Meet Scott Yenor.
Yenor is a mild-mannered, bald, bespectacled professor of political science at Boise State University, a college known more for its blue football field and run-and-gun offense than for its history of philosophical debate. Yenor’s intellectual credentials are spotless: He has never received complaints from students or faculty about his classes or his papers. He’s a teacher and a thinker by trade, fully tenured.
But Yenor, you see, is also the devil.
At least, that’s the new public perception of Yenor at at Boise State. That’s because Yenor published a report in 2016 with the Heritage Foundation titled, Sex, Gender, and the Origins of the Culture War. The central thesis of the piece was simple and rather uncontroversial in conservative circles: that radical feminism’s central argument decrying gender boundaries between the sexes as entirely socially constructed has led directly to transgenderism’s attacks on gender itself as a social construct. As a philosophical matter, this progression is self-evident. Yenor’s report was academically worded and rather abstruse at times, filled with paragraphs such as this one:
Yenor later translated his extensive report into a shorter, less jargon-y article for Heritage’s Daily Signal, titled, “Transgender Activists Are Seeking to Undermine Parental Rights.”
Again, his contentions were not merely consistent with mainstream conservative thought—they were self-evident to those human beings with eyes and the capacity to read. (Ontario, to take just one example, has recently passed a bill that could plausibly be read to identify parental dissent from small children seeking transgender treatment as “child abuse.”) Yenor’s rather uncontroversial article was then posted at the Boise State Facebook page.
That’s when the trouble began.
Leftist students took note of Yenor’s perspective. And they seethed.
Actually, they did more than seethe: they complained, they demanded that the piece be taken down, and they insisted that Yenor had personally insulted them. All of this prompted the pusillanimous dean of the school, Corey Cook, to half-heartedly defend Yenor’s right to publish. But then Cook backtracked faster than Bobby Hull defending a breakaway, saying:
Cook didn’t say exactly why Yenor’s writings had violated this inconsistently-enforced value. In fact, Cook’s attacks on Yenor violated this value far more significantly than Yenor’s original writing. But as shoddy as this statement was, other leftist faculty members thought Cook didn’t go far enough—even though he had pledged to “begin reevaluating our approach to social media.”
And so a knight arose to challenge Yenor’s nefarious, patriarchal dragon: Francisco Salinas, a man with the Orwellian title “Director of Student Diversity and Inclusion.”
Salinas believes that diversity and inclusion do not include perspectives disapproved by Francisco Salinas. Thus, he took up his fiery pen and wrote a post on the school’s website dramatically titled “Connecting The Dots.” Salinas explained that the Yenor controversy had preceded white supremacist rally and murder in Charlottesville, Virginia by a day. This was not, Salinas concluded, a coincidence. “Their proximity in my attention,” Salinas wrote, “is no accident.” How so? Let’s let Salinas sally forth:
And so Yenor went from mainstream conservative thinker to neo-Nazi in the blink of an eye. Not just in the mind of Salinas, mind you—but in the minds of Yenor’s fellow professors and members of the student body, too.
A flyer suddenly began appearing around campus, reading “YOU HAVE BLOOD ON YOUR HANDS SCOTT YENOR.” The faculty senate took up a measure that would initiate an investigation claiming that Yenor was guilty of some ethereal “misconduct.” Here’s what faculty senator Professor Royce Hutson wrote:
Yenor was forced to hire an attorney. His fellow professors cast him out like a leper. In Yenor’s words, his colleagues engaged in “ritual condemnation and ostracization.”
If this reads more like a tragicomic Kafka novel than an honest discourse about ideas at one of our nation’s institutions of higher learning, that’s because it is. Except that it’s real: Yenor wanders the halls of an institution to which he has dedicated his life, condemned for a crime nobody will specify.
Unfortunately, Yenor’s experiences aren’t rare. Professors are now routinely hauled up before courts of inquisition in true revolutionary fashion for offenses contrived post facto for the sole purpose of ensnaring anyone who dissents from the current leftist orthodoxy.
Northwestern University’s Laura Kipnis—who isn’t even conservative—has been sucked into the maw of a Title IX case for having the temerity to write about “sexual paranoia” on campus and asking for evidence before condemning professors or students to the wilderness for mere allegations of sexual misconduct.
Professor Keith Fink found himself ousted from his part-time role at University of California at Los Angeles; Fink lectured on free speech and employment law from a conservative perspective. No real reason was given for UCLA’s failure to renew his contract.
Professor Bret Weinstein was forced to quit his position teaching at Evergreen State College after he refused to comply with a racist mob demanding that white professors not teach on a specified date.
Professor Nicholas Christakis resigned his administrative position at Yale’s Silliman College after he was abused by students who didn’t appreciate him telling them that they should get over their fears about diabolical Halloween costumes.
And people wonder why academia is leftist.
The suffocating leftism in American universities has arisen in large part because they are run by a self-perpetuating clique. To be excluded from such cliques can be professional suicide. And the price of admission is ideological conformity. Moreover, public pressure from students and outside media often prompts administrators to join in the chorus—better to be part of the mob baying for heads than to join a controversial thinker on the guillotine. The few conservative professors left tend to keep their heads down and pray for anonymity.
But that’s just the start of the problem. Decade after decade, the treatment of conservative professors has gotten worse as the leftist hegemony has grown stronger. And as older conservative professors have aged out of the population there are no sponsors for up-and-coming conservatives who want to join the professoriate.
As Yenor explains, “The process of getting a Ph.D. either makes conservatives into ‘careerists’—which means that they have to toe the line on sacred cows of the left—or conservatives at the undergraduate level see what academia would be for a career and decline to join.” So the self-perpetuating caste grows ever stronger. And louder. And more virulent. Anti-intellectual bullies like Francisco Salinas—enforcers of the revolution—exist on nearly every campus.
Conservatives tend to think that it can’t get much worse on campus. But it can. And it will.
The purge is on. When even Scott Yenor can’t be left alone in the middle of Idaho to write obvious truths about sexual politics, it’s a warning to every conservative professor in America that if they speak freely on intellectual matters they’re not doing their jobs—they’re risking their careers.
