From a reader:

Mr. Goldberg
As a college perfesser myself, your comments about the wimpishness of college authorities rang true. I think of the Dean in ‘Ghostbusters’ who, while throwing Bill Murray out of his lab, accuses him of treating science as a “dodge”. The scene always struck me as wildly unrealistic. Not because academia isn’t full of scamsters; it is! But because no dean these days would have the cojones to accuse one of his faculty of intellectual dishonesty or incompetence. He would have had to wait ’til the scandal stank so high that he had to fire the guy for, say, sexual harassment.
No one here is ever allowed to judge another colleague’s ideas on their merits.