Exactly. Any student, any time, can denounce a professor. It's The Twilight Zone episode where everyone's terrified that Billy Mumy will send them to the corn field.

And yet those of us who have suffered from such tactics for years can't feel that much pity. Professors outside of the hard sciences have done this to each other and to their students for decades. Now that they've eliminated everyone else they are at risk. That whole 'and when they came for me there was no body else left.' quote is quite relevant. The only solution I see is to let the universities fall apart under their own weight and begin anew elsewhere.

I've suggested that this professor write an op-ed with a few other professors, perhaps for The New York Times...

The NYT is Witch Hunt Central. Exhibit A is their conduct during the Duke Lacrosse episode, followed by their promotion of the revisionist book "The Price of Silence".

What I just wrote to my prof friend:

I would love to know the parameters for profs to be able to dispute/debate things, and this seems to be a need for profs -- a dire one.

I think there is safety in numbers, and it would help to have a group of professors go to the university to ask this question.

But if/when you talk to FIRE -- and I hope you will -- let me know what they say. They are wonderful people who have preserved free speech on campus for so many and saved many a butt, pro bono.

I love the fuck out of them and only wish I could do more for them.

Lastango, the NYT is not a monolith. There are different editors there, and one on the op-ed page I've had some dealings with told me that they like to run stuff that's "counterintuitive."

I would think many big paper op-ed editors do.

"I talked to a professor friend last night, who told me about the most unimaginable ways students are going after (or are able to go after) basically much of what any professor says. Innocuous stuff is being turned into speech crimes."

The first targets of the Red Guards were university professors and high school teachers.

Universities? if it were just limited to that. Try searching on these terms:

jail global warming deniers

Google shows just shy of 200K hits. At least McDonell and West at Mother Jones thinks that's not a good idea.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/dont-arrest-climate-deniers

This is the current edition of the French revolution when any accusation would send someone to the guillotine.

Then: J'accuse=off with his head.

Now: I'm offended=he must be guilty.

Any chance the "safe space" concept, used to protect special snowflakes, could also protect normal people from the snowflakes?

That shouldn't be necessary (1st amendment!) but perhaps if the ridiculous SS concept was inverted it would shock the victim class back to normalcy.

Only problem is, would the professor in this scenario stoop to the level of his tormentors?

DaveG has probably stated the "answer".

Use the hell out of the available "tools" - safe space, hostile teaching environment, dehumanizing tactics of _______ group, and so on.

Feel sorry for the married w/children ones. Stuck between a rock and a hard spot.

Try going more than a few minutes among college students without hearing some sort of sexual innuendo, ribald joke, or questionable pun. Add to that the fact that many innocent statements or jokes can be misconstrued by an idiot, and no speech is allowed, period.
There was a law school (can't remember the name) where the students did not want to hear about legal cases concerning things like rape--but how can they prosecute or defend such cases then?
Most literature, classic or not, has some sexual content, since this is a part of life. Good luck to the English teachers.
How can nursing teachers or med school cover STDs, sexual dysfunction, pregnancy, etc? They can't.

The comparison to the French Revolution, or the Red Russians, is apt. In both of those, we saw what we see here, where a "concerned citizen" stands up to denounce someone, and then action is swift. Not until later is it discovered that the "concerned citizen" was planted, either an apparatus insider, or a shill working for some sort of compensation. The plant's job is to stir up emotions, providing the apparatus with the opportunity to do what it was going to do anyway, but gain public support by doing so.

It would do a lot of good if students, starting in, say, junior high, were instructed on the techniques and propaganda methods that tyrannical movements employ, and on the psychology of mobs. I remember, way back when, getting some of that in connection with lessons on the Salem witch trials. Nowdays I don't think school kids are taught about Salem as anything other than a vague sort of fable. I also recall reading some about the tactics employed by Hitler and Stalin. I don't think the former is taught much in school, and the latter not at all.

College & gummint got a long history. I think American businessmen, large and small, worked the levers of power for the first century and half to keep the worst foolishness of the short-pants schoolboys confined to the campus green. In postwar America, gummint and ejucmication grew more intertwined and hand-jobby, causing enormous expansion for each.

I mean, government made modern academe what it is... Government put up the money for this explosive growth. (Well, put up the financing if not actual wealth.)

"Free inquiry" is a fun thing to think about, but I don't think that's what's been happening on college campuses for a very long time... Certainly not in our lifetimes.

It's government that's responsible for so much of what's on campus, things which you won't admire anyway. I suppose it's government's option to ruin that stuff if it chooses. But these forces were set in motion long ago.

At the University I attended in 1980, I asked a black Republican guy how a black person could support Reagan. He called mw a moronic useful idiot for the Democrats. He than schooled me about how the Democrats want to enslave the blacks again by keeping them in a permanent state of underclass/poverty.
Now that exchange could have gotten both of us expelled for creating a hostile environment.

What Ben said - for years, YEARS, the rest of us have been dealing with this. Just what did academics think would happen when they kept promoting it?

While, I'm sorry that it is happening to a friend of yours, Amy, I think that he should not be all that surprised by it.

As others have done already - the Red Guards, The French Revolution, etc. are all quite apt comparisons.

Maybe if the academics had bothered to actually learn history instead of "interpreting" it to suit their ideology they would have been able to stop it.

But, they kept feeding the beast and now it's going to eat them.

FIRE is facing a tough uphill battle - and kudos to them for going at this kind of nonsense. But, I don't have much faith that they, even with their strong desires to do something, can turn back the tide.

P.S. It was kind of schadenfreude when I was in school and watching them go at each other. You know, the "How dare you! I'm offended by that!" nonsense. And, then they would get offended that someone else had the nerve to get offended by their being offended. I had to work hard to suppress my own glee at the idiots eating each other alive.

"worked the levers of power for the first century and half to keep the worst foolishness of the short-pants schoolboys confined to the campus green. In postwar America, gummint and ejucmication grew more intertwined and hand-jobby, causing enormous expansion for each."

Yeah... I think a lot of it originally fell into the good-intentions-gone-bad category. I've often wondered how it was that the '68ers were able to long-march through the academy so swiftly. Here's what I've worked out:

It started with a grateful nation wanting to reward our soldiers (the ones who survived) from WWII. And so there was the GI Bill, which enormously expanded the pool of college applicants. Of course these weren't your typical schoolboys; they had watched their buddies get shot in Europe or escaped from sinking, burning ships in the Pacific. They had learned military discipline, and a lot of them had been taught technical or financial skills that they needed during the war.

So they were a lot more mature and clear-headed (and older) than the typical college freshman. So over time, college administrators reasoned that a lot of the controls that they had exercised over the undergrads in the past were no longer necessary. So over the next decade, those were lifted.

That was a huge open door for the '68ers to walk through. Unlike the GI students, they were immature and knew nothing of the real world, but they knew an opportunity to exploit when they saw one. And did they ever. I think it's hilarious that now that they are administrators and tenured professors, they are getting jobbed by students who practice what the '68ers preached.

As far as the federal government's intertwinement, it all goes back to the person who has the dollars making the rules. The government started funding university research in the 1930s, and then increased that after the war when everyone saw how important technological development had been in winning the war. Once universities started drinking from that spigot, they couldn't stop.

Second was student loans, which were sort of the follow-up to the GI bill when the next generations started saying, "wait, where's ours?" Add in some court precedents that established that the government could control how schools were run once the schools started accepting loan and grant money from students, plus the impossibility of meeting diversity quotas without accepting such students, and here we are. As usual, the road to tyranny really wasn't that long a drive.