A professor at California State University Northridge is resigning from his position after he was barraged with harassment and hostility from his colleagues and students for having a conservative worldview.
In a recent article for American Thinker, Professor Robert Lopez of Cal-State Northridge, who is bisexual and Latino, revealed the harassment he endured as a conservative on a campus dominated by progressives. According to his account, someone dug a knife through the door to Lopez’s office to deface his pro-military stickers and to send a message.
Lopez claims that personal information that was stored on his office computer was leaked, that his was American flag torn, and that he received obscene phone calls from individuals who refused to identify themselves.
It had become clear to me that someone had been going through the documents on my computer and hacked into my personal email accounts through the desktop at work. Someone must have physically entered my office, having obtained the key from staff, or gotten into the hard drive through the network cables. For years the coincidences had been too numerous and bizarre. For a while, though, I didn’t have proof.
In dozens of articles I had joked about the tribulations of a conservative professor in left-wing academia, but there was nothing funny about my life anymore. Someone within the university was leaking personal details from my personal email (not the university email) to people off campus. The door to my office still, after six years, bore the deep grooves left when someone dug a sharp blade through the wood to deface my Army stickers. The vandalism had been hidden for a number of years behind posters, but in the time since, some of my posters had been ripped or disfigured as well. People had slipped menacing Bible verses about repenting and preparing for the apocalypse under my door. Then there were the barrages of obscene phone calls, emails calling me “vendido” and asshole, and the vandals who tore my American flag.
Lopez contends that faculty members at the University were often more hostile than his students. In a 2013 piece for American Thinker, he detailed how a colleague compared him to Hitler for announcing his casual support former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin. “I confessed that I admired Palin to a colleague, and he immediately compared me to Hitler.”
On another occasion, Lopez claims that his colleagues accused him of being a CIA operative engaged in “government-backed agitation.”
What am I hoping for, a corroborating witness? My colleagues are just as likely to make up stories about me as my students. In the last two weeks, I obtained proof that other professors (the lefties, of course) were spreading rumors that I was a CIA operative engaged in “government-backed agitation,” I threatened to jump off a tower and kill myself, I stole a computer, and I was “racially profiling” students in the blind-copy section of an email. (How you “racially profile” people in a blind-copy section containing white, black, Asian, and Latino recipients is really a curious mystery. But there you have it.)
By resigning, Lopez is leaving behind a tenured position. Despite the circumstances, Lopez seems to have no regrets about his decision to leave Cal-State Northridge. Although he won’t reveal what his plans for the future are, Lopez is, for now, “living a happily chaste lifestyle as a converted Southern Baptist.”
Tom Ciccotta writes about Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity for Breitbart. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or on Facebook. You can email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com
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