The Review

What’s the difference between a “pedophile” and a “minor-attracted person”? “Minor” is a legal designation, while “pedo-" (“child”) names a developmental phase. But beyond that the phrases are denotatively identical. They feel different, though. The word derived from Greek sounds evaluative, and has indeed become so, such that “pedo,” enunciated on its own, can illogically serve as a disgusted insult (“That guy looks like a total pedo.”). “Minor-attracted person,” conversely, sounds studiedly neutral — clinical, technical, academic. “Pedophile,” presumably, once sounded the same way but has become stigmatizing rather than merely descriptive.

This difference in resonance turned out, for a former assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University, to have major consequences. As our Emma Pettit explains, Allyn Walker (who uses they/them pronouns) found themself under attack for their book, A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, published last summer by the University of California Press. The book focuses on nonoffending pedophiles and insists that their experiences can help the criminal-justice system learn how to reduce child sexual abuse. In this, it falls squarely within mainstream harm-reduction models of both medicine and criminology. And Walker is unambiguous: “This book does not promote sexual contact between adults and minors.”

As Pettit reports, a clip of an interview in which Walker used the phrase “minor-attracted person” went viral after being promoted by the Twitter account Libs of TikTok. The comedian Colin Jost mentioned Walker’s research, briefly and derisively, on Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update.” Tucker Carlson ginned up the controversy with his usual calculated phobia: “A self-described ‘non-binary’ assistant professor at Old Dominion University — we have no idea what that means, by the way … is now teaching students to use a term called MAP. What does that mean? It means ‘minor-attracted persons.”

At first, the Old Dominion administration behaved appropriately. It released a statement defending Walker’s academic freedom: “An academic community plays a valuable role in the quest for knowledge. A vital part of this is being willing to consider scientific and other empirical data that may involve controversial issues and perspectives.” The university might have left it at that.

Instead, apparently because of some combination of outside threats and student outrage, the administration placed Walker on administrative leave and began pressuring them to find a new job. Walker got in touch with FIRE, which helped them find lawyers to negotiate an exit. In explaining Walker’s leave, Brian O. Hemphill, Old Dominion’s president, transmuted by administrative magic the fiery rhetoric of Tucker Carlson into the therapeutic argot of the contemporary university: Academic “freedom,” he said, “carries with it the obligation to speak and write with care and precision, particularly on a subject that has caused pain in so many lives.” Translation: Watch your words, or you’ll get axed, especially if you get noticed on TV.

Both the Saturday Night Live bit and Carlson’s report strike me as ludicrously unfair. But the blame doesn’t lie with them. Academics aren’t protected from the contempt of comics or political pundits. Sometimes such skepticism is a salutary corrective to insular academic cultures; sometimes it’s propagandistic distortion. Sometimes it’s hard to tell — and the verdict will depend on who you are. But when scholars are challenged by other cultural actors — journalists, entertainers, and so on — their administrators have a responsibility not to sacrifice them to political fashion or the perceived demands of public opinion.

The struggle to hold administrators to that role defines the entire history of modern American academic freedom, from its early articulations in the second half of the 19th century to the American Association of University Professors’ finalized 1940 statement, which remains normative. As Walter P. Metzger discusses in Academic Freedom in the Age of the University (1955, and still a standard reference), the AAUP, at its founding in 1915, faced fierce opposition from the Association of American Colleges — a group of college presidents. Across the century and into the present, various rapprochements have eased tensions and, with some exceptions and setbacks (patriotic fever during the First World War, McCarthyite surveillance after the Second), expanded the reach of academic freedom.

But relapses are always possible, and administrative commitment to the ideal is fickle. As John Dewey wrote in 1899 of a now-forgotten controversy at Syracuse University, in which the chancellor fired the economist John R. Commons for political radicalism: “It is bad enough when such insults to scholarship and scientific preparation come from the man in the street. It is literally appalling when they come from the head of a university, for, acted upon, they mean the death of American scholarship.”

Read Pettit’s “An Unacceptable Idea” here. And for a different take on the Walker case, read Geoff Shullenberger’s essay from December on “Why Academic Freedom’s Future Looks So Bleak.”

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• “Imagine I, Robot meets Flowers for Algernon with a dash of the office novel.” At The Nation, Jessica Loudis on Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitkin. (Incidentally, our own Lee Gardner named The Employees the best novel he’d read this year.)

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin