ALICE DREGER: We are seeing more attacks on academic freedom.

In many cases, charges of allegedly improper ethical behavior made against controversial researchers turn out to hold little water.

I found this out after spending a year of research on each of two major controversies. The first involved a controversy over a book about male-to-female transgenderism by Northwestern psychology researcher J. Michael Bailey. Angry that Bailey suggested their transitions from male to female might be as much about erotic interests as gender identity, a group of supposedly-progressive transgender women accused him of all sorts of serious ethics violations. These included conducting human subjects research without approval from an institutional review board (IRB), practicing psychology without a license, and having sex with a research subject. The second occurred when a group of liberal anthropologists charged two major researchers, Napoleon Chagnon and the late James Neel, with engaging in genocide in South America in the 1960s. The group, part of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), was upset by Chagnon’s sociobiological claims about “human nature.” In both cases, the evidence did not support the charges, but Bailey and Chagnon . . . spent a great deal of resources defending themselves and nearly had their careers permanently ruined.

Dreger does diservice to her case by lumping these examples in with threats to withhold public funding. Scientists and other academics should just stop relying on public funds.