Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    Student Housing
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
6807 expertise cover campbell fullbleed.jpg
Harry Campbell for The Chronicle

Academic Freedom’s Proxy Wars

Professors with unpopular views are being punished for unrelated infractions. That’s terrifying.

The Review | Opinion
By Suzanne Nossel June 27, 2022

This month the legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, hired to run the Center on the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school, announced in an op-ed that he was declining that post for fear of being set up for a “slow-motion firing.” Just before his original start date, in February, Shapiro had tweeted a criticism of the Biden administration for planning to appoint a “lesser black woman” to the U.S. Supreme Court rather than a candidate Shapiro considered more qualified. The tweet was racist and sexist, and it prompted campus protests and a university investigation that delayed Shapiro’s installation.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

This month the legal scholar Ilya Shapiro, hired to run the Center on the Constitution at Georgetown’s law school, announced in an op-ed that he was declining that post for fear of being set up for a “slow-motion firing.” Just before his original start date, in February, Shapiro had tweeted a criticism of the Biden administration for planning to appoint a “lesser black woman” to the U.S. Supreme Court rather than a candidate Shapiro considered more qualified. The tweet was racist and sexist, and it prompted campus protests and a university investigation that delayed Shapiro’s installation.

In time, Georgetown’s investigation absolved Shapiro, on the grounds that he was not yet an employee at the time of the tweet. Yet Shapiro concluded that he was a marked man, and that some other transgression would eventually be found to justify his ouster.

In the current climate, Shapiro’s fear that an incendiary tweet, even if not the explicit justification for punishment, might nonetheless precipitate his eventual dismissal, is not baseless. Highly public controversies over free speech on campus have, at least superficially, reinforced the prohibition against direct reprisals for expression. At public colleges, punishments for speech are mostly barred by the First Amendment. At private colleges, principled commitments to free expression and academic freedom ward off retaliation for writings and utterances. But because prohibitions on outright punishments for speech have remained relatively strong, institutions are resorting to indirect ways of penalizing offenders, relying on flimsy pretexts and sometimes invoking completely unrelated conduct by the targeted speaker. This sleight of hand allows colleges to sate demands for comeuppance and to constrain obstreperous faculty members, while technically avoiding speech-based reprisals that run afoul of law and policy, and may generate blowback from free-speech liberals.

Yet such proxy reprisals for speech are dangerous. They must be called out for what they are. They can have the same chilling effect as direct punishment, raising the perceived costs of voicing contestable viewpoints or heretical ideas. Principled institutional commitments to free speech and academic freedom demand guarding against proxy reprisals. They must not be allowed to serve as a workaround to punish speech that merits protection.

Several recent cases illustrate the tendency of university administrations to resort to proxy reprisals. At Princeton, the classics professor Joshua Katz was excoriated for a critique of campus activism in which he called a Black campus activist group a “terrorist organization.” The university, while reaffirming its commitment to free speech, condemned his comment but took no action against him, acknowledging that his right to express his opinion was protected. Nearly two years later, however, Katz, despite having tenure, was fired based on what the university said were new disclosures that he had failed to be forthcoming during an investigation into a sexual relationship with a student 15 years earlier, which had already resulted in a suspension. Although the university claimed that his firing was unrelated to his critique of campus activists, in fact, those incendiary comments were what triggered the new investigation into his past sexual behavior — strongly suggesting that, but for those comments, Katz would still be on the faculty.

Another proxy reprisal occurred at the University of Central Florida. After Charles Negy, an associate professor of psychology, tweeted about “black privilege,” the university began an investigation that found him to have violated several policies and regulations unrelated to the tweet, and fired him. Negy successfully challenged his dismissal, winning reinstatement when an arbitrator ruled that the firing was indeed motivated by his comments. Despite the outcome, the administration’s effort to fire him amounted to an effort to punish speech.

A somewhat different situation unfolded in 2021 at the University of North Carolina. After being re-elected unanimously to chair the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina Press, the law professor Eric Muller — who had criticized the university’s defense of a Confederate statue on campus — was removed from that position by the University’s Board of Governors in an unprecedented departure from established procedures. The Board denied that Muller’s removal had anything to do with his comments, citing only a sudden wish to “change the membership on some of these boards more frequently.” In 2015 Muller’s UNC colleague, Gene R. Nichol, saw his Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity shuttered in what was formally justified as the alleged ineffectiveness of the center’s work, but widely seen as a reprisal for Nichol’s own outspokenness on social-justice issues.

Proxy reprisals are familiar to those who study free speech worldwide. Authoritarians use them to imperil not just academic appointments but fundamental freedoms. The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was targeted with tax evasion and economic crimes. The Russian historian Yuri A. Dmitriev, who is responsible for seminal documentation of the Soviet gulags, is serving a 15-year jail sentence on specious charges of child pornography that were previously judged baseless.

Some American campuses harbor a strong impulse to find alternative means to punish those who cannot be targeted for their speech without falling afoul of legal or institutional principles. When a professor has said something racially offensive, there may be genuine concerns about whether they hold animus and can give students of color a fair shake. In other cases, universities may have doubts about whether a faculty members’ values are out of sync with the institution. External pressures — from students, faculty, donors, and politicians — can be crushing, with agitated stakeholders dismissive of the legal and principled rationales against punishing speech.

But proxy reprisals for speech are not the equivalent of hooking a mafia don on tax-evasion charges as a last resort because more serious crimes cannot be proved. When it comes to punishing speech, it is not a lack of evidence that stands in the way, but rather time-tested principles that hold that reprisals for expression muzzle not only an individual speaker, but all others who might contemplate saying something unorthodox.

When university officials find themselves inclined to impose proxy punishments for protected speech, they should pause. Of course, controversial speech must not inoculate faculty members from well-founded personnel actions that may affect them negatively. But when contested speech is followed by discipline or adverse consequences that are ostensibly unrelated, university officials need to honestly interrogate their own systems, motives, and decision-making processes to avoid being complicit in punishments that flout free-speech principles. They should ask themselves whether, but for the hot-button speech, the contemplated disciplinary action would still be afoot.

ADVERTISEMENT

Refraining from proxy reprisals need not mean condoning deeply offensive speech. In a pluralistic society, we bear a responsibility to use language conscientiously, remaining mindful of how diverse audiences may react to what we say. Because of their powerful platforms, faculty members have an added duty of care to consider how their words may reverberate. But university leaders can reinforce these obligations through frank conversation and engagement with critics, rather than punishment. Such conversations can educate all parties about how free-speech protections can be reconciled with the exercise of voluntary restraint essential to enabling diverse types of people to inhabit the same campus peaceably.

Colleges rightly pride themselves as institutions that treasure free speech and open inquiry. That commitment demands a vigilant refusal to engage in proxy reprisals for speech.

We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Tags
Academic Freedom Free Speech
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
About the Author
Suzanne Nossel
Suzanne Nossel is chief executive of PEN America.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

More News

UCLA students, researchers and demonstrators rally during a "Kill the Cuts" protest against the Trump administration's funding cuts on research, health and higher education at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in Los Angeles on April 8, 2025.
Scholarship & Research
Trump Proposed Slashing the National Science Foundation’s Budget. A Key Senate Committee Just Refused.
Illustration of a steamroller rolling over a colorful road and leaving gray asphalt in its wake.
Newly Updated
Oregon State U. Will End a Renowned Program That Aimed to Reduce Bias in Hiring
Dr. Gregory Washington, president of George Mason University.
Another probe
George Mason President Discriminated Against White People After George Floyd Protests, Justice Dept. Says
Protesters gather outside the Department of Education headquarters in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 14, 2025 to protest the Trump administrations cuts at the agency.
An Uncertain Future
The Education Dept. Got a Green Light to Shrink. Here Are 3 Questions About What’s Next.

From The Review

Photo-based illustration with repeated images of a student walking, in the pattern of a graph trending down, then up.
The Review | Opinion
7 Ways Community Colleges Can Boost Enrollment
By Bob Levey
Illustration of an ocean tide shaped like Donald Trump about to wash away sandcastles shaped like a college campus.
The Review | Essay
Why Universities Are So Powerless in Their Fight Against Trump
By Jason Owen-Smith
Photo-based illustration of a closeup of a pencil meshed with a circuit bosrd
The Review | Essay
How Are Students Really Using AI?
By Derek O'Connell

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin