How To Get Rid of a Tenured Professor
I was a tenured full professor at the University of Colorado Boulder for almost 24 years. At the end of 2024, I left. Officially, it was a voluntary departure. But I sure felt like I’d been pushed out.
My story started in 2015, when Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D–Ariz.) asked the university to investigate me. He alleged that I may have been secretly taking money from Exxon in exchange for the substance of my congressional testimonies, in which I reported on the consensus scientific findings of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—that while heat waves and extreme precipitation had increased, there was vanishingly little evidence to support claims that hurricanes, floods, and drought have become more common or intense.
I was not taking Exxon’s (or anyone’s) money—not in exchange for testimony and not for anything else. What was odd was that after the investigation was announced and conducted, no campus administrator ever spoke to me about it, not even to check in and see how I might be doing. I heard only from university lawyers.
Not long after, I was told that university support for the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research, which I had been recruited to Colorado to found in 2001, could no longer be guaranteed, and that the center might be closed. No one linked this explicitly to the Grijalva-related investigation, but I could not help but think they were related.
Sensing the issue was really me, I chose later in 2015 to leave the science policy center and the university institute it was a part of to go across campus and create a new sports governance center, focused on another of my intellectual passions, far from the reach of the climate police. I hoped that leaving the science policy center would allow it to continue while I continued to do teaching, research, and university service in another area where science meets politics.
Thanks to enthusiastic support from two successive athletic directors, the university allowed me to move into the Athletic Department to develop the new center—making me the only tenured full professor rostered in a Division I athletic program. For four years things went well: I created and taught a popular undergraduate class, developed with colleagues a novel proposal for a new professional master’s degree program, produced collaborative world-leading research, and engaged a great group of university and international collaborators.
Meantime, as I was expanding a new career focus in sport governance, across campus Colorado faculty and administrators began moving the university headlong into climate advocacy.
In 2016, the Boulder Faculty Assembly (the faculty’s primary governing body), led by a professor of environmental studies, adopted a generic and highfalutin statement in support of institutional climate advocacy. Over the next seven years, the assembly issued eight statements and resolutions calling for climate advocacy on campus, including encouraging students to engage in nonviolent “confrontations” and joining with student activists and external nongovernmental organizations to declare a “climate emergency.”
All of this might have been laughed off as a handful of self-important professors role-playing as world leaders. Soon, however, the empty exhortations turned into demands that the entire university morph into a climate advocacy organization.
In 2023, the activist professors produced a new faculty resolution demanding that the university refocus its mission on climate activism, including demands that climate advocacy be taught in “all” departments and units (emphasis in original) and that the university prioritize training all students to be “climate solution leaders.” The entire campus was to engage in advocacy: They called for “policy makers, including the regents, system administrators, and campus leadership, to implement swift and systemic changes in order to avoid the worst impacts of extreme weather events, the devastation of human habitats, the collapse of ecosystems, and the loss of biodiversity.” This reads more like a mission statement for Greenpeace than anything remotely related to the mission of a flagship state university.
A Cold War
Working at the sports governance center, I was generally unaware of these changes. For me, things were going great, or so I thought.
For reasons never made clear to me, the experiment in marrying academics and athletics ended after four years, in 2019. Rather than return me to the campus institute where I had previously been rostered (as was in the terms of the memorandum of understanding that transferred me to Colorado Athletics), administrators instead placed me into the environmental studies department. In the process, the university doubled my teaching load from that in my original contract.
For an office, environmental studies allocated a small, windowless room previously used for storage (and labeled as such on the building plans) deep in the bowels of the soulless building in the office park where the department was located, about a mile east of the main campus. My little office was far removed from other environmental studies faculty and the environmental studies office.
In 2020, the university terminated the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research that I had created and led. A little later, the university also decided to terminate the graduate certificate in science and technology policy that I had established. Then all eight graduate courses that I had developed and taught as part of the graduate certificate program were no longer to be offered. This meant that all of the classes I had been recruited to Colorado to develop and teach were no longer being offered.
I asked the environmental studies chair to let me take complete responsibility for continuing the science policy center (I even found an external partner) and said I would be willing again to oversee the science and technology policy graduate certificate program. He told me no, absolutely not, he would not allow that.
Over the next few years, I was repeatedly told to develop and teach new undergraduate courses, with new requests just about every semester—nine new preps in four years. (And one of those years was a sabbatical.) For example, I taught a popular upper-division energy policy course that received rave reviews from students, tripling the class size in just two years. And then I was removed from teaching it.
I rolled with it. What was the alternative?
In mid-2020, I was told that the university was going to use my little office for storage of a large number of boxes and several file cabinets that were not mine but apparently were connected with the science policy center I had left five years earlier. The storage of these items rendered my little office completely unusable, as you can see in the photo at right. I never touched them out of fear that I’d be accused of something nefarious if I did. (Later we learned that the file cabinets stored in my office were actually empty. Funny!)
A Sham Investigation
As the pandemic unfolded into 2021, it was clear that having a usable office on campus was not actually that big a deal, so I let it ride. But later in 2021, after we returned to campus, I mentioned the unusable office to everyone who would listen—and
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