In September 2017, I published a peer-reviewed paper titled “The Case for Colonialism” in Third World Quarterly. Eighteen thousand people signed petitions against the paper, six thousand of them academics. One month later, the paper was withdrawn with my consent, because the editor had been facing death threats.
Of course, I am not unique in having been persecuted for my academic work, nor is the experience of such persecution unique to academic conservatives. Right-wing activists have also been known to launch campaigns against left-wing academics. But there is a crucial difference: The right-wing activists are not part of university faculties or administrations and do not receive a sympathetic hearing within them. The left-wing activists tend to be supported by universities. The two petitions against me were launched by academics, Farhana Sultana of Syracuse University and Jenny Heijun Wills of the University of Winnipeg. When I was invited to Texas Tech to give a talk on the subject of my paper, the university’s president and provost issued a joint statement saying that I should not have been invited because my article had been “discredited,” because my talk was “objectionable and potentially harmful,” and because the president and provost had decided “emphatically” that “there is no case for colonialism.”
