SAMUEL ABRAMS appears to be exactly the kind of conservative professor left-leaning colleges would want. He has degrees from Stanford and Harvard and is a moderate Republican who opposes Donald Trump—not a populist with a penchant for bomb-throwing. Yet he has found himself at the centre of a controversy at Sarah Lawrence College, a selective liberal-arts university near New York City, where a group of students has called for his tenure to be reviewed because they disagree with an opinion piece he wrote for the New York Times.

This is the latest scuffle in a seemingly endless war over free speech on elite college campuses. But what makes the Abrams row notable is the response of the university faculty and administration to a straightforward assault on academic freedom.

Mr Abrams’s troubles began on October 16th 2018, when the Times published his op-ed, entitled “Think professors are liberal? Try school administrators.” It begins by expressing unease over college administrators at Sarah Lawrence sponsoring “overtly progressive events” without offering a “meaningful ideological alternative”. It then describes the results of a representative survey Mr Abrams made of college administrators nationwide. The survey suggests that liberal staffers outnumber conservatives by a ratio of 12 to 1, which is much more ideologically lopsided than the professoriate or the student body. “This warped ideological distribution,” Mr Abrams concludes, “threatens the free and open exchange of ideas, which is precisely what we need to protect in higher education in these politically polarised times.” That is it. There is no dismissal of trigger-warnings, no descriptions of activist students as coddled or snowflakes or social-justice warriors. Mr Abrams’s article could be reasonably described as anodyne.

Yet what a fracas it created. “The day the article came out was a completely monumental day on Sarah Lawrence because everyone on campus was reading it,” says Kate Bakhtiyarova, the editor of the Sarah Lawrence Phoenix, the student newspaper. “People were devoting their entire classes to the article.” Incensed students arrived at Mr Abrams’s office, which was locked, and ripped pictures off the door—of Mr Abrams with former students and of his newborn son sporting a Sarah Lawrence onesie—and replaced them with crude signs. Among them: “Our right to exist is not ‘idealogical’, asshole”, signed by “a transsexual fag”; repeated demands to apologise and to quit; and an injunction to “Go teach somewhere else you racist asshat (maybe Charlottesville?).” Anonymous social-media posters spread unfounded rumours that Mr Abrams had had sexual relations with students. Mr Abrams says he tried to contact the university president, the provost, deans and security, and received no immediate response.

According to Mr Abrams, when he did finally speak to the president, Cristle Collins Judd, a few days later, “the first thing she said was, ‘Don’t you think you should have cleared your piece with me first?’” In Mr Abrams’s recollection, she also said that he had created a “hostile work environment”. Patricia Goldman, a spokesperson for Sarah Lawrence College, said that Ms Judd could not be reached for an interview because she was travelling. Ms Goldman did not respond to subsequent repeated requests for comment. Ms Judd’s public statements have been tepid: after perfunctorily acknowledging that the “professor has every right, and the full support of the college, to pursue and publish this work,” she said, “the opinion piece made claims that many on our campus understandably found not only controversial, but insulting, and even personally intimidating, for which the proper response is vigorous and informed debate and criticism.”

On March 11th, an anonymous group of students at Sarah Lawrence calling themselves the Diaspora Coalition staged a sit-in occupation of the president’s office, and presented a 10-page list of demands. Some of these demands seemed reasonable enough—like calls to address food and housing insecurity for poor students—while others, like the demand that “all campus laundry rooms are to supply laundry detergent and softener” seemed ripe for satirists of leftie campus culture. But the list also included alarming demands concerning Mr Abrams. Because “the article revealed the anti-Blackness, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman bigotry of Abrams” and “threatens the safety and well-being of marginalised people,” the students demanded that his position “be put up to a tenure review to a panel of the Diaspora Coalition and at least three faculty members of colour”.

Remarkably, this position was adopted by many staff at the university. According to the coalition, 40 faculty members signed the declaration—including the paragraph regarding Mr Abrams’s tenure. By contrast, only 27 signed a declaration, drawn up after the fight first broke out, supporting Mr Abrams’s right to academic freedom. "The fact that my colleagues would not support that—the simple idea that I have a right to publish—is horrifying,” says Mr Abrams.

Before the sit-in, the Diaspora Coalition, which was founded five months ago, had 24 members—a tiny fraction of the student body. Since the Abrams affair it has swelled to more than 100. Sharon, a student with the group who did not want to give her full name, says that the row over Mr Abrams has overshadowed the group’s other demands. When asked how such a seemingly innocuous article could stir such a reaction, she said that Mr Abrams had unfairly criticised the university office of diversity without actually attending any of its events.

Mr Abrams says he does not worry that his tenure will be reviewed or revoked. But he is concerned that his ability to teach will be damaged by administrators’ failure to stand up for academic freedom. His troubles reveal the dynamics that many left-leaning college campuses are struggling with as activists, eager to localise national issues of racial and economic justice, find soft targets and dub them pariahs. Left-leaning staff are either sympathetic or wary of getting sucked into the vortex of campus politics. Senior university officials want to appease a vocal minority of student activists while not scaring off future applicants or upsetting boards of trustees. While some universities, such as the University of Chicago and the University of California, have created policies that affirm the right to free speech and academic freedom, there has been little such progress in other institutions, as Mr Abrams’s troubles show.