The stifling intolerance and lack of intellectual diversity are a crushing reality in higher education today. There are few remaining conservatives or libertarians on law school faculties, which have been purged of dissenting voices through a biased hiring and promotion system. Despite years of complaints and declining public trust in higher education, faculty members continue to reinforce bias and orthodoxy in our schools. There is no better example than Fordham University School of Law professor John Pfaff, who recently called for “repercussions” for professors who do not “recant” their view that birthright citizenship is not protected by the 14th Amendment.
In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court held that the 14th Amendment protects birthright citizenship, a view rejected by four justices, including Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who would have struck down the underlying executive order on other grounds.
This has long been a debate that divided legal experts. Given the purging of our law schools of conservative scholars, the rejection of birthright citizenship is not a popular view in higher education. However, some of us stressed when the decision came down that there were good-faith arguments on both sides and defended conservative justices like Justice Amy Coney Barrett for voting with the liberal justices in rejecting the claim.
That tolerance, however, is intolerable for professors like Pfaff. After the decision, Professor Pfaff went on BlueSky to vent against anyone who dared to voice a dissenting view in academia, calling such faculty “parasites” that have to be effectively stomped out of higher education. In his post, Pfaff declared:
“There MUST be repercussions for the lawprofs who advanced such untenable arguments. Their behavior is — and I mean this literally, not dehumanizingly — parasitic.
They exploit norms of collegiality and presumptions of integrity to advance trash. Which undermines the work of ALL of us.”
His rationale for punishing opposing viewpoints is an insight into the arguments used against intellectual diversity and institutional neutrality in higher education.
I recently returned from a debate with the President of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) who opposed institutional neutrality principles. I also previously debated Professor Randall Kennedy at Harvard Law School on the lack of intellectual diversity at Harvard.
I had a dinner with another Harvard Law Professor who expressed disbelief that I expected him to vote for any faculty applicants who held views that he considered wrong. When I noted that I regularly vote for faculty candidates who hold opposing views, he just shrugged and said that, if he rejects their views, he cannot vote for those views to be taught to students.
Many faculty members have rejected free speech and intellectual diversity arguments to restore greater balance in our universities. In my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” I discuss these arguments to justify the current levels of intolerance and orthodoxy in higher education.
We previously discussed how two Arizona State University professors — Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell — wrote that free speech concerns yield too much to the “right wing” and that free speech should not be given the protection currently afforded by universities and colleges. Indeed, they argue that free speech may be harming higher education by fostering “unworthy” ideas.
Amesbury teaches religious studies and O’Donnell teaches history at ASU. They wrote an article titled “Dear Administrators: Enough with the Free Speech Rhetoric! It Concedes Too Much to the Right-Wing Agenda.”
Their view of “unworthy ideas” is used by many to justify the overwhelmingly liberal makeup of our faculties and is reflected in Pfaff’s claim that such opposing views, even from a tiny minority of professors, undermined the work of all professors.
Some sites, such as Above the Law, have supported the exclusion of conservative faculty. Senior Editor Joe Patrice defended “predominantly liberal faculties” by arguing that hiring a conservative law professor is akin to allowing a believer in geocentrism to teach at a university.
Pfaff expressly lashed out at Professor Ilan Wurman (whose scholarship was cited by Justice Thomas in his dissent) as an example of the type of professor who needs to be punished for expressing opposing viewpoints:
“If there are no costs to that — and only the upside to fancy dinners funded by antidemocratic oligarchs and the ‘nonpartisan institutions’ they have endowed — then we can only reward this behavior. Everyone involved in this canard should be frozen out of academic life until they recant.
Academics cannot simultaneously complain about the inability for facts and reality to drive policy while simultaneously refusing to confront the fabulists in our midst. Wurman et al do not just demean originalism or history. They demean ALL of us, by making ALL of us less credible.”
Professor Wurman responded, “Ah yes, time to push for that traditional tool of academic thought and freedom—the recantation!”
Pfaff was responding to an unhinged posting from Georgia State University Professor Anthony Michael Kreis, who has also shown some of the same intolerance for opposing views in academia. (Notably, Kreis was made an Associate Dean for Faculty Research & Development by his school). While not calling for compelled recantation, he also denounced those who disagree with his views. In his BlueSky posting, Kreis wrote:
“I’m mad about today. I’m mad that justices can’t do the bare minimum to uphold the Constitution. I’m mad that the law and our history, which I have dedicated so much of my life to, is an inconvenience than an inheritance to many. I’m mad that the academy, which I love, rewards and enables it.” (emphasis added).
I will remind you that the Court ruled in favor of birthright citizenship, but Kreis appears upset that there are dissenting views on the Court and there are academics who “enable” such dissenting views. Kreis also has denounced Professor Randy Barnett (a leading constitutional scholar who wrote an opinion piece with Wurman) as engaging in shameful “hackery” that is “not scholarly.”
These are the voices of a perpetually angry and intellectually intolerant of academia.
The views and anger of Pfaff and Kries are clearly shared by many in higher education, though I would like to think that most academics still recoil from this type of raw intolerance.
Indeed, after backlash over his comments, Pfaff made a half-hearted effort to address the critics but seemed to make it worse after acknowledging that perhaps he was “too blunt”:
“I stand by the idea, but I should have phrased it better. Academic freedom is the right to say what you want, without INSTITUTIONAL repercussions (generally). But it’s not the right to speak w NO repercussions.”
He then appeared to take an implied swipe again at Wurman for having been cited by the justices:
“Ideally, bad work is self-sanctioning: it gets ignored,” he continued. “That, though, is not what happened here. An idea [with] no prior historical support gained enough traction after an aggressive post-EO campaign to nearly sway a SCOTUS majority. That sets a dangerous precedent.”
So academic freedom is nice, but there still have to be repercussions, and those voicing dissenting views are setting “a dangerous precedent.”
These exchanges give outsiders a chilling insight into the rationalization of many in higher education to maintain orthodoxy. Many others would not voice such views openly, but their hiring records demonstrate a similar intolerance of opposing views.
so why is my TAX MONEY helping Fascist Democrats?
Your tax money is all the dumbocrats think about. It’s the first thing on their mind when they wake up in the morning.
They’re obsessed with YOUR money.
Fascist Democrats don’t believe in Debate…they believe in THREATS and Criminal Actions!
sounds like a TERRORISTIC Threat to me! JAIL HIM!
Free Speech doesn’t including threating people.
end Federal Aid and loan backing to colleges
let Capitalism FIX the Fascist Democrats
I think there should be repercussions for those calling for repercussions.
You know what’s really wrong with this picture? They want to be champions of the joust with nobody on the other side of the list.
I would be nice if we could create a “Bud Lite” situation with academia. If only those dudes had something worth boycotting. Their irrelevancy to the real world is apparent to all but them and their acolytes
Here is a question for society; Do we truly need universities at this point. Think of the origins of such entities, they were places where newly discovered wisdom from a past age was digested, contested, and dispense across Europe. What are they now? They are business, factories if you will, that churn out mis-educated/uneducated tools for promoting an ideology that most of those tools can’t begin to comprehend past the mere rote regurgitation of talking points.
I could easily see technical schools for STEM education and trade schools for essential infrastructure is taught – but do we truly need bloviating opinionators indoctrinating naive young minds about blather that is relevant only to the blatherer?
I say we should shutter universities, send their fanatic crew to the 4 winds and allow our youth to be trained in some field of use to the human species. If you want to diddle around with Marx, you are then free to do it on your own dime and on your own time.
Clearly articulated by someone who never saw the halls of academia, let alone spent a day inside.
WRONG as you usually are. Spent many a year at university, even graduate school – don’t say – but that was more than half a century ago when academia still had the luster of wisdom and logic.
You are just an ugly-tempered, hate-filled contrarian and I venture to say that this is because you are a vapid, indoctrinated soldier in the progressive army – a title that tells the sane world that you are a potential infection of sound minds and hearts.
Whim, what did you think of forced integration on the 60s?
And clearly whimsicalmama is more intelligent than you with your useless one line insult.
One line insults are about all this Anonymous has to say. And he/she says it a lot. Having such fools here will mean the eventual death of the Professor’s blog, and that is precisely what they want.
wiseoldlawyer, a free and open blog will always have its trolls. If they continue to be fed (recognized), the blog won’t die, it will transform. The answer is one we all know to do, but rarely follow through on: ignore, ignore and then ignore. X is just a more sophisticated troll. His AI-generated contrarian comments have just enough bait in them to entice responses. The thing is anyone of us could write his comments for him. The answer is the same, don’t get dragged into his sandbox, just ignore.
Wise/old
You just nailed it.
I view the situation as one similar to what we see nationally. There will always be the haters, but as long as we have enough Wiseoldlawyers we will survive.
“Clearly articulated by someone . . .”
Too bad there isn’t a “little blue pill” to treat your daily outbreaks of intellectual impotence.
whimsicalmama,
As I stated yesterday, we need to let higher education die. By it’s own hand.
We need to create a new system of paid internships with book work or studies directly related to the career field. Get rid of the useless General Education electives and mandatory DEI classes. Streamline the system. Reduce the time and money spent. Produce people who are ready for the workforce and have the skills to do the job.
Your observation of what universities were like is correct. Once upon a time, the lofty goal was to produce a well rounded, educated citizen.
Now, it is a business with indoctrination of a captive audience who has to pay to get indoctrinated for a piece of paper that may or may not be worth anything.
Upstate, from a systems perspective, the current output measure is tied to whatever ideological risk these institutions are willing to take, not to what students actually need. If you remove the underlying federal funding sources from their revenue stream, they would have to revamp the model. They would be forced to compete on value, reduce waste, and align their offerings with the needs of students rather than the preferences of the institution. The downstream impact would reach the K-12 level as well, because colleges, employers, and families would all begin demanding better preparation instead of ideological conditioning.
OR, offer alternatives to the broken model:
Students in Arkansas are outperforming the national average due to the expansion of SCHOOL CHOICE:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/07/students-arkansas-are-now-outperforming-national-average-due/
anna, that is exactly how K-12 will have to adapt. Once families have real choices, students will stop being stuck in the default system and start looking at schools the way they should, by asking what actually works. They will compare results, fit, cost, values, and whether the school is really preparing them for what comes next. That kind of pressure will force schools to get better or lose students. And the removal of federal revenue would speed the whole process up. If schools had to survive on real value instead of guaranteed money, they would be forced to adapt a lot faster. Right now too many institutions can drag their feet because the funding is already there. Take that away, and the market starts telling the truth.
Where I live in Illinois our public schools are funded by our property taxes.
I don’t see that ending.
So school choice is the option.
Maybe not in Communist- dominated Illinois, but families are leaving Illinois in droves as are businesses.
A quiet “partitioning” is taking place.
Anna, that “quiet partitioning” line is real, and it’s not even quiet anymore. Illinois, California, same movie. People aren’t waiting around for reform, they’re voting with moving trucks in plain sight.
School choice makes sense as a pressure release valve. But it’s worth asking what happens after families leave. The ones who go are often the ones with the means and the will to demand something better. What’s left behind loses exactly the people who’d push for accountability. That’s how a place hollows out, not slow and quiet, but right out in the open now, in blue states on both coasts.
Property tax funding was supposed to tie schools to local control. Instead it turned into a captured system nobody can touch. That’s not a school problem. That’s what happens when local self-government gets replaced by a bureaucracy nobody can vote out.
Olly not where I live.
It is most definitely a bureaucracy but that’s what the overwhelming majority of the town voted FOR.
In fact at a recent townhall meeting, townspeople applauded a conservative speaker who announced he was moving out.
This is what the town wants- to intentionally shrink any opposition while expanding their socialist policies.
Residents and businesses are internally driven out while illegal aliens replace us- and they thus consolidate their power.
The town board recently voted amongst themselves to eliminate the existing residential zoning regulations and replace them with new laws that allow section 8 apartment buildings into single family home residential areas.
When someone mentioned maybe this should be put to the town in a referendum vote it was shouted down as racist.
but even if it does make it to a referendum the vast majority will support it.
Anna
Great idea, but it has zero chance in blue states/cities.
The teachers union own them.
which is one of the reasons Illinois (my home) has the 2nd highest population exodus of families and businesses out of this state and TO red states. ( Ca. is first in pop. exodus)
The “soft secession” is very real.
(I predict that after 2028 this secession will become massive)
Upstate
Trade schools,
YES!
Dept of War Announces $10 million skilled trades investment with Mike Rowe to forge the next generation industrial workforce:
https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/4532101/dow-launches-buildfreedomus-announces-10m-skilled-trades-investment-with-mike-r/
also listen to Susan Kokinda at Promethean Action talk about it:
https://youtu.be/S902UncrI-I?si=VjBrJdYELoczjufY
In many ways, like newspapers, they are being replaced. I can learn anything I want on the internet.
They are now just gatekeepers of knowledge, for profit.
They know they are soon obsolete and that’s why they have gone this route as fewer see the need for a corrupted degree that says ‘don’t hire me, I’m trouble’.
It is true that we have access to around 99% of the world’s information. What we do not have are citizens with a strong moral code that would allow them to differentiate between good knowledge and dangerous/false information that is not based on a love of truth, but an agenda. Until we can muster a majority of citizens with the ability to separate the wheat from the chaff I would question the total open net as our educational conduit. What we lack are moral leaders who can manage a culture that is based on sound principles much as our founding fathers required for their constitution to be functional.
“In many ways, like newspapers, they are being replaced. I can learn anything I want on the internet.”
Academia can’t even plead that what you get on the net is not necessarily the truth, since they have become such consistently fact-free liars themselves.
Is it true that Windsor is being changed into an office building?
The article confirms that academia is a self confirming echo chamber. Their thoughts and action about what is education will be fulfilled when it is so high, nobody can reach it.
Not sure why I thought of this short story after reading today’s post. Maybe conservative professors should form a guild named after the Harlequin
https://lecturia.org/en/short-stories/harlan-ellison-repent-harlequin-said-the-ticktockman/8559/
Quote “These are the voices of a perpetually angry and intellectually intellectually … ” stunted … sums up the commenters here.
yes.
I don’t think they have any audience of their own, in their own lives, so they barnacle off Jonathan’s site to get attention.
this speaks of very serious daddy issues.
WOW Anna strikes back. (-:
“Higher Education” has become an oxymoron. It’s neither. It’s a joke, yet incredibly serious. Universities are the factories where millions of young minds are deprogrammed then reprogrammed with some of the most ludicrous, yet dangerous, social ideas. They have been intentionally designed for that purpose. Unfortunately there’s nothing we seem able to do to fix it. When we try we are told “Hands Off” and accused of every horrific motive under the sun. Our frustration has morphed into aggravation. Our aggravation is rapidly escalating to anger. The next step is something that will shake the foundations of our nation. The People will assume their rightful place as the architects of the future. The debate over “Higher Education” will cease to be an academic exercise and will become a decree from the streets. If universities continue down their current path the voice of the street will prevail.
Are you a tenured academic? You read like someone who spends an entire day on the internet and then spews composite opinions.
BTW, what’s your academia level? If any.
Wow! you get mad when faced with reality! You come across as one of those tenured buttheads discussed above.
“You read like someone who spends an entire day on the internet and then spews composite opinions.”
This applies to you as well.
the voice of the citizens are prevailing in Arkansas:
Arkansas students are OUTPERFORMING the National Average due to the expansion of SCHOOL CHOICE:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/07/students-arkansas-are-now-outperforming-national-average-due/
They’ve made their own tests. Those scores cannot be compared with other states? Let’s say, for objectives selected by Arkansas and a baseline score acquired, students show growth?
They are outstripping the national averages in reading and math, the national average being the calculus against which they are compared.
“They exploit norms of collegiality . . .” (Pfaff)
Being “noncollegial” is the activist faculty’s go to smear, a left over from their high school clique days where the bullies declared: “The cool kids won’t like you.”
That credentialed bullying is a well-known corruption with an appropriate name: “Academic mobbing.”
They are academia’s fascists in spirit. And just like their despicable socialist/communist comrades, the mob is their cudgel.
Winston Churchill wrote the book, “The Gathering Storm,” about the approaching threat and storm of war decades ago. Currently, Jonathan Turley writing similarly about the approaching gathering storm of another type of threat, that is, to our most fundamental right of free-speech. It is almost paradoxical many of the pending threats are published on a cite called “BlueSky.com”.
Pfaff wants professors to “recant.” That word’s got history. Last time recant was the demand, it was the Church making Galileo kneel and take back something that was just true, because it embarrassed the people in charge. That’s the club he’s swinging.
And “parasite” isn’t a throwaway insult either. The Soviets used that exact word to justify shipping dissidents off. The Nazis used it to describe people right before they came for them. You don’t reach for that language by accident.
Here’s where it always ends. It never stays pointed at just the one guy everybody already agreed to hate. The list of who’s a “parasite,” who needs to recant, always grows to whoever’s inconvenient next. Build that machine and you’re building it for whoever’s holding it after you’re gone.
Soviets, Nazis, Inquisition etc… Are you writing a novel? Or just spouting nonsense.
For someone who’d never ever worked in academia, your comment reflects that.
“For someone who’d never ever worked in academia . . .”
I have. And if anything, Olly’s comment is *understated*. Those activist, fascist faculty don’t just want the opposition to recent. They don’t want the opposition to exist.
And this is his best line: “Build that machine and you’re building it for whoever’s holding it after you’re gone.”
So do what civilized people do when barbarians are on the horizon: Destroy the machine you built, before the barbarians seize it and use it as a weapon against civilization.
Exactly Sam. Also, as if I need a faculty badge to read a guy calling his colleagues parasites who need to recant and have an opinion about it. That’s not academic theory, that’s plain English, and plain English doesn’t require a PhD to parse.
“academia.”
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Yet OLLY’s comments are without a doubt just as good as any of those in academia if not better.
And as some others have noted, academia has become a joke and a bad one at that. We do not have to make an argument of it. All we have to do is just listen to people like Pfaff and Kreis who prove it.
Being a professor or having a degree no longer has the gravitas it once did. Pfaff and Kreis prove that.
Thank you, Upstate, for the kind comment. I really appreciate it. I should also say that I am not coming at this as an academic or historian. I am using a systems-level view that I have practiced through Deming’s Out of the Crisis and The New Economics. That lens pushes me to look at structures, incentives, and outcomes, because what matters most is not just what sounds right in the moment, but what a system actually produces over time.
Educational institutions are one of the primary formation domains we have for developing citizens with the capacity for self-government. If we fail to concern ourselves with what they are producing as output, we should not be surprised when we keep getting citizens who want a different form of government.
You are completely confusing a heated, rhetorical venting session with a literal state-sponsored purge.
You are acting like Professor John Pfaff is a Cardinal from the Catholic Church holding a branding iron. In academic and political discourse, telling someone they need to “recant” a theory is an aggressive, rhetorical way of saying: “Your research was completely debunked by the Supreme Court, your history was proven wrong, and you need to admit your mistake.”It’s about intellectual accountability, not the rack. When a legal scholar advances a fringe argument to justify an unconstitutional executive order, and that argument gets rejected overwhelmingly by the Supreme Court, their peers have every right to demand they admit their legal theory was a failure.
You are trying to turn a standard, angry internet critique into Nazi Germany. Pfaff explicitly stated in his post—using the actual word literally—that he was talking about how bad scholars exploit academic norms of collegiality to advance low-quality “trash” work. He was describing an academic dynamic, not a biological race. He was pointing out that these echo-chamber think tanks feed off the credibility of the university system without contributing anything of scholarly value.Trying to claim this is the first step to the Gulag because he used a common metaphor for exploitation is just a desperate attempt to avoid talking about how bad the actual legal scholarship was.
You warn about “building a machine” that will eventually be pointed at everyone. What machine? A professor tweeting on a private social media account has zero institutional power. Pfaff cannot fire anyone, he cannot strip tenure, and he cannot lock anyone up. The only “machine” here is the free market of ideas.
If you publish an extreme, legally bankrupt argument that threatens the constitutional rights of millions of people, you are going to get aggressively criticized by your peers. That isn’t an Inquisition—that is just the consequences of putting bad ideas into the world.
Aaaahhh! Academics!
https://notthebee.com/article/chancellor-of-elite-california-medical-school-the-vast-majority-of-pregnancies-are-in-women
Noone
OMG do not go to that college. Men can have babies………………… what a fool.
While I happen to agree with the majority on the 14th amendment, I also have to agree with some of the professors in that it should have been an open and shut case. It says what it says and that’s that. However, some of the same people who believe that also defended Roe which was manufactured out of thin air. They also try to spin the 2nd amendment to their point of view that the citizenry should not have guns. Be consistent everyone. The articles say what they say.
“have been an open and shut case. It says what it says and that’s that…” What about mitigating circumstances? It surely wasn’t intended to allow just anyone get citizenship?
^^^ my point arrived..
(Sorta OT)
The image in JT’s post is titled “Doctor Factobend’s Recantation in the Bird Basket.” As with his other images, this one is perfect — and particularly obscure: a single plate from an early 19th century satirical book.
Any ideas how he comes up with those images?
These “law professors” are retarded. If they are true scholars, why aren’t that actually practicing law instead of teaching it?? Hmmm likely they would get curb stomped in the court room with their ridiculousness even with the bias favoring the left 😂
Yo Anthony!! Easy! Those who can’t….teach.
Can’t? Like you?
Exactly !!!
That is why Turley is a teacher.
He is incapable of actually practicing law, so he simply snipes from the sidelines making absurd and irrational comments here on a daily basis.
He is nothing more than a tool of his MAGA overlords, and is paid to rile up the MAGA mob to distract them from the disaster that is the Trump administration.
but you have narcissistic TDS so who are you to talk? This right here is Trump!’s greatest success!
It’s your TDS that brought you here and your TDS that MADE you say that. Don’t you see how DJT! reveals your true intentions, controls your very motivations.
Of course Trump! will be right THERE, inside you, forever. anytime you hear his name you will be like pavlov’s dogs and start drooling.
God! I love it!! please screech for me! Trump!
Anon: JT does practice law. He has represented many notable clients. Your point is false.
“. . .making absurd and irrational comments here on a daily basis.”
Gee. . .that comment sounds like your posts. 😂
Good post! Reminds of the old adage. . . .”Those who can “do”, and those who can’t “teach”.
‘These are the voices of a perpetually angry and intellectually intolerant of academia.’
That is populated by the equivalent of maladjusted five year-olds and cowards. Stop sending your kids to these schools.
Yes, it makes choices very narrow, but we are at the point where all you are paying for is at best a highly disrupted learning environment that makes learning nigh impossible, at worst, universal indoctrination. Both are by design. Get over the notion that a piece of paper at the end is indicative of anything other than a transaction.
Those of you that still think it isn’t that bad – it is.
Professors John Pfascist and Anthony Michael Third Kreich are a disgrace to teaching, a disgrace to academia, a disgrace to democracy, a disgrace to the ideal of a free exchange of ideas and opinions.
…….::but they have tenure.
Tenure: their shield of ultimate authority over you. “We are the experts!”, they screech.
Watch as Birthright Citizenship is deeply curtailed. Screech louder leftys, you lose.