MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT:

Deming, an associated professor of geology, says his troubles began in March 2000 when he published a letter to the editor criticizing a female colleague’s claim that all gun owners are potential murderers. He wrote that if her assertion is true, then one could argue that her “possession of an unregistered sexual organ made her a potential prostitute.”

The colleague filed sexual harassment charges against him that were eventually dropped.

Since then, he has written letters to local papers that were determined to be showing “contempt and resentment” toward the school. The letters were included in his personnel file in a situation he describes as “analogous to a professor stapling a student’s political letters to his or her examinations.”

More evidence of how bogus sexual harassment claims are used to silence unwelcome opinions — and of how thin the academic commitment to open debate often is, when those unwelcome opinions surface.