THE INSURGENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION ARE GETTING BOLDER.

A professor at Central Florida called Charles Negy has gotten himself into a jam questioning the woke indoctrination.  Here's a Quillette commentary by Samantha Harris, who I believe is a staff attorney with The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, on what's going down.

Professor Charles Negy is a wonderfully eccentric man, someone who teaches extraordinarily controversial subjects—Cross-Cultural Psychology and Sexual Behavior—with bluntness and humor. He is exactly the kind of professor you want in college: someone who is passionate about his subject, who will challenge your deeply-held assumptions, and who encourages free and open discussion in the classroom. Negy’s bluntness has occasionally ruffled feathers over the years, but throughout his 22-year career at UCF he has received consistently superior performance reviews.

It's not unusual for professors to take issue with dictates from Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity or manifestations of affirmative action.  There are lots of arguments from authority that a dissident professor can invoke; heck, if you're really desperate there's stuff right here at Cold Spring Shops.

It is unusual, though, for the professor to retweet a comment by Steve Sailer linking to one of his articles in Taki Magazine.  The comment is in the article's closing lines.  "What America needs to do is treat blacks as human beings with free will who when they make good choices should enjoy the benefits and when they make bad choices should experience the consequences. Instead, The Establishment views blacks as our Sacred Cows, above criticism, but beneath agency."

That's likely to set some people off.  There are similar sentiments available from, for example, the Thomas Sowell of Black Rednecks, White Liberals, and those would be good enough for the cancel mob.  The professor is citing (deliberately?) an author better known for his affiliation with V-Dare, which is to say, a site where white nationalists (gasp!) hang out.

The Holy Inquisition pounces.

Instead, last Friday the university subjected Negy to an “investigative interview” that was one of the most Kafkaesque things I have seen in my 15 years advising students and faculty about campus disciplinary matters. For four straight hours, UCF’s investigator grilled Negy about accusations stemming directly from his classroom pedagogy, having made no effort to weed out the countless accusations that were obviously just critiques of his choice of teaching material. UCF also made no effort to consolidate allegations, repeatedly asking Negy variations of the same question, ad infinitum. And again, virtually all of these questions related directly to Negy’s pedagogy, which deals with unavoidably controversial subjects. When Negy, physically and emotionally exhausted after four hours of interrogation, asked if the interview was almost over, we learned that the investigator had not even gotten halfway through her list of accusations. Since he could take no more, another five-hour inquisition was scheduled for the following week.

This investigation was obviously undertaken in retaliation for Negy’s protected tweets, and it is serving its purpose: How many professors are going to be willing to speak out if the result is a nine-hour inquisition followed by an almost inevitable punishment? How many professors will be willing to teach necessary but controversial material if they know they might be called upon, 15 years later, to defend every statement they made in the course of teaching that material?

The university has made it abundantly clear that it does not care about Professor Negy’s free speech and due process rights. This investigation is a means to an end—to get rid of a professor whose protected expressions of opinion have made him politically inconvenient. Cases like this are canaries in the coal mine: if a public university—a government agency—can treat someone this way for deviating from the university’s orthodoxy, and face no accountability for doing so, then what (and who) is next?

Nowhere in the Quillette report, though, is any evidence that the inquisitors are focusing on the author (Mr Sailer) or the source (Taki) as part of their complaint.  We'll see how the Overton window shifts.