Zion Williamson isn’t the only star leaving Duke University after this academic year. But at least the basketball phenom is allowed to leave voluntarily to pursue an NBA career. A popular professor is being driven off campus for reasons that are not entirely clear.

After teaching for nearly two decades at Duke, Evan Charney was told last year by the university’s Sanford School of Public Policy that his contract would not be renewed after this academic year. He reports that he had not been warned about any problems with his teaching and was not told why he was being dismissed.

This week, as he prepares to depart, he describes what happened after he filed a complaint with Duke’s Faculty Hearing Committee. Unlike his Sanford colleagues, this outfit at least gave him some vague sense of why he was getting sacked:

Professor Charney’s tendency to provoke negative reactions, and perhaps harm, among some students in the classroom due to his confrontational teaching style—a style that had a tendency to be polarizing among students, particularly in a required Sanford course in which not all students could choose to have Professor Charney as an instructor.

Not that the Faculty Hearing Committee agreed with the decision to let him go, adding:

The members of the panel were disappointed with Sanford’s handling of Professor Charney’s reappointment. Professor Charney was, for many years at Duke, a highly-rated, University-decorated, and—for many, many students—beloved and formative professor. He was an asset to Duke.

But perhaps the committee was not disappointed enough to save his job. The committee either could not or would not overturn the decision of Duke’s Sanford school. Mr. Charney adds another curious detail: