The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported about Louisiana State University’s (LSU) recent firing of associate professor Teresa Buchanan for alleged sexual harassment and creating a “hostile learning environment.” Buchanan said that LSU conducted a “witch hunt” against her.

According to FIRE’s Peter Bonilla:

Among the offenses cited against Buchanan are her occasional use of profanity among her adult students as well as occasional sexual jokes and references. Such interchanges are presumptively protected by a faculty member’s free speech and academic freedom rights and by themselves seem to fall well short of constituting any kind of actionable sexual harassment.

Unfortunately, this fits with FIRE’s recent experiences. FIRE has seen multiple faculty members in recent years investigated, suspended from teaching, removed from campus, and even fired from their positions over similar complaints to those against Buchanan at LSU. Their universities have regularly shown remarkable indifference to their academic freedom rights even when their speech at issue was demonstrably germane to their teaching or were themselves direct applications of the assigned course materials.

LSU defended Buchanan’s termination in a statement sent yesterday to Reason’s Robby Soave. Soave quoted LSU’s statement in full (as LSU requested), but ended his column as follows:

Readers familiar with the the federal government's draconian campus sexual harassment policies won't be surprised that a professor was treated this way. The Education Department's Title IX push is eroding faculty rights in service of greater emotional comfort for students, and little can be done unless someone stands up to [the Office of Civil Rights].