In the George Floyd Protest Era, Professors Find Themselves under Attack

There are a number of ways an activist movement can quantify its progress: number of statues toppled, Twitter exposure, law changes, and so on. But real change takes time — who can wait for a legislature to meet, debate a new law, and run it through the deliberative process? The much quicker option to measure influence is to get people fired. Nothing smells more of victory than parading around the cybersphere with the head of an insufficiently woke employee on a pike. Of course, to achieve such a theatric firing, an activist group needs an obeisant boss who is not only ideologically aligned but also horrified at being made to look insensitive.

Enter college campuses.