That’s good news about Prof. Kehowski being reinstated and congratulations to him and to FIRE. But George is right. The whole incident, even though it ended rightly, sends out an ominous message, that a lot of trouble and grief may await those who innocently and well-meaningly wade into the public sphere with ideas that don’t utterly conform to PC. It certainly would not be surprising for many to decide that it is just better not to bother, not to risk being tied up in litigation or other unpleasant battles in order to defend freedom of speech or to hold onto one’s livelihood. This is an example of how one cannot count on the free marketplace of ideas, as posited by John Stuart Mill, to operate in today’s academy. Stanley Rothman mentoned in a recent interview how the well meaning academic liberals of the 50s were willing to hire the 60s radicals because they thought they could handle them, having already put the earlier wave of radicals, the Marxists, in their place. But they didn’t realize that the new radicals had no intention of playing by the established rules of the game. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, liberalism is too weak to hold out against the more aggressive radicalism.