Comparison to the mobbing of E. A. Ross Ricardo Duchesne was not the first critic of multiculturalism and advocate of reduced immigration to be run out of a professorship. In 1900, E. A. (Edward Alsworth) Ross, a member of the founding generation of American sociologists and an early president of the American Sociological Association, was forced to resign his position at Stanford University on account of the anti-immgration views he strongly voiced in academic and public media. Ross then joined the faculty of the University of Nebraska, and later the University of Wisconsin, where he remained until retirement with much honour in 1937. A comparison of Duchesne’s mobbing to Ross’s sheds light on how times have changed. So far as I know, Duchesne does not ground his own scholarship in Ross’s, may never even have read his work, but Duchesne's view of the world is uncannily similar to Ross's a century ago. Ross was well-travelled. He went to France and England and studied for a year in Germany before completing his PhD at Johns Hopkins in 1891. But he had a keen sense of national autonomy and was proud of and devoted to his native country, the United States. The standard of living in America by that time was far higher than in southern and eastern European countries, not to mention those in Asia and Africa. Unsurprisingly, thousands of people from poorer countries wanted to immigrate to the United States. Ross was opposed to admitting them. In the preface to his book on immigration, The Old World in the New (1913), Ross said he did not regard America as something to be spent quickly and cheerfully for the benefit of pent-up millions in the backward lands. What if we become crowded without their ceasing to be so? I regard it as a nation whose future may be of unspeakable value to the rest of mankind, provided that the easier conditions of life here be made permanent by high standards of living, institutions and ideals, which finally may be appropriated by all men. We could have helped the Chinese a little by letting their surplus millions swarm in upon us a generation ago; but we have helped them infinitely more by protecting our standards and having something worth their copying when the time came. It was this kind of thinking that got Ross in trouble, but in an altogther different quarter than in Duchesne’s case. The founder had died by the time Ross started teaching at Stanford, but Leland’s wife Jane chaired the trustees and claimed stewardship of the institution they had endowed. Jane found Ross’s opposition to Chinese immigration outrageous. The Stanford family fortune derived in great part from Leland’s Central Pacific Railroad, which had imported thousands of poor Chinese for cheap labour. Jane eventually demanded that the university president fire Ross. The president resisted, putting his own job at risk. He counted Ross a personal friend, and believed he should be free to teach what he believed to be true. Foreseeing no end of trouble if he tried to stay, Ross (like Duchesne 119 years later) resigned. Ross’s ouster was thus a case of administrative mobbing. The eliminative campaign originated in the university’s governing board and came down through the hierarchy of authority to the president. The Ross case reflected the political landscape in America throughout the twentieth century, where the capitalist class was generally more in favour of immigration, seeing it as a way to keep wages low, than the working class (and Progressive intellectuals like Ross who identified with ordinary Americans), which generally saw immigration as a threat to workers’ bargaining power vis-a-vis employers. So widespread among American professors was anger over what happened to Ross at Stanford that that university’s reputation remained poor for many years, and no small number of prominent scholars refused appointments to its faculty. The Ross case is cited to this day as the main inspiration for the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915, which continues even now as a major guarantor of academic freedom for professors in the United States. Duchesne’s case, in striking contrast, was one of lateral or collegial mobbing. Had it been up to the board of governors and senior administration at UNB, Duchesne might well have kept his job. The hostility toward him arose from his peers, his colleagues especially in sociology and history but also in other fields. This, too, reflects the larger political landscape, markedly different now than in Ross’s time. Over the past 30 years, in both Canada and the United States, policies welcoming immigrants have become key objectives of the postmodern left, who are commonly now called progressive. So far as I am aware, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), this country’s counterpart to the AAUP, did not lift a finger to defend Duchesne’s academic freedom.