At The Columbia Academic Freedom Council Conference
/On Saturday (September 13) something called the Columbia Academic Freedom Council held a day-long conference here in New York. The Council used the event to hand out awards to some 23 recipients. Each of the recipients had not only been punished or ostracized somehow for speaking out as a dissenter from the groupthink of academia, but had also fought back in some way.
The CAFC is composed of members of the Columbia faculty, most prominently law school professor Philip Hamburger, who was listed as a “Co-Chair” along with four others. The organization’s website indicates that it has over 100 members, most but not all of whose names are listed on the site. One hundred may seem like a substantial number, but Columbia’s website lists close to 4800 full time faculty members.
The day’s program was organized into a series of panels, where each panel’s members were award recipients who got to tell their stories. The recipients included some prominent academics from elite institutions, but also some from less-well-known places, including some from community colleges and high schools.
The entire program was some 10 hours long. I was able to stay for about half of it. In many cases I was familiar with the story of the award recipient, but in many others I was not. I thought readers might be interested in the personal stories from a sample of some of the more and less prominent recipients.
Martin Kuldorff. Kuldorff was probably the most famous of the award recipients at the conference. He was a Professor of Medicine and a biostatistician at Harvard, starting there in 2003. He gained fame in 2020 as one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a widely circulated petition opposing the lockdown policies then sweeping the world in response to the Covid pandemic. The GBD ultimately got almost 1 million signatures. According to this piece from Reason Magazine in April 2024, for his trouble Kuldorff was “booted from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) COVID-19 vaccine safety commission and regularly de-boosted on Twitter and YouTube for his views. Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins labeled him and his co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration ‘fringe epidemiologists’ and demanded a ‘quick and devastating…takedown’ of their call to end lockdowns in favor of a "focused protection" strategy.” In 2024, Kuldorff was fired from Harvard, allegedly for failure to take the Covid vaccine, even though he had had the disease, and thus had natural immunity. More recently, in June 2025, Kuldorff has been appointed by new HHS Secretary RFK, Jr., to a new Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.
Roland Fryer. Fryer is also one of the most prominent among the award recipients. He was hired by Harvard as an economics professor in 2003, and in 2007 he became the youngest African American, and second youngest person, ever to receive tenure at that school. His career trajectory was continuously upward until 2016, when he published a research paper concluding that blacks were not more likely than whites to be shot in a given interaction with police. The next year, Fryer fired a long-time personal assistant, who proceeded to accuse him of various acts of sexual misconduct. I wrote about this story extensively in a post back in December 2022. None of the allegations against Fryer went as far as accusing him of ever making a pass at a subordinate or of asking for sex. My post links to other articles that contain lists of his allegedly inappropriate statements, most of which amount to off-color jokes. (My favorite was “I learned my negotiating skills trying to get laid in high school.”). The then dean of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences — Claudine Gay — recommended that Fryer be fired. He ultimately got a two-year suspension, and had his lab and researchers taken away from him. Gay went on to become President of Harvard, before very quickly disintegrating in a plagiarism scandal. A film maker named Rob Montz made a documentary about the Fryer affair, and later commented in an interview, “Roland’s work represents a mortal threat to some of the most powerful black people at Harvard,” such as Claudine Gay. Remarkably, Fryer hung on at Harvard, and is still there as far as I can determine. (But then, so is Gay, as a tenured professor rather than as President.)
Tabia Lee. Ms. Lee is an example from the less prominent category. She worked as a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion co-ordinator at a California public community college called De Anza, until fired in 2023. Whereupon she brought a lawsuit, the complaint from which is extensively quoted in this Newsweek piece from July 2023. From Newsweek:
A 53-page lawsuit filed July 10 claims that [Lee] encountered a hostile department "illegally targeting White people on the basis of race." It also says she was accused of "whitesplaining" and not being the "right kind of Black person," and claims she was vilified for refraining from invoking racial stereotypes and refusing to use the term "Latinx" instead of "Latinos." . . . The lawsuit says that she "objected to racial stereotypes peddled by Defendants that targeted both White and Black Americans, bizarrely celebrating Blacks as incapable of objectivity, individualism, efficiency, progress, and other grossly demeaning stereotypes, while condemning Whites for promoting these same values, which Defendants label 'colonialism' and 'White supremacy.'"
I can’t find further information about what Lee is up to today, other than that her lawsuit continues. However, from her presentation, I will say that she is quite the firebrand.
Paul Rossi. Rossi was a high school math teacher at Grace Church School, a private school in Manhattan, when, in 2021, he publicly called out the administration for indoctrinating the students with extreme progressive politics. On April 13, 2021, Rossi published an op-ed in the New York Post titled “We’re damaging kids with ‘Critical Race Theory.’” Excerpt:
“Antiracist” training sounds righteous, but it is the opposite of truth in advertising. It requires teachers like myself to treat students differently on the basis of race. Furthermore, in order to maintain a united front for our students, teachers at Grace are directed to confine our doubts about this pedagogical framework to conversations with an in-house “Office of Community Engagement” for whom every significant objection leads to a foregone conclusion. Any doubting students are likewise “challenged” to reframe their views to conform to this orthodoxy.
By April 19, after several students complained of feeling “uncomfortable” in his class, Rossi was removed from teaching for the year. He declined to return thereafter. However, he did have a conversation with head-of-school George Davison, which he recorded, in which Davison appeared to agree with Rossi about the student indoctrination, even while reciting progressive mantras in public.
Since his experience in 2021, Rossi has made the rounds of the speaking circuit, continuing to publicize his story.
I feel particularly close to this circumstance for a couple of reasons: (1) my son-in-law attended Grace Church School from K to 8; and (2) one of my daughters shared a piano teacher with Davison’s kids, as a result of which I met the guy in the context of attending piano recitals at his apartment.
Rebecca Tuvel. And finally, another example from the non-prominent category, but in this case extremely funny. Ms. Tuvel was a junior (assistant) professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, when in 2017 she published an article called “In Defense of Transracialism” in a “peer reviewed” feminist philosophy journal called Hypatia. The article cleared the journal’s peer review process and got published on April 25, 2017. The article compared the case of Caitlyn Jenner, a trans woman, to that of Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who identifies as black. Key quote from the article: “Since we should accept transgender individuals' decisions to change sexes, we should also accept transracial individuals' decisions to change races."
The blowback was immediate. According to a Wikipedia summary here, by April 28, 2017, the article had come under massive attack on Facebook and Twitter. Tuvel was called “transphobic, racist, crazy, and stupid, and was accused of having engaged in ‘epistemic violence.’ Several feminists referred to her as a ‘Becky.’ The article was called ‘violent’, ‘crap’, and ‘wack shit.’” By May 1 the journal had posted an apology on its Facebook page. An open letter of protest to the journal got some 830 signatures.
Remarkably, Ms. Tuvel seems to have survived the controversy, and still teaches today at Rhodes College, where she is listed as an Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy.
So it’s just a small sample of how you get treated in academia if you have the temerity to speak out publicly in opposition to the dominant progressive/woke groupthink. It’s little wonder that few have the courage to do it. But this was a very impressive group.