Washington Post, The Professor Is Canceled. Now What?:

Across higher education, [‘intolerant’ professors] are tying college administrators in knots as they seek to balance free-speech traditions with goals like diversity and inclusion. While faculty, especially those with tenure, can enjoy broad latitude to speak their minds, college officials face enormous pressure to act when students point to possible discrimination and harassment in the classroom.

Yet their responses to such controversies, which often follow a similar pattern, seldom leave anyone satisfied. The Washington Post analyzed several emblematic cases and found that the incidents often trigger lengthy and opaque investigations that can disrupt departments for years and turn students into witnesses against their professors. They often harden views that colleges are either hopelessly “woke” or woefully incapable of confronting bigotry within their own ranks. In the end, it’s hard for anyone to say what has been accomplished.

Charles Negy (Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Central Florida): "Black privilege is real"

UCF fired Negy in early 2021, months after the professor provoked a firestorm by complaining on Twitter about “Black privilege” just days after George Floyd’s murder. 

University officials insisted that Negy wasn’t fired for his views. Instead, an exhaustive investigation concluded that the professor had created “a hostile learning environment.” UCF cited comments he made in class: that being anti-racists gave students “a little boner,” and that a woman is “kind of like a Ford pickup truck, built to take a pounding.”

But in 2022, an arbitrator reversed Negy’s dismissal. So, with gritted teeth, UCF reinstated him in August, returning to the classroom a professor about whom it had sent an undeniable message: This person is toxic to our university.

After everything, the university ended up right back where it started — with Negy at the lectern and his critics unsatisfied. That’s not surprising, said Will Creeley, legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Universities don’t want to sit back and let an intolerant professor off the hook; students won’t stand for that. But they usually can’t provide what critics really want, either, Creeley said: a professor’s “head on a platter.”

Eric Rasmusen (former Professor of Business Economics & Public Policy, Indiana University-Bloomington): "A ‘radioactive’ colleague"

For years, Indiana University at Bloomington had struggled with how to respond to Eric Rasmusen, a tenured economist in its Kelley School of Business. Past controversies — such as one in which Rasmusen argued on a blog that gay men shouldn’t be hired as schoolteachers because they could prey on children — had faded from attention.

A tipping point came in 2019, when Rasmusen tweeted a link to an article titled “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably.” He highlighted a quote from the article, which claimed “geniuses are overwhelmingly male.”

Lauren Robel, then Indiana’s provost, decided she’d had enough. In a fiery public statement, Robel slammed Rasmusen for expressing “racist, sexist, and homophobic views,” which she labeled “stunningly ignorant.” Robel said the university could not fire Rasmusen for his tweets because they were protected by the First Amendment. (“That is not a close call,” wrote Robel, who teaches constitutional law.) But if Rasmusen “acted upon his expressed views” in violation of IU’s nondiscrimination policy, she said, the university would take action.

For some, Robel had modeled a perfect response: Fight speech with more speech, and draw a hard line against discrimination. Ari Cohn, a First Amendment lawyer, declared the provost’s statement a “masterpiece.”

But a very messy case was about to unfold. …

Despite the initial furor after Rasmusen’s tweet, IU never publicly said what its investigation had found. Rasmusen retired in 2021 at age 62 after about three decades at the school. …

Today, Rasmusen teaches seventh-grade math at a Christian school in Bloomington and often has lunch at a local diner with a group of conservative faculty members. He hasn’t completely cut ties with IU: Former colleagues still spot him at campus functions, such as a Federalist Society event last fall.

Steve Sanders, a law professor who saw him there, said these cases put universities in a terrible bind. They can’t punish professors for saying unpopular things, Sanders said, but “the perceptions of students matter. Once a professor has been canceled, they’re canceled.”

Abbas Ghassemi (Engineering Professor, University of California at Merced):  "An attack on ‘IsraHell’"

In December 2020, the Jewish News of Northern California reported that the Twitter account of Abbas Ghassemi, a teaching professor in the engineering school at the University of California at Merced, was awash with antisemitic tropes. A cartoon diagram of the “Zionist brain” there depicted a “frontal money lobe,” a “Holocaust memory centre” and a “world domination lobe.” Another post said the interests of “Zionists and IsraHell” had “embedded themselves in every component of the American system,” including banking and media.

Merced came under a barrage of criticism, much of it from pro-Israel and antisemitic watchdog groups. An online petition demanded Ghassemi be fired.

The university immediately pulled Ghassemi from the classroom, which Elisabeth Gunther, then chief campus counsel, said was necessary to “ensure that the teaching environment was protected.” He would remain barred from instruction for two years.

In April 2021, Merced began a formal investigation into whether Ghassemi’s tweets had created a “hostile environment,” according to court records. But what came of the probe is a tightly held secret. Merced denied a request for records of its inquiry, saying they were exempt from disclosure for reasons of “personal privacy.” …

Ghassemi filed a grievance to challenge his removal from class, court records show. In the meantime, the controversy put Thomas Harmon in a bind. As chairman of the civil and environmental engineering department, Harmon entered the spring 2021 semester unexpectedly short one teacher. Ghassemi also refused to take on other duties, such as assessing curriculum for accreditation, Harmon said. All the while, the sidelined professor continued to earn a base salary of more than $155,000 per year, records show. “It dragged on and it wore on the department,” Harmon said.

Merced officials would not comment directly on Ghassemi’s case. They said in a statement that the campus uses “every tool at our disposal” to respond when an employee’s speech departs “from our values.” “However,” the statement continued, “federal and state laws, and the principle of free speech that is inherent in the higher education sphere of open participation, limit institutional responses to personal choices that transpire outside our campus boundaries.”

Then, one day last fall, administrators told the school’s dean to prepare for the professor’s return, said Mark Matsumoto, the former dean, who has since retired. “They said, ‘It’s been long enough; we think we can let him teach again,’” Matsumoto recalled.