I was a liberal adjunct professor at a large university until 2013, and my liberal students never scared me at all.

I covered sensitive topics in my courses, including rape, capital punishment, female genital mutilation, and disputed accounts of mass atrocities. Our classroom debates were contentious, and forced students to examine their own biases. I kept an "on-call" list that pressured students to participate actively in those discussions. I did not use trigger warnings.

I never had any complaints.

I bring up my own experiences as a reminder that if the plural of anecdote isn't data, the singular of it sure as hell isn't, either. The fact that I enjoyed my time teaching doesn't tell you anything about the state of education in America — and neither does the fact that the pseudonymous author of this Vox article is a liberal professor who is terrified of his liberal students.

And yet the response to his article, which as of this writing has now been shared more than 190,000 times on Facebook, shows it has struck a nerve. This is something people are genuinely concerned about — enough that the thoughts of an unidentified man from the Midwest feel like a revelation, as if some secret truth everyone suspected has finally been exposed.

In other words, it's truthy: it offers a conclusion that feels as if it should be true, even though it isn't accompanied by much in the way of actual evidence. In this case, that truthy conclusion is that the rise of identity politics is doing real harm — that this new kind of discourse, whether you call it "identity politics" or "call-out culture" or "political correctness," is not just annoying or upsetting to the people it targets, but a danger to academic freedom and therefore an actual substantive problem to be addressed.

You're a professor. Why are you scared of students?

In fact, a closer read of the article shows that the actual problem the professor faces isn't the rise of a scary new breed of students. Students, after all, have been complaining about their professors and just about everything else since time immemorial.

Rather, if university faculty are feeling disempowered in their classrooms, that's because they do, in fact, have less power at work: the shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs and the corresponding rise in the numbers of poorly paid adjuncts means many university teachers are in a precarious position right now.

Students have been complaining about their professors since time immemorial

The American Association of University Professors reports that 76 percent of faculty across all US institutions are adjuncts — non-tenured contract positions that universities can terminate or not renew at will. Those uncertain jobs are also poorly paid — a study from the US House of Representatives last year found that a majority of adjuncts live below the poverty line, and that they rarely have access to health, retirement, or other benefits. Tenure-track jobs are comparatively rare, and even tenure itself may be becoming a political target: Wisconsin Governor and GOP presidential hopeful Scott Walker is pushing legislation that would weaken tenure protections for state university professors.

That means that, as Vox's anonymous correspondent wrote in his article, "the academic job market is brutal. Teachers who are not tenured or tenure-track faculty members have no right to due process before being dismissed, and there's a mile-long line of applicants eager to take their place."

In that context, it's hardly surprising that non-tenured university lecturers would take an extremely conservative approach to any perceived threat to their job security. As the "liberal professor" wrote, "In this type of environment, boat-rocking isn't just dangerous, it's suicidal, and so teachers limit their lessons to things they know won't upset anybody."

That is a real issue, with real implications for education, and for academic freedom. But pinning the blame on students' embrace of identity politics is a mistake. If adjuncts and junior faculty members feel insecure enough to censor their teaching or work, then that's a problem in their relationship with their universities, not in their relationships with their students.

Indeed, in that academic environment, it wouldn't matter if liberal identity politics disappeared tomorrow. Some students will always be unhappy about something, and if faculty are this nervous, that will influence their teaching. Indeed, the article notes that the only actual complaint the professor ever received was from a conservative student angry at his "communistical" tendencies because he refused to blame poor black homeowners for the 2008 financial crisis.

The problem isn't the substance of student complaints — the problem is that university lecturers are so terrified of the effect student complaints could have. That's a problem to be solved by universities having faculty members' backs, not by somehow silencing the debate over identity politics.

The search for real harm from the culture wars

Of course, an article about the employment challenges for today's budding academics probably wouldn't have been shared 190,000 times on Facebook. The professor's article didn't inspire columns in the National Review or the Wall Street Journal because their conservative authors are so concerned about the working conditions of adjunct professors.

Rather, the article garnered so much attention because it seems like it's raising new evidence that identity politics is a bad thing — not just a kind of discourse that some people dislike — by identifying real harm. In January, liberal writer Jonathan Chait took a stab at doing something similar in New York Magazine, critiquing political correctness by claiming it was an attempt to "expand freedom for the oppressed by eliminating it for their enemies," and that such efforts were doomed to undermine the freedom they sought to protect. And now the Vox article seems to suggest that the harm is to academic freedom: even the professors are scared! These kids today with their identity politics are threatening the academy!

Without some kind of real harm to point to, critiques of identity politics collapse in on themselves

It's not surprising that people are eager to grasp at such conclusions, because without some kind of real harm to point to, critiques of identity politics collapse in on themselves. As Matt Yglesias wrote in January, the term "identity politics" is generally used to refer to feminist or anti-racist critiques, but that assumes that traditionally marginalized groups are the only people with an "identity."

"The implication of this usage," Yglesias wrote, "is that somehow an identity is something only women or African Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal."

Citing the supposed threat to the academy is another way to claim that arguments against identity politics are rooted in pure reason and are trying to protect universal concerns, rather than silence specific concerns raised by marginalized people that we'd rather not listen to. (After all, if you're going to dismiss campus identity politics as a debate "in which the feelings of individuals are the primary or even exclusive means through which social issues are understood and discussed," as the anonymous professor does, then you need to come up with something beyond your own feelings to explain why that's a problem.)

But "identity politics are bad" is the wrong lesson to take from the experiences of the professor who wrote for Vox. If adjuncts and tenure-track professors are disempowered in relation to their students, the solution isn't to attack students, as the professor did, sneering at undergraduates with too many feelings or an unsuspecting woman who had the misfortune of tweeting about the biases of scientific research and discourse.

Rather, it's to focus on a university system that treats students as customers and faculty as the interchangeable means of production. If you care about academic freedom, care about that.