Georgetown University law professor Sandra Sellers was fired this month for saying in an accidentally recorded Zoom conversation that her black students scored at the bottom of her class. The university also suspended the professor to whom she made the remark for not correcting her. He subsequently resigned.

These comments are controversial and offensive to many. To others, including those who have followed the research of noted black scholars such as Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Jason Riley, who have long argued that affirmative action programs at prestigious universities backfire, they are merely inartful. While the substance of Sellers’s remark is debatable, her right to make it should not be. These Georgetown professors are just the latest victims of campus cancel culture, where faculty members are silenced for uttering unpopular views. This censorship threatens academic freedom, scholarship, and knowledge, from which we all benefit.