How To Get Rid of a Tenured Professor

I was a tenured full professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for almost 24 years. At the end of 2024, I left. Officially, it was a voluntary departure. But I sure felt like I'd been pushed out.

My story started in 2015, when Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D–Ariz.) asked the university to investigate me. He alleged that I may have been secretly taking money from Exxon in exchange for the substance of my congressional testimonies, in which I reported on the consensus scientific findings of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—that while heat waves and extreme precipitation had increased, there was vanishingly little evidence to support claims that hurricanes, floods, and drought have become more common or intense.

I was not taking Exxon's (or anyone's) money—not in exchange for testimony and not for anything else. What was odd was that after the investigation was announced and conducted, no campus administrator ever spoke to me about it, not even to check in and see how I might be doing. I heard only from university lawyers.

Not long after, I was told that university support for the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, which I had been recruited to Colorado to found in 2001, could no longer be guaranteed, and that the center might be closed. No one linked this explicitly to the Grijalva-related investigation, but I could not help but think they were related.

Sensing the issue was really me, I chose later in 2015 to leave the science policy center and the university institute it was a part of to go across campus and create a new sports governance center, focused on another of my intellectual passions, far from the reach of the climate police. I hoped that leaving the science policy center would allow it to continue while I continued to do teaching, research, and university service in another area where science meets politics.

Thanks to enthusiastic support from two successive athletic directors, the university allowed me to move into the Athletic Department to develop the new center—making me the only tenured full professor rostered in a Division I athletic program. For four years things went well: I created and taught a popular undergraduate class, developed with colleagues a novel proposal for a new professional master's degree program, produced collaborative world-leading research, and engaged a great group of university and international collaborators.

Meantime, as I was expanding a new career focus in sport governance, across campus Colorado faculty and administrators began moving the university headlong into climate advocacy.

In 2016, the Boulder Faculty Assembly (the faculty's primary governing body), led by a professor of environmental studies, adopted a generic and highfalutin statement in support of institutional climate advocacy. Over the next seven years, the assembly issued eight statements and resolutions calling for climate advocacy on campus, including encouraging students to engage in nonviolent "confrontations" and joining with student activists and external nongovernmental organizations to declare a "climate emergency."

All of this might have been laughed off as a handful of self-important professors role-playing as world leaders. Soon, however, the empty exhortations turned into demands that the entire university morph into a climate advocacy organization.

In 2023, the activist professors produced a new faculty resolution demanding that the university refocus its mission on climate activism, including demands that climate advocacy be taught in "all" departments and units (emphasis in original) and that the university prioritize training all students to be "climate solution leaders." The entire campus was to engage in advocacy: They called for "policy makers, including the regents, system administrators, and campus leadership, to implement swift and systemic changes in order to avoid the worst impacts of extreme weather events, the devastation of human habitats, the collapse of ecosystems, and the loss of biodiversity." This reads more like a mission statement for Greenpeace than anything remotely related to the mission of a flagship state university.

A Cold War

Working at the sports governance center, I was generally unaware of these changes. For me, things were going great, or so I thought.

For reasons never made clear to me, the experiment in marrying academics and athletics ended after four years, in 2019. Rather than return me to the campus institute where I had previously been rostered (as was in the terms of the memorandum of understanding that transferred me to Colorado Athletics), administrators instead placed me into the environmental studies department. In the process, the university doubled my teaching load from that in my original contract.

For an office, environmental studies allocated a small, windowless room previously used for storage (and labeled as such on the building plans) deep in the bowels of the soulless building in the office park where the department was located, about a mile east of the main campus. My little office was far removed from other environmental studies faculty and the environmental studies office.

In 2020, the university terminated the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research that I had created and led. A little later, the university also decided to terminate the graduate certificate in science and technology policy that I had established. Then all eight graduate courses that I had developed and taught as part of the graduate certificate program were no longer to be offered. This meant that all of the classes I had been recruited to Colorado to develop and teach were no longer being offered.

I asked the environmental studies chair to let me take complete responsibility for continuing the science policy center (I even found an external partner) and said I would be willing again to oversee the science and technology policy graduate certificate program. He told me no, absolutely not, he would not allow that.

Over the next few years, I was repeatedly told to develop and teach new undergraduate courses, with new requests just about every semester—nine new preps in four years. (And one of those years was a sabbatical.) For example, I taught a popular upper-division energy policy course that received rave reviews from students, tripling the class size in just two years. And then I was removed from teaching it.

I rolled with it. What was the alternative?

In mid-2020, I was told that the university was going to use my little office for storage of a large number of boxes and several file cabinets that were not mine but apparently were connected with the science policy center I had left five years earlier. The storage of these items rendered my little office completely unusable, as you can see in the photo at right. I never touched them out of fear that I'd be accused of something nefarious if I did. (Later we learned that the file cabinets stored in my office were actually empty. Funny!)

A Sham Investigation

As the pandemic unfolded into 2021, it was clear that having a usable office on campus was not actually that big a deal, so I let it ride. But later in 2021, after we returned to campus, I mentioned the unusable office to everyone who would listen—and also, I guess, to some who didn't—requesting the situation be fixed. Nothing was done for years. My faculty colleagues were aware and many were sympathetic, but the department chair did not budge.

Around the same time, the department chair placed me under investigation. Bizarrely, he accused me of winning a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in violation of university procedures.

I'm not sure how one might get a grant outside university procedures, so the accusation was clearly a sham. But he went through with an investigation that spanned almost a year, empaneling some cronies to write a report, and finding me guilty of something or other and sanctioning me—which mainly just meant a strongly worded letter in my permanent file. But he did throw around phrases like "possible termination," and administrators acted like they were taking it seriously, so I took it seriously as well.

I appealed the sham investigation and sanction to a faculty committee from outside my department. Unsurprisingly, it found no factual basis for the investigation, and it concluded that my due process rights may have been violated. There were no consequences for the environmental studies department chair for bringing the false allegations.

As this harassment was playing out, I repeatedly asked campus administrators to either implement a formal process of mediation with my department chair or find me a new home on campus where I was not subject to a hostile work environment. Administrators did neither.

In 2023, soon after I returned from the sabbatical, a new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (who I had never met) finally decided to move me out of environmental studies but for some reason did not place me into a new unit. I was given an office (with a window!) in the stadium—which housed the academic version of an Island of Misfit Toys.

In what must be some sort of joke from the university gods, the new office I was provided was then rendered unusable for about a year because the campus was installing a new gigantic video screen on the south end of the stadium, directly over my office. I was given several days' notice about the lack of access and not provided any alternative space on campus.

Nowhere To Go

So at the start of 2024, I found myself with no future courses to teach, no space on campus, no home academic unit, no university service, no way to obtain basic administrative support (much less prepare, submit, and oversee grants for research funding), no possibility of having graduate students, and no way to address any of this on my own. I contacted many departments and units to see if I could secure a home on campus, with some showing interest, but with absolutely no upper level support for finding me a campus home, I had no luck.

I got the impression that the university might be preparing to oust me by claiming that I was not fulfilling my job duties of teaching and service. Of course, the campus had made that impossible.

I considered just going with it: showing up to my office in the stadium, collecting a paycheck, and being a unit of one person with no teaching or service. Instead, more than nine years after my university first investigated me at the request of Grijalva, I finally took the hint—Colorado administrators did not want me on campus and they were going to turn the screws until I left. In 2024 I chose to retire, and I am glad I did.

Was the harassment and hostile work environment since 2019 connected to the Grijalva investigation or the institutionalization of climate advocacy on campus? I couldn't tell you for sure, but I have suspicions.

Was the apparent vendetta against me by the climate campaigning chair of the environmental studies department motivated by his politics or his perceptions of mine? I couldn't tell you for sure, but I have suspicions.

What I do know for sure is that academic freedom and tenure mean little without administrators who stand up for their faculty when they are under attack—whether from inside or out, whether from the left or the right. When a university institutionalizes political advocacy, it grants a green light to campaigning faculty and administrators to come after colleagues they view as their political enemies, misusing the policies and procedures of the institution to do so.

I expect that the fever of climate advocacy on campus will break at some point and mainstream views such as mine might again be welcome. But what happened to me was wrong and should not happen to any instructor. And my experiences, while extreme, illustrate larger problems.

It's Not Just Me

Other faculty at Colorado have had similar experiences with administrative discipline and diminishment of their roles, seemingly as punishment. More broadly, a survey of faculty by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) indicates that 7 percent of Colorado faculty have been disciplined or threatened with discipline associated with their teaching, research, or expression. Almost a third of the university's faculty believe that academic freedom is not very or not at all secure on their campus. These are not numbers indicating a healthy academic workplace.

These numbers are broadly representative of how faculty see their universities across the country. Among FIRE's survey of 6,269 faculty at 55 major colleges and universities, 35 percent of faculty say they self-censor their written work, nearly four times the number of social scientists who said the same in 1954, at the height of McCarthyism. About 87 percent of faculty reported finding it difficult to have an open and honest conversation on campus about at least one hot-button political topic.

Against this backdrop, public confidence in colleges and universities has dropped. In 2015, 57 percent of Americans had "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in higher education, according to Gallup's first measurement on the issue. By 2024, that same number had plummeted to 36 percent—and 32 percent said they had little confidence or none at all. Among those with very little confidence, 41 percent cited political agendas as their top reason, with another 7 percent and 3 percent, respectively, mentioning political unrest and free speech concerns.

Over my career, I've seen professors and administrators increasingly emphasizing political advocacy over research and scholarship. Individual faculty members should of course be perfectly free to advocate whatever causes they'd like. That goes with academic freedom. But there has been an institutionalized politicization of curricula, departments, and even entire campuses.

"In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms," Michael W. Clune, a humanities professor at Case Western Reserve University, wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education in November. "Venerable scientific journals—such as Nature—now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects."

Administrators and faculty alike push progressive political projects—in many cases extreme ones, as when climate researchers advocate degrowth and millenarianism. Clune explains the consequences: "If this is truly what the university stands for, if these are our values, then when we are called before our elected representatives to answer for ourselves, what can we say? Colleges have no compelling justification for their existence to give when the opposing political party comes into power. We have nothing to say to the half of America who doesn't share our politics."

Actually, it turns out some professors and administrators do have something to say to those fellow Americans. They tell them that they are misinformed, evil, even Nazis—and that academia is part of a "resistance" and should be "prepared to go to the barricades." They say we academics should be waging a "new climate war" against our fellow citizens.

Partisan Professors

Institutionalizing a political agenda on any college campus would be pathological whether that agenda came from the left or right. But faculty in today's American universities overwhelmingly hold views on the political left.

Professors are almost all Democrats. In 2020, the National Association of Scholars published a survey of more than 12,000 tenure-track faculty in the top-ranked universities in each state, based on publicly available information. Results were presented as a ratio of Democrats to Republicans among faculty who were registered voters and who had donated to political candidates. The results show that among those registered to vote by party ID, Democrats dominate. The ratio is even stronger among those who donate to campaigns. Even chemistry, a discipline far from partisan politics, has a ratio of 113 donors to Democrats for every one donor to Republicans.

A somewhat older dataset, from the work of Matt Nisbet of Northeastern University, looked at the political and ideological views of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) back in 2011 (though not all members are university faculty). The data show AAAS members self-reported ideological views and partisan affiliations that were more liberal than black churchgoers and more Democratic than MSNBC viewers, with a combined partisanship/ideology score comparable only to Tea Party supporters on the right.

The extreme leftward lean of the academy has not always been the case.

A 2017 analysis by Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College showed the political orientation of faculty members had moved to the left over several decades, with a notable increase starting about 2004. In contrast, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among students and citizens changed little over the same period. As Abrams wrote in his analysis: "The problem here is actually quite simple: When almost everyone in a field or department shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, errors can go unchallenged, and these orthodoxies inhibit scholarly inquiry."

When researchers in 1968 looked at the political affiliation of professors, they found that behavioral (or social) scientists leaned left but physical scientists and those in the fine arts were evenly distributed between Democrats and Republicans and "no affiliation." Even among behavioral scientists, more than 20 percent reported being Republicans. Another 1968 study of faculty politics also found that social scientists tended to be on the left, whereas a majority of botanists, geologists, mathematicians, and engineers characterized themselves as conservatives. I am not aware of any recent research that shows any academic discipline with a majority of faculty self-describing themselves as conservative—it's not even close.

Commenting on the trend, Phillip Magness and David Waugh wrote in the Winter 2022/2023 issue of The Independent Review: "Faculty and university administrators have increasingly prioritized overt political activism as a primary emphasis of classroom instruction. The changing ideological landscape has not only made nonleft constituencies feel increasingly unwelcome on campus—it has also started to materialize in hiring discrimination against faculty applicants with nonleft perspectives in several of the most politically skewed disciplines."

As Abrams wrote, this harm hits students as well: "As teachers, we fail in teaching students how to think. When students are shielded to divergent view points and counter-arguments on the issues that are more salient to them, the students understandably become confused and angered by others who see the world differently. This diminishes our national discourse and frays our civic bonds."

And it's not just teaching and research that suffers from the narrowing of political perspectives on campus. In some cases, like-minded faculty have repurposed universities for political advocacy in service of their favorite causes, losing sight of why we have universities in the first place and contributing to the loss of public confidence.

From 'Science Communication' to the 'Science Police'

The end of the Cold War marked the end of the post–World War II consensus on the social role of scientific research. In 1995, Rad Byerly and I characterized this general agreement as a social contract, one that was necessarily undergoing change: "With the Cold War ended, science is adapted to an obsolete environment….Problem resolution will become increasingly important in justifying support for science. Legislatures challenge research universities to contribute more to society, to better educate undergraduates, and to study practical problems."

The changing social context meant policymakers and the public would expect research institutions, including universities, to be more accountable to serving social needs. Through the 1990s and 2000s, there was indeed greater pressure for more accountability from the scientific community.

One consequence of these pressures was demands from funders that researchers demonstrate impact. One important example of this dynamic occurred in 1997, when the NSF—a leading federal funder of university-based research—changed its merit review criteria for evaluating research proposals. The two new criteria announced in 1997 were "intellectual merit" and "broader impacts," to be considered equally important.

Increasing demands that researchers demonstrate impact were not limited to the NSF or the United States—they became ubiquitous across scientific institutions, including universities.

A phrase that began to be popularized about 20 years ago, "science communication," characterized one increasingly popular approach to demonstrating impact. It became so popular that it developed into its own field. Some cautioned against seeing science communication in terms of overt or stealth advocacy. Despite these warnings, the field reflects a turn within the academic community to institutionalize and legitimize political advocacy, with "science communication" frequently interpreted to mean simply sharing one's political views.

Some practitioners of science communication have not limited themselves to advocating policies, politicians, or a cause—they have also tried to limit the expression of other academics whose views they disagree with or do not find helpful for advancing their causes. In 2017, the journalist Keith Kloor labeled these activists the "science police," explaining: "Highly charged issues, such as climate change, engender the most active policing in the scientific community and that the intensity of this policing is proportional to the perceived influence of the person on the receiving end of it."

Such policing has become institutionalized in yet another new field, called "misinformation research," in which certain professors appoint themselves arbiters of truth in scientific and public debates. Like most academics, the self-described political views of misinformation researchers are skewed to the political left.

So large parts of science communication are about promoting the right messages, and large parts of misinformation research are about preventing others from promoting the wrong messages. Unsurprisingly, data show a sharp increase in the use of both phrases that coincides with the increasing politicization of universities—"science communication" took off around 2000 and "misinformation research" in 2010.

The dynamics here are not limited to these two areas of research. A more general perspective has spread through academia, one where faculty and their research ought to be judged by political criteria: Do they express the "correct" views?

An example of how this dynamic became institutionalized in our universities can be found in the 2024 course-correction decision by the University of Michigan to eliminate the requirement that its faculty prepare statements on diversity, equity, and inclusion. A faculty committee concluded: "As currently enacted, diversity statements have the potential to limit viewpoints and reduce diversity of thought among faculty members."

Small wonder confidence in U.S. universities has dropped so precipitously. What did they expect would happen?

Fixing Universities

As university leaders become more aware of diminished public confidence, the notion of institutional neutrality has found support in a growing number of campuses. At least 29 schools have adopted a policy of institutional neutrality (or restraint). As FIRE defines it, this is the idea that "colleges and universities should not, as institutions, take positions on social and political issues unless those issues 'threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry.' Instead, these discussions should be left to students and faculty."

Such policies shouldn't be empty words. On many campuses, taking institutional neutrality seriously will mean making difficult and politically fraught decisions about how to reform entrenched programs that operate with a decidedly nonneutral stance. Such changes must be made from within—they should not and almost certainly could not be imposed on universities from the outside.

And such changes must be made soon. Universities are supposed to serve common interests, not the narrow political agendas of faculty, administrators, or public officials.

This article was adapted from a post on The Honest Broker Substack.