private game’s going to be. I was very lucky that I have friends who are PR professionals and political operatives, and I have contacts in the media and all that. Please, I’m extending this to everyone in the audience. Get in touch with me if you have no idea what to do. I’m happy to advise you.
And also get in touch with Greg because [Inaudible 00:52:56] does fantastic work in this area, as I said. But I wanted to add any other best practices, give you a chance to do that. I should say that apparently cancellation is good for fecundity because my wife and I are also expecting twins later this month.
Speaker 9:
Yeah, that works. So first of all, I want to acknowledge Johnny Etchemendy. I am a former Stanford student. I got my PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford. He really practice what he preaches. I got into an issue related to free speech, and he supported me when he was Provost. He’s not here, but he’s a great supporter that we have. The second point that I want to make is I’m also a pro-life person. I’ve been appalled by what I have been hearing the entire day. I think that you guys could take a page from the pro-life movement. When Roe vs Wade became the law of the land, so called in 1973, the consensus among the same people that are woke today is that, “That’s it. It Will never be overruled.”
Those of us who were in the pro-life movement thought otherwise. We were strategic. During the Dobs litigation there was a paper that was submitted by biologists across the world that actually affirmed that life began in conception. They didn’t take any sides. It took a lot of education. It became a very big movement. I recall conversations with gay people who joined the pro-life movement because they thought if one day a [inaudible 00:54:42] could be identified. It took 50 years, and maybe those of you who disagree with the whole result of the Dobbs decision, but here is an outcome. And I think that you guys have to be strategic, have a very clear goal. This is a victim movement because I think that a lot of people, I salute what she said, I forgot her name. A lot of people care about free speech, irrespective of ideology. And if this is explained to the public, to the people who are unaware of how bad the situation is in academia, you guys will find support from unexpected places. So that’s what I want to say.
Speaker 10:
Yeah, okay. I’ll ask the question. Just over in the Hoover Institution, Shelby Steele, who wrote a book called White Guilt, which is interesting because it’s about the emergence of the racism taboo in the mid 1960s in the US. And he argued that essentially moral authority shifted from people of color having to defer to white people, to then white people and American institutions having to defer to people of color because they’d lost their moral authority. So I’m just wondering to what extent you think those events in the mid-sixties, which led to the emergence of this anti-racism taboo from which subsequent taboos around sexuality and gender derived in a way. How important do you think that has been? Do we need to revisit that taboo that emerged even though we may support, to some degree, what the spirit of that taboo… I mean, is there not an overreach that’s resulted from that taboo? Do we need to question these taboos that emerged in the mid-sixties in the US, later in the UK? Thanks.
Speaker 1:
Let’s do one last round of answers here. Actually, just on Ilya Shapiro, I was also candid at some point, and I think what you say is enormously important. When that comes, it hits you like a thunderstorm out of blue sky. You just don’t know what happens, right? It’s not something you think of preparing for. It might be good to prepare for that, just in case. I learned a lot from Eric Rasmussen’s website. He was so kind to send me an email right away and saying, read this. This was enormously helpful. One piece of advice, if you talk to journalist, make sure you have a written record of what you say, because the New York Times may not replicate what you actually said.
Amy Wax:
Can I just address that? The advice I would give, well, first of all, I’m blessed or cursed with a very disagreeable personality. There are five personality measures. I won’t give you a little lecture about personality psychology, but one of them is agreeableness. Women are known for their agreeableness. I have been rated by my family as getting a zero on agreeableness, and that really helps it. It helps that you have this contrarian nature. You question everything. You don’t mind conflict. Josh says he’s conflict-averse. I’m not really conflict-averse. I don’t know whether that’s nature or nurture. You have to have a high tolerance for pain, and you have to expect pain. You will be attacked. You will be labeled. You will be slurred.
The media is not your friend. The media is catastrophically dishonest, the mainstream media. I have learned that the hard way. It’s really tragic and scary. Frankly, I don’t approve of talking to the media because I think that you will always lose. The other thing is you get shunned, you get ostracized, you get ghosted, you lose your friends, absolutely, by the dozens. But you make new friends. People come out of the woodwork, really wonderful people, I call them the adorable deplorables. All across the country people contact you, they email you, they send you letters, they send you invitations to their dude ranch or whatever. I have made new friends.
Speaker 1:
You want to say something? Could I keep this mic? You’re mic’d up. I’m the only one not mic’d.
Amy Wax:
Oh, so sorry.
Elizabeth Weiss:
I think I would say keep your sense of humor. I think that when there’s adversity, even if it seems so terrible, so much of this is absurd that you have to laugh at it or else you will go crazy. That you can’t even take a photo of a box where there’s a bone in a bag. That’s the level of absurdity. The Society for American archeology has now decided that no photographs of bones will be in their journals. You can apply and beg to ask whether a drawing a sketch will be admitted. This is all absurd. It’s laughable, even if it’s sad. But we have to be able to laugh at it at it too.
Joshua Katz:
I agree with everything that’s been said. In my piece, The Culture of the Canceled, which I mentioned before, I said specifically that if you are in trouble, that means the people in this room, that means anybody watching, you should get in touch with me and you should get in touch with lots of other people. And this is very important. I don’t mean being in touch with me. It’s very important to be in touch with the extremely disagreeable Amy Wax. And it is extremely important to get in touch with the putatively amiable Joshua Katz. And the reason is that although all situations are likely to have certain commonalities, there are going to be differences, and there are going to be reasonable differences of opinion on what exactly you should do. So just about as in every other situation in which you’re in trouble, what you want is the greatest range of advice possible. So talk to me and talk to Amy and talk to everybody else you can possibly get your hands on, and we will help you.
Amy Wax:
And you need allies. Your impulse is to withdraw when you’re attacked. You should do exactly the opposite and reach out.
Joshua Katz:
Bingo.
Frances Widdowson:
Yes, so I think there’s two things I’d like to say. And this is in terms of being strategic. If you are doing controversial work, you need to prepare for the worst, hope for the best, prepare for the worst. Get all your documents on a separate computer so that if they take your computer away, you have that. Fortunately, I had some very good advice. I talked to many, many people. I have a huge network of people I talked to with diverse perspectives. It’s very important not to have an echo chamber of people just telling you what you want to hear. You need to have diverse perspectives. One of the pieces of advice I got was when you say anything in public or you’re talking not in a private conversation obviously, but anything publicly, record that. And as a result of that, great advice I have recorded everything since 2019. So I have hours and hours of recordings.
I had three investigations that I was investigated for, and then I filed complaints myself. Not because I wanted to, but because I wanted to have an equitable situation of everyone being bound by the same rules I had. There was two investigations there. All of those are recorded. When I’m going to be going to arbitration in January 16th to 27th, I have hundreds of documents which will form the basis of my case. If I had not recorded these things, it would be he said, she said, and who knows what the outcome of that would be. So that’s very, very important.
Joshua Katz:
Keep in mind that in the United States, different states have different one party consent laws. Make sure the law in the state in question.
Amy Wax:
Can I address the race question that Eric asked?
Speaker 1:
I think we have to conclude, unfortunately. These are great pieces of advice. I hope you will never ever use them because you’ll never have to be in the situation where you have to use the advice. There’s going to be some closing words. But let me first from here, thank Jess Weber, John Cochran, and Ivan Marinovich, the central organizers for this fantastic conference. So thank you so much.
Speaker 11:
We just have a couple of closing words, most of all, closing words of thanks. I’ll start with thanks to all of our speakers, not just the last panel, but everybody put in a lot of effort. Many traveled a long way to come here. This has been a fantastic set of talks. So thank you to all the speakers. Jeff, take it away.
Jeff:
We also want to thank those who just did all the work in the background to make everything work here, GSB Operations, media services, security. Especially want to thank Rochelle [Inaudible 01:04:18], also. Rochelle was behind orchestrating everything in this setup, everything that went on in this conference, really did a wonderful, terrific job. So we want to give special thanks to her.
Speaker 11:
Our sponsor, oh yes, behind the camera. Our special thanks to our sponsors who helped pay for it, among other things, not just the business school, but the long list of sponsors.
Jeff:
And most of all, thanks-
Speaker 11:
Most of all.
Jeff:
Thanks to Iván Marinovic. Iván really had the vision for this conference. He was the one who worked on all the details for the conference. He was the one who put in the work for this conference.
Speaker 11:
Literally, we would send an email, “Hey Jeff, let’s invite X.” “Yeah, that was a good idea. And Iván.” Boom, Iván now has to go invite X, emails back and forth. “What’s your flights? What’s the rest of it?” Iván, thank you so much. This wouldn’t have happened without you. Two little announcements. Those of you who haven’t heard, there is a declaration of academic freedom and Chicago principles. If you don’t know about it and you’d like to sign, let us know. Thank you everybody. This has been fantastic.