TOTALITARIAN HABITS COME NATURALLY TO HIGHER EDUCATION THESE DAYS: When Your Professor Disappears and No One Will Tell You Why. “Amarasekare, a tenured professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, would no longer be able to advise them, Johnson told the students. It soon became clear that they wouldn’t be able to communicate with her at all, even as they were putting the final touches on conference presentations and working through the kinds of complex mathematical equations and analyses she specialized in. Their adviser was strictly off limits, and no one would tell them why. . . . The next 14 months would become a blur of confusing email exchanges with administrators, copies of which the graduate students shared with The Chronicle, and failed attempts to figure out why Amarasekare had been erased from their academic lives. ‘In her capacity as your research adviser, Priyanga is not able to provide advising,’ Johnson reiterated in August 2022. The frustration, and the questions, escalated to the point over the past few weeks that the three graduate students decided to speak publicly. They’d waited more than a year to resume work with their adviser, but when July 1 came around, their emails to her were still bouncing and she hadn’t returned to campus. . . . The university has forbidden her from discussing the proceedings that led to sanctions against her, and she declined comment for this article.”