Adventures of a Quixotic Professor: How One Man's Lifelong Passion for Social Justice Bristles Bureaucracies and Sparks a Landmark Free Speech Ruling

Can One Person with Passion and Principles Make a Difference?When journalism professor David Demers creates a controversial plan to improve the quality of the Edward R. Murrow School at Washington State University, administrators target him for dismissal. This was not the first time his passion for free-speech and civil liberties had steered him into trouble. His newspaper editors killed stories that offended powerful institutions, including Dow Chemical Company. When Minneapolis Police refused to give his journalism students access to citizen complaints, he sued and the records revealed evidence of racism nearly three decades before the death of George Floyd. When the University of Wisconsin-River Falls fired Demers for helping journalism students publish controversial stories, he sued and the university backed down, paying him $64,000. And when Demers filed a free-speech lawsuit against WSU to protect his job, four outside journalism deans and his journalism colleagues refused to publicly condemn the administrators' attempts to squelch faculty speech.If university administrators, journalism faculty and journalists fail to defend our basic freedoms, Demers asks, then how can society expect other organizations and citizens to defend them? Are universities and American institutions abandoning their historical mission of defending and promoting Age of Enlightenment ideals? Or is Demers tilting at windmills?Adventures of a Sociopathic Professor will make you laugh, cry and scream for justice as it chronicles the personal consequences and social and historical conditions of one man's lifelong fight for social justice - culminating in a landmark First Amendment decision that, for the first time in history, extends constitutional protection for professors and K-12 teachers who teach a public institutions.