How to kick a professor off campus

The bowtie makes me suspicious right away

I shouldn’t have to tell my students that I don’t regard their backpacks as urinals, but apparently some professors have issues.

A Macalester College student has accused her chemistry professor of pissing (“urinating,” to use the legal term) on her backpack last December, reports the Mac Weekly. That prof, identified in a police report regarding “fourth-degree intentional damage to property” (well that really removes a lot of the nuance from the incident), is Paul Fischer, who is no longer a Mac employee.

That’s a first to me. There is an official police report on the incident.

A report from the St. Paul Police Department (SPPD) states that, on Feb. 6 at 9:41 a.m., a Macalester student informed SPPD officers that an individual had urinated on her belongings on Dec. 5, 2025, on Macalester’s campus. The report names former Macalester chemistry Professor Paul Fischer as the suspect in the case.

According to a statement SPPD spokesperson Alyssa Arcand made to the Pioneer Press, the student left her backpack unattended for several minutes in a classroom building and discovered urine on it when she returned.

So the event happened at the end of Fall term. Then, at the beginning of Spring term, Fischer is abruptly terminated.

On Feb. 19, chemistry Professor Keith Kuwata sent an email to all chemistry majors and minors, as well as biology majors with a biochemistry emphasis, stating that “Fischer is no longer an employee of Macalester College and is not authorized to be anywhere on campus.”

Kuwata’s email also notes that it has been “an unsettling time for many of you.” He stated that the department’s top priorities were student well-being and academic success.

My sympathies to the chemistry faculty at Macalester, that’s a rough decision to make, to suddenly drop a professor early in the term. I hope the students aren’t too traumatized by a professor suddenly losing his mind. That comment about “an unsettling time” suggests there is a lot more to the story, but they aren’t talking.

Apparently, Fischer started teaching at Macalester in 2001, not much different from me, starting at UMM in 2000. Do professors typically start falling apart around the 25 year mark? Should I be worried?

Again, I want to reassure my students that I probably won’t start pissing on everything.

I could have told them that

Conservative media likes to play up their persecution complex — and colleges are a common target. We’re too liberal, they say, we try to silence conservative students. None of that is true, as a recent poll shows.

According to a report that Gallup and the Lumina Foundation published today, just 2 percent of all college students—including 3 percent of Republicans—say they feel they don’t belong on campus due to their political views. That’s one of the many disconnects between public perceptions about higher education’s climate and value and what students say is actually happening on campus, according to the report, “The College Reality Check: What Students Experience vs. What America Believes.”

Two to three percent sounds about right, and probably represents the fraction of faculty who are outright assholes (we’ve always got a few of them, any slice of humanity you can choose will have a few bad apples rattling around.) Almost all students are welcome, we like to discuss controversial issues and present dissenting views, and we actually have expectations for passing a class that do not ever include holding a particular political affiliation, or what kind of haircut you have, or who you voted for in recent elections.

However, I was disappointed by one result from the poll.

The results showed that two-thirds of college students said most of their professors encourage them to share their views, including those that make others uncomfortable. At the same time, 71 percent said their professors create a classroom environment that supports both students who express unpopular opinions and those who may be upset by such views.

Only 71%? I don’t believe it. One of our most common challenges is getting students to speak up — I want students to raise their hand or just shout at questions in the middle of a lecture…please please please interrupt me and tell me what you are thinking. I think that’s true of every faculty member, getting students to think and express themselves is our job. Too many students want to just get through the class and get out of there, and getting a conversation going is harder than just taking notes and listening quietly.

I have never objected to conservative students taking my classes. If anything, it goes the other way–I’ve had students put me on lists at FIRE and TPUSA, they’ve reported me to the campus police (that never goes anywhere), they know me at local churches that I do not attend. A few years ago, we had a TPUSA chapter that constantly posted posters with their stupid slogans on them — I’ve seen a few with Sharpie ‘enhancements’, but that’s about the limit of their oppression. One of their representatives did go on to win notoriety by graduating, joining Project Veritas, and getting arrested for breaking into a Louisiana politician’s office. Note that he did graduate.

Come to think of it, I just checked our list of student organizations, and TPUSA isn’t on it! We must have hounded them out of existence. Or, more likely, the former members were so aggressively antagonistic and unpleasantly ineffectual that they tainted the reputation of their organization for years to come, and no one wanted to join. I didn’t kick them out, despite their feeble efforts to kick me out.

A seismic change

Today has been a day full of meetings (with another to come tonight!) and now I’m tired. One of the meetings gave me mixed feelings: a division meeting of all the science faculty to give our final approval of a decision to get rid of our geology discipline.

OK, that’s overly dramatic. We’re not actually getting rid of any of the geology classes, or any of the geology faculty, we just won’t be giving out geology degrees, and the existing structure of the discipline is getting folded into our Environmental Science program. Nothing will be lost, it’s more of an administrative shift, and apparently this is a common kind of change at many universities, but I still feel like it’s a historical break. Before there was a biology, there was geology, and geology was one of the core research fields in natural history. It’s being absorbed into a broader academic discipline, which is OK, I guess, but as an old guy I feel like something is being lost.

I wonder what will happen to biology in a few decades…what grander concept will expand to encompass my little domain?

Don’t tell me physics.

I’ve been distracted lately

If you’ve noticed that I’m posting less, it’s the timing: my sabbatical is ending, I’m getting ready to plunge back into the teaching grind in January, and I’ve got a lot of prep work to do. And then we were hit with more cloudflare errors…but now we’re back.

Last year, I incorporated a significant unit on race and genetics; this year, I’m going to prepare the students a little better by including readings from the scientific literature throughout the semester, so I’ve been searching for good, easily digestible papers on the subject. One that I found (but probably won’t use in the course) is “Teaching the Science of Race and Racism,” by Kevin N. Lala, Jasmeen Kanwal, and Kalyani Twyman, which came from this book, Innovations in Decolonising the Curriculum: Multidisciplinary Perspective. The abstract for the paper hit me a bit hard, personally.

Social Science departments of universities regularly teach the history of scientific racism and how contemporary genetics undermines biological conceptions of race. By contrast, biology departments rarely embrace this challenge, and ‘race’ and racism barely feature on the curriculum. Seemingly, professional biologists shirk any social responsibility to educate future generations about these pressing social issues, despite the fact that racism is heavily reliant on the propagation of biological misinformation and that biologists are well-qualified to teach facts related to ‘race’ and racism accurately.

Harsh, but that’s why I added the topic of race to an otherwise convential transmission genetics course. I am feeling simultaneously vindicated and embarrassed for my discipline. I guess I’ll have to continue expanding on the subject.

I don’t think I’ll be facing much pushback from students and colleagues — the authors didn’t, after all.

Here we describe the experience of teaching a senior undergraduate course entitled ‘The Science of Race and Racism’ within the School of Biology at our institution in the UK. The module discussed the history of scientific racism, how contemporary genetics undermines biological conceptions of race and tackled race and sport, race and health, and race and intelligence controversies. Misgivings that delayed our offering the course proved unfounded: the course was extremely positively received by the students, and extraordinarily rewarding to teach. We encourage others to grasp the nettle and teach similar courses.

My students seemed to appreciate it last year, let’s hope they like it and learn something this year. I might only be teaching this course this year and next year before finally retiring!

Sympathy for Samantha Fulnecky

The Algorithm keeps throwing articles and videos about this bad essay that was written by OU student Samantha Fulnecky. I can understand that — there is so much content being generated over the terrible writing by this student, because the internet is full of educated people who in many cases have professional expertise in evaluating writing. I’m going to be teaching a class in writing scientific papers this Spring, so I’m familiar with the work. Here’s an example:

If you didn’t watch it, that’s OK, you can find hundreds of similar examples on the internet. And that’s the problem!

I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of student papers, and some of them have been atrocious and earned zeroes. But I would never drag a student publicly, I would never shame a student’s lack of rigor or talent or ability on the internet. We have strict rules about that — I would get dragged into the division chair’s office, and get a few phone calls from the university’s lawyers, and face disciplinary action if I did that, no matter how badly the essay I was mocking was written.

However, in this case, Samantha Fulnecky exposed herself — she gave her awful essay to Turning Point USA, and they cruelly posted it online with full attribution, and invited the brutal savaging she is getting. I cringe a little bit deep inside every time I see these dissections of her paper, because normally a teacher would do that in confidence, one on one, with the goal of helping the student learn and get better, not to rip her apart in a public display.

I experienced this myself. The first essay I wrote in graduate school was for a physiology class, and I apparently expressed a view on the role of synapse structure that the professor did not like, so he spent an entire class hour going over it line by line and telling the entire class how stupid and wrong I was. It was not a good learning experience, except that I did learn that this one professor was an asshole.

Now, even worse, the entire internet is shredding Fulnecky’s paper, and probably millions of people are wallowing in schadenfreude over this one student’s disgraceful inability to make a coherent argument. What has Samantha Fulnecky learned? Probably only that she has to be more careful about letting people see how she expresses herself.

I also suspect that I’m seeing so much criticism of Fulnecky’s paper because she made herself fair game for the dammed up resentment so many of us have for the bad papers we have to routinely read in detail. Finally, we get to explode at this garbage we have to carefully evaluate, rather than being professional and courteous!

I see presentiments of my future fate

Sometimes, students earn a failing grade. I hand back essays or exams with zeroes on them, and inform students that they aren’t passing the course…and suggest that we meet so we can work out the problem. At the end of the semester I might log into the Peoplesoft database and put an F in a little square box, and the students are clear about who’s putting the black blot on their transcript — it’s me, not them. So I still worry that they might hate me or take action with the administration to get me in trouble. It’s part of the job.

Sometimes you have to evaluate a student’s performance, and sometimes they fail. And now we have a new generation of entitled and ignorant students that think they can just go over the instructor’s head to demand that their biases get approval.

The University of Oklahoma has placed a trans graduate instructor on administrative leave after a student received a zero on a psychology assignment that described transgender people as “demonic” and asserted that gender roles are “Biblically ordained.” The dispute has quickly escalated into a statewide political flashpoint.

The controversy began when junior Samantha Fulnecky submitted a 650-word reaction paper for a course on how social expectations shape gender. Instead of addressing the assignment’s questions using data, her essay claimed society is “pushing lies” about gender, warned that eliminating strict gender roles would be harmful, and described transgender identities as “demonic,” Them reports.

You can read Fulnecky’s essay for yourself. It’s terrible. It might pass muster in Sunday School, but this was submitted to the University of Oklahoma, which has somewhat higher standards. It contains no data, unless you count quoting the Bible poorly as data (you shouldn’t). The central theme of the essay is that you shouldn’t question conservative interpretations of the the Bible.

I do not think men and women are pressured to be more masculine or feminine. I strongly
disagree with the idea from the article that encouraging acceptance of diverse gender expressions
could improve students’ confidence. Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and
everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth. I
do not want kids to be teased or bullied in school. However, pushing the lie that everyone has
their own truth and everyone can do whatever they want and be whoever they want is not biblical
whatsoever. The Bible says that our lives are not our own but that our lives and bodies belong to
the Lord for His glory. I live my life based on this truth and firmly believe that there would be
less gender issues and insecurities in children if they were raised knowing that they do not
belong to themselves, but they belong to the Lord.

The TA’s evaluation was spot on, and Mel Curth should have a bright future in academia, although maybe this experience will sour her on the career.

Graduate teaching assistant Mel Curth, who graded the paper, wrote that the zero was based on academic criteria, not retaliation for the student’s religious views. Curth wrote that the essay “does not answer the questions for this assignment, contradicts itself, heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.” Curth also noted that portraying a marginalized group as “demonic” is “highly offensive,” and urged the student to use empirical sources rather than doctrinal statements when critiquing course material.

Does Fulnecky learn from this instruction? No. She immediately turned to Turning Point USA to advocate for her, filed a religious discrimination complaint with the university, and got the governor of Oklahoma to intervene. You’d think he has better things to do with his time.

Fulnecky wasn’t penalized for her beliefs. She was penalized for not doing the assignment and using her biases instead of data.

The university has bent the knee and removed the TA from the class and put a full-time professor in charge (I wouldn’t want to be in their position — imagine taking over a class with cocky students who have learned that they can get rid of instructors who don’t give them the grade they want.)

A state representative is demanding that Curth be fired.

To use academic power to punish or pressure a student simply because she stood firm in her faith and cited real science in her essay is not leadership. It is inappropriate, unacceptable, and should be investigated for discrimination.

The University of Oklahoma must address this. This individual should not be teaching in higher education — period.

Take another look at Fulnecky’s essay. Can you find where she cited any science?

I’m trying to avoid imagining a student in my genetics or evolution class complaining that a known atheist was teaching about stuff that contradicts their religious beliefs. It could happen, it has happened, but so far it’s always been confined to private meetings in my office, with me reassuring them that I don’t care what they do on a Sunday morning, but that the course content is well defined by the textbooks and the evidence.

And afterwards I thank God that I don’t live in Oklahoma.

If you care about getting a good education, don’t go to the University of Oklahoma. Go further north.

Texas leads the way!

They have new policies for their university.

Courses at Texas A&M University System schools that “advocate race or gender ideology or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity” will only be allowed with pre-approval, following a policy change approved Thursday.

Editorial comment: they will never be pre-approved.

Speaking ahead of the committee vote Thursday, committee chair Sam Torn said a rigorous review of university courses will accompany the policy changes.

Editorial comment: they will enforce rigid ideological beliefs…but will deny that they are being ideological.

“The board agreed it was essential for the Texas A&M University System to refine existing policies and lead the way with an in-depth and repeatable review of our courses so that we can, simply put, make sure we are educating, not advocating, and that we are teaching what we say we are going to teach,” Torn said.

Editorial comment: see what I mean? They haven’t figured out yet that silencing a set of ideas is ideological, too.

The university system’s Civil Rights Protections and Compliance policy also has been revised to state that “No system academic course will advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation or gender identity, unless the course and the relevant course materials are approved in advance by the member CEO or designee.”

Editorial comment: they will erase race, gender, and sexual orientation from the curriculum, denying that such phenomena even exist.

Many faculty and outsiders are speaking out against this policy.

The new race and gender policy has garnered condemnation from educational rights advocates, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which sent a letter to the regents earlier this week arguing the policy amounted to censorship.

“We urge the board to reject these proposals, which invite — indeed, practically guarantee — unconstitutional political interference with faculty teaching and academic freedom,” the letter reads. “Academic freedom requires that faculty, not administrators, determine whether, when, and how to teach material germane to the topic of their courses.”

Before the final vote, FIRE special counsel Robert Shibley told Houston Public Media the policy change would affect a wide swath of curriculum, from civil rights to the Civil War or even classical Greek plays.

“That would subject dozens or potentially hundreds of courses to the veto of high-level administrators,” Shibley said. “So, even if a faculty member just wants to assign one chapter of a book, and it has something to do with race or gender, that means that the college president is going to have to pre-approve that.”

My god, FIRE opposes it? An organization funded by Charles Koch favoring libertarian/conservative causes thinks that maybe Texas has gone too far dislikes the policy? You know it’s bad.

In addition, Texas A&M is going to enable a network of student snitches. It’s going to be so much fun!

As part of the review process, Hallmark said there would be a “24-7 reporting mechanism” for students to report what they consider “inaccurate or misleading course content.”

Shibley, the FIRE special counsel, said the potential creation of such a reporting mechanism could have a “chilling” effect on faculty.

How will the students know if the course content is inaccurate? Because Fox News or TPUSA tells them so?

If you’re from Texas and attending college or planning to attend, get out now. The neighboring states aren’t particularly great, though, may I recommend applying to the University of Minnesota system?

The era of destruction

Deservedly or not, Harvard is the premiere research institution in the US, internationally renowned, magnificently endowed, so it’s shocking that Trump is demolishing our research capabilities nationwide.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences slashed the number of Ph.D. student admissions slots for the Science division by more than 75 percent and for the Arts & Humanities division by about 60 percent for the next two years.

The scale of reductions in the Social Science division was not immediately clear, though several departments in the division experienced decreases over the coming two years ranging from 50 percent to 70 percent.

We’re used to thinking that STEM departments are safe…but no more.

The Organismic and Evolutionary Biology department will shrink its class size by roughly 75 percent to three new Ph.D. students, according to two professors. Molecular and Cellular Biology will reduce its figure to four new students, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology will go down to four or five admits, one of the professors added.

The reduction in admissions slots puts a figure to FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra’s announcement in late September that the school would be admitting Ph.D. students at “significantly reduced levels.” Hoekstra cited uncertainty around research funding and an increase to the endowment tax — which could cost Harvard $300 million per year — as sources of financial pressure.

This isn’t just Harvard — universities across the country are tightening their belts to the point that whole disciplines are getting chopped. How do we recover from this?

All Trump knows how to do is destroy, just like he’s demolishing the east wing of the White House.

That’s symbolic of how this administration will be seen by history: a flag waving over a wrecking crew.

It’s going to be hard going back to work in January

I’m relieved to not have any teaching obligations this term. I’ve been doing weekly homework problems/quizzes using the university standard Canvas tool, and I’ve always been pretty liberal with that: if students want to work together on the problems, that’s all to the good. Communicating and helping each other is useful for learning.

But I’m getting all these emails now about a feature that was added. AI. There’s a box on the screen to invoke Google Lens and Homework Helper, so I could be putting all the effort into composing a problem set, and the students could solve it by pushing a button. The university has been putting in something called Honorlock to disable AI access in problem sets, which seems to working inconsistently.

I’m not alone in resenting all these shortcuts that are being placed in our teaching.

It’s a sentiment that pervades listservs, Reddit forums and other places where classroom professionals vent their frustrations. “I’m not some sort of sorcerer, I cannot magically force my students to put the effort in,” complains one Reddit user in the r/professor subreddit. “Not when the crack-cocaine of LLMs is just right next to them on the table.” And for the most part, professors are on their own; most institutions have not established blanket policies about AI use, which means that teachers create and enforce their own. Becca Andrews, a writer who teaches journalism at Western Kentucky State University, had “a wake-up call” when she had to fail a student who used an LLM to write a significant amount of a final project. She’s since reworked classes to include more in-person writing and workshopping, and notes that her students — most of whom have jobs — seem grateful to have that time to complete assignments. Andrews also talks to her students about AI’s drawbacks, like its documented impact on critical-thinking faculties: “I tell them that their brains are still cooking, so it’s doubly important to think of their minds as a muscle and work on developing it.”

Last spring’s bleakest read on the landscape was New York Magazine’s article, “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College,” which included a number of deeply unsettling revelations from reporter James D. Walsh — not just about how widespread AI dependence has already become, but about the speed with which it is changing what education means on an empirical level. (One example Walsh cites: a professor who “caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt ‘Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.’”) The piece is bookended with the story of a Columbia student who invented a tool that allowed engineers to cheat on coding interviews, who recorded himself using the tool in interviews with companies, and was subsequently put on academic leave. During that time, he invented another app that makes it easy to cheat on everything. He raised $5.3 million in venture capital.

I’m left wondering, who is asking for these widgets to be installed in our classes? Are there salespeople for software like Canvas who enthusiastically sell these features for cheating to university administrators who think more AI slop benefits learning? Why, if I’m trying to teach genetics, do I have to wrestle around garbage shortcuts imposed on me by the university that short circuit learning?

Several years ago, I was happy to embrace these new tools, and found it freeing to be doings exams and homework online — it meant 4 lecture hours in the semester that weren’t dedicated to proctoring students hunched over exams. No more. When I get back into a class in the Spring, I’m going to be resurrecting blue books.

Oh, and since I was wondering who kept shoveling this counterproductive crap into my classes, I’ve got one answer.

It’s not coincidental that the biggest booster of LLMs as a blanket good is a man who, like many a Silicon Valley wunderkind who preceded him, dropped out of college, invented an app and hopped aboard the venture-capital train. As a leading booster of AI, Sam Altman has been particularly vocal in encouraging students to adopt AI tools and prioritize “the meta ability to learn” over sustained study of any one subject. If that sounds like a line of bull, that’s because it is. And it’s galling that the opinion of someone who dropped out of college — because why would you keep learning when there’s money to be made and businesses to found? — is constantly sought out for comment on what tools students should and shouldn’t be using. Altman has brushed off educators’ concerns about the drawbacks of AI use in academia and has even suggested that the definition of cheating needs to evolve.

An insufferable student

I would never want to teach in Texas…I wouldn’t even want to live in such a place. As an example, here’s a case of a dogmatic student objecting to the instruction in a class that mentions gender. This is from a right-wing twitter account where the tweeter approves of the student.


CAUGHT ON TAPE: TEXAS A&M STUDENT KICKED OUT OF CLASS AFTER OBJECTING TO TRANSGENDER INDOCTRINATION… and A&M President defends “LGBTQ Studies.”

I’m referring @TAMU to the Trump Administration for investigation… and asking Gov @GregAbbott_TX to fire the A&M officials involved and to instruct his Regents at all public universities to immediately end all DEI and LGBTQ indoctrination.

Hidden camera video and audio, letters to the Trump Administration and Governor Abbott, as well as some of the course materials my office has obtained, are in 🧵 below.

If you don’t want to listen to the video, the instructor starts by briefly reviewing some basic concepts in gender and sexuality, and one student pipes up to say that she thinks the course content is illegal, because according to our president, there’s only two genders, and that he would be freezing agency’s funding programs that promote gender ideology and that it also goes against people’s religious beliefs, two arguments that I would never ever want to hear in the classroom. Authoritarian pronouncements from a dictator and religious beliefs are never a sound basis for reasonable understanding.

This student chooses to argue with the instructor, and incidentally reveals that she has no understanding of material that had been discussed in a previous class.

Can you explain to us how teaching us about gender identity and transgenderism and that there’s more sexes than…

“My gender isn’t illegal,” the teacher interrupts.

Huh?

“My gender isn’t illegal,” she repeats.

Gender? What do you mean?

Your gender is not illegal? According to President Trump’s executive order, it…

“If you are uncomfortable in this class, you do have the right to leave. What we are doing is not illegal, and if you would make the claim that it is you need to talk to the department head, or the head of undergraduates.”

The student then refuses to participate, and says she has an appointment with the university president to complain about this course.

She does more than that. She meets with the Texas A&M president and asks that the instructor be fired.


Audio of student asking Texas A&M President to fire the professor who kicked her out and who was blatantly indoctrinating students in transgender ideology.

A&M President snaps back at student: “THAT’S NOT HAPPENING!”

Exactly right. You don’t fire faculty because opinionated students disagree with course content, even if the student claims that it was indoctrination. Teaching is a matter of explaining concepts that students don’t initially understand; reciting ideas that students already know and only regurgitating their opinions is not teaching, it’s memorizing dogma.

Unfortunately, after giving a brief lesson in reality to the student, the president of Texas A&M later issued a statement.

I learned this afternoon that key leaders in the College of Arts and Sciences approved plans to continue teaching course content that was not consistent with the course’s published description. As a result, I directed the provost to remove the dean and department head from their administrative positions, effective immediately. Our students use the published information in the course catalog to make important decisions about the courses they take in pursuit of their degrees. If we allow different course content to be taught from what is advertised, we let our students down. When it comes to our academic offerings, we must keep our word to our students and to the state of Texas.

The excuse is now that the course catalog does not include a summary of all the concepts an instructor might introduce in a course. Uh-oh. My genetics course doesn’t have a catalog entry that mentions that I teach about the fallacies of genetic determinism, racism, and historical development of the chromosome theory of inheritance, so I guess my class faces the threat of being declared anathema…except that my university administration isn’t packed with dogmatic assholes on a crusade to purge science.

I’d say that Texas professors need to get the hell out of that shithole state, but they already know it. Professors want to leave Texas because of tense political climate, survey says.

Many Texas professors are looking for jobs in different states, citing a climate of fear and anxiety on their college campuses due to increased political interference, according to a recent survey conducted by the American Association of University Professors.

The survey interviewed nearly 4,000 faculty across the southern U.S., including more than 1,100 from Texas. About a quarter of the Texas professors said they have applied for higher education jobs in other states in the last two years, and more than 25% said they soon intend to start searching for out-of-state positions. Of those who aren’t thinking of leaving, more than one-fifth said they don’t plan to stay in higher education in the long-term.

“Morale is down,” said one Texas faculty member at a public four-year university in a written response. “Friends have lost contracts for no discernable [sic] reason. We live in fear of using the wrong word. We self-censor. We do not have academic freedom.”

The top reason faculty cited in the survey for wanting to change jobs was the state’s broad political climate. In Texas, faculty have criticized new state laws banning diversity, equity and inclusion programs in universities; requiring university governing boards to establish policies on granting and revoking tenure; and limiting faculty’s role in crafting courses and hiring colleagues. Other reasons included salary and academic freedom concerns, the survey found.

Unfortunately, it’s not just Texas. Thanks to federal policies that mirror those of Texas, professors in 50 states want to get the hell out of this country.