BY JOHN K. WILSON
On March 16, 2021, Boise State University ordered the suspension of fifty-five classes enrolling more than 1,299 students in its required course, UF 200: Foundations of Ethics & Diversity. The mass suspension lasted for eight days, and it is one of the largest targeted suspensions of a course in the history of US higher education.
And it was all based on a lie told by a state legislator.
On May 19, 2021, a law firm hired by Boise State to investigate the case concluded that it was “unable to substantiate the alleged instance of a student being mistreated.” A year later, the right-wing attacks on diversity and racial justice that prompted the mass suspension at Boise State are growing even louder and more censorious across the country, along with the threat that administrators will engage in preemptive censorship to appease their overlords in the legislature. And Boise State officials are still convinced that this incredible act of repression was both necessary and justified. The state legislator who told the lie still has his identity protected by the Boise State administration, and he has never been named.
The instructor, who has never been publicly identified for fear of being targeted for harassment by the right, told me what happened last year, before either of us knew that her class was actually the source of the rumor: A conservative student in her class misunderstood something that the instructor said about inequality, and told the instructor that her ideas were stupid. Other students in the class jumped on the chat to write “you can’t call the instructor stupid” and “not cool.” The instructor defended the student who had called her ideas stupid, but that student was upset, started crying, and left the class early. The report noted, “Student 1 expressly stated that she did not feel like the instructor was disrespectful to her in any way and that the instructor checked in with Student 1 after class to make sure she was okay.”
This is a case of students responding in a perfectly reasonable and polite way to a conservative student who was abusive toward an instructor. The report concluded that “the instructor responded appropriately to the situation.” Appropriately? How about admirably? It takes incredible character for any teacher to be called “stupid” by a student and then to immediately defend that student and follow up with her, not to demand an apology or lecture her, but to make sure she wasn’t upset.
And what was Boise State’s reward for having thoughtful instructors who bent over backwards to protect abusive conservative students? A right-wing hit job from a state legislator targeting higher education in the state.
Somehow, the rumor mill about this upset conservative student must have reached this state legislator, who immediately went to top Boise State officials to express his outrage. Here’s what the law firm reported that the state legislator told Boise State officials:
He had viewed a video from a friend’s phone in which a Caucasian student was singled out in a class at BSU by an instructor and was mistreated and demeaned.” According to the report, “It was alleged that the student was forced to apologize in front of the class for being ‘white’ or for the student’s ‘white privilege’ and was then subjected to taunts, name-calling, and other verbal attacks from other students. It was alleged that the word ‘stupid’ was used during the incident and that the student left the class in tears.”
This was the only incident that law firm uncovered that used the word “stupid” and involved a student leaving a class in tears, which is why they realized the connection to the hoax.
The Boise hoax helped justify the defunding of higher education in Idaho, impacted the education of over one thousand students, and forced thirty-six instructors to work extra hours to rearrange their suspended classes and pretape their presentations without any student interaction. Courses designed specifically for students to exchange ideas with one another were turned into lecture classes overnight.
I am certain that if a top administrator at Boise State had spread a false story smearing the state legislature, legislators would demand to know who did it. So why should state legislators be immune from scrutiny? State Representative Barbara Ehardt, a Republican who has attacked diversity in education, told me:
I want to know who this legislator is.” She added, “I say heck yes, release the name of the legislator!!! Let’s not play silly games that leaves a cloak of darkness hanging over the head of the legislators. Release the name! Then once we do that, let’s release the entire story because this one just doesn’t make sense.”
The hoax served its purpose: To smear higher education in Idaho and justify right-wing attacks on “social justice.” The day after the classes were suspended, the Idaho State Senate voted to cut $409,000 from BSU’s budget, an estimate of spending on social justice programs, and unconstitutionally banned state colleges from using any appropriations to “support social justice ideology student activities, clubs, events and organizations on campus.”
While the investigation was going on, the Idaho legislature ended up cutting $2.5 million from “social justice” programs at state colleges and passed a law banning colleges from forcing students to agree with certain tenets about race and gender.
Although the Idaho hoaxer deserves condemnation for his part in this fraud, it’s important to note that the responsibility for the worst consequences of this witch hunt falls upon the Boise State administration and President Marlene Tromp. But Tromp didn’t act alone. She consulted with numerous administrators and faculty leaders who supported her actions. Amy Vecchione, who was president of the faculty senate, wrote to me: “We appreciate the efforts by the leadership at Boise State and are very glad that there was an independent investigation. We support decisions made to protect the students and the faculty.”
The law firm’s report concluded, “A university presented with credible allegations of harassment must take efforts to investigate and prevent that abuse—including, if necessary, through the suspension of a course or instructor.” There were no allegations—credible or otherwise—in this case, just some rumors. There was no legally defined harassment alleged, just some rumors of meanness. But even if there had been allegations, and even if they had been of harassment, it would never justify suspending the identified class, and certainly not fifty-four other classes swept up in the hoax.
President Tromp justified the mass suspension with this analogy: “It’s a little bit like being told there’s a gas leak in the building, but you don’t know where it is . . . It always feels dramatic to clear the building to find the gas leak, and that’s what we felt like we were doing.”
No university should ever suspend a course mid-semester. In the most extraordinary circumstances with overwhelming evidence of misconduct, an instructor can be suspended and a substitute assigned. But the allegations have to be more than rumored, more than credible—they have to be proven. The common practice of suspend-while-investigating needs to be stopped. There are all sorts of ways to monitor a class and provide advice to faculty and provide help to students who might feel harassed without the extreme harmful and punishing action of a suspension.
Boise State’s ban on classroom discussions after it lifted the suspension was another clear violation of academic freedom. Faculty must determine how their classes are run and administrators cannot simply order a ban on discussions.
The Boise State case attracted remarkably little attention in the media, and has almost completely disappeared from public view over the past year. While other cases get massive scrutiny in the press and from advocacy groups despite their trivial nature (such as a tenured Princeton professor being criticized on a campus website), one of the worst attacks on academic freedom in recent memory, based on a hoax, is largely ignored.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) was one of the leading voices condemning Boise State’s actions and demanding the truth about what happened, and named Boise State one of the “10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech” because of this case. Yet even FIRE omits the Boise State case from its exhaustive “Scholars Under Fire” database. Likewise, the National Association of Scholars exhaustive “cancel culture” database includes 226 recent cases, but no mention of what happened at Boise State.
The FIRE and NAS databases include a 2021 case at Boise State, when conservative professor Scott Yenor came under attack for his offensive statements. But in that case, Boise State stood strongly in support of academic freedom when the attack came from the left, announcing that “We stand fully in support of academic freedom. Academic freedom is the bedrock of the university and higher education.”
So why would a case where fifty-five classes were actually suspended without any evidence due to political pressure be omitted from these databases? Perhaps it’s because the Boise State case was so massive that fifty-five acts of repression from the right would have reversed the overall ideological threat to higher education. FIRE reported that in 2021, 68 percent of incidents were targeted from the left, and only 30 percent from the right. If the Boise State case had been fully included, a clear majority of the successful attacks in 2021 leading to a punishment would have come from the right.
There have been no consequences for the state legislator who created the hoax at Boise State. Instead, all of the consequences were suffered by innocent victims of this lie: The instructors who were falsely smeared and suspended, the students who had their students interrupted for no reason, and all the faculty and students at Boise State who faced budget cuts and intimidation over a false story.
When a university suspends fifty-five classes because of a hoax, it has a chilling effect across the campus and the state. If so many classes can be suspended based on a fabrication, imagine what might happen to a professor who is targeted with an actual complaint about teaching controversial ideas. If the terrible mistake at Boise State is largely ignored, and not even recognized as a mistake, it is almost certain to be repeated.
Nor did the lie stop the Republican attack on higher education in Idaho. Rep. Ehardt wrote to me,
Legislators have not been the ones violating the rights of our students. Not even close. It’s been the faculty. They are the ones walking a thin line with that which they are teaching / doing and requiring of our kids. It is our students 1st amendment rights for which we are fighting. This is a public institution of higher learning. We serve all of our students and we should serve them ‘equally!’ Faculty do not get to decide the rules. They follow them.”
But at Boise State, it was a legislator’s fraud that violated the right of students to not have their classes arbitrarily suspended (without a refund, no less) and the right of students not to be banned from speaking with other students and faculty in a class.
If one of the largest attacks on academic freedom in recent history, sparked by a right-wing lie, cannot shift the political calculus or cause any second thoughts about the conservative assault on academia, it suggests a gloomy future for higher education in red states. The hoax at Boise State must not be forgotten.
John K. Wilson was a 2019-20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies.
