After 15 years of waging a highly successful campaign against progressive fascism in academia, Professor Mike Adams just announced in a piece for Town Hall that he will soon be submitting his official letter of resignation to the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. The announcement not only highlights his free speech victories, but also the defiant spirit that kept him in the fray all those years despite being massively outnumbered in the notoriously anti-conservative academic world.
Here’s how Adams begins the piece (emphasis his):
On August 12, 2017, I will get in my car and make my annual cross-country trip from my summer home in Colorado to my other home in North Carolina. After I arrive in the Tar Heel State and get settled I will sit down at my computer and do something the leftists at my university have been wanting me to do for years: I will pen my letter of resignation to the Board of Trustees at UNC-Wilmington.
Adams explains that he felt it would be helpful to provide to all his supporters some of the reasons he’s decided to call it a day. “In a nutshell, as of last week, I have now accomplished the five main objectives I have set out to accomplish since the administration started to aggressively fight against the free speech and due process rights of professors and students in the UNC system,” he writes. With those five goals completed, it’s time to “start enjoying life instead of fighting against my employers in federal courtrooms and state legislative halls.”
Adams goes on to highlight the key victories in his war with the progressive administration, including being the “lone dissenter and plaintiff” among his peers to push back against the administration’s move to potentially “punish” professors for their viewpoints by stripping First Amendment protections from professors’ columns if they mentioned them in their productivity reports. In 2011, with the help of Alliance Defending Freedom and the American Center for Law and Justice, Adams won in a unanimous ruling by the 4th Circuit in Richmond.
Adams also played a key role in a 2013 state bill that “ended the practice of UNC schools expelling students and student groups in kangaroo court proceedings where they were forced to face university counsel after being denied their own representation.” Adams notes that the bill has major free speech implications, “given that many expulsion hearings involve campus speech code and speech zone violations.”
After yet another free speech victory in March 2014, three months later, Adams celebrated passage of “the best religious liberty statute protecting university student groups in all of America,” a bill originally written by FIRE and which Adams helped promote.
The fifth victory came this month:
August 2017. Finally, as of last week, North Carolina became the first state to pass a model free speech reform bill advanced by the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. In addition to effectively doing away with all campus speech codes and speech zones, it forces universities to educate students about the new pro free speech policies during freshman orientation, which was previously a place where students were introduced to anti-free speech concepts like “micro-aggression.” The best part of the bill is that it cracks down on students who attempt to disrupt the free speech rights of others. For example, the campus lunatics who tried to shut down a pro-life display on my campus by surrounding the pro-lifers with a “human chain” so they could not speak to or share literature with passers by are now much more likely to face expulsion. We had to fight very hard to get this bill passed in light of public resistance by leftist anti-free speech newspapers like The Charlotte Observer – and relentless lobbying by UNC President Margaret Spellings. We will know it was worth the effort once we start to see heads exploding during the first freshman orientation.
Adams closes the article with his trademark defiant humor.
“I’ve been a busy guy with all of this so I am indeed looking forward to slowing down and enjoying my new life,” he writes. “For me, that will be spending the rest of my days ridiculing academic hypocrites.”
Saying he still hasn’t decided exactly when his resignation will take place, he promised it wouldn’t be later than “August 1, 2050.”
“In the meantime leftists, feel free to start another of your annual petitions to fire me,” he concludes. “If you ever do succeed, it will mean more time on my hands to write the things that make you angry and keep sane people entertained.”
