Well worth reading the entire article.

At the University of North Texas, the Mob Comes Calling for a Music Theorist

It is particularly ominous that Jackson’s critique of a fellow scholar falls wholly within the scope of academic freedom that UNT promises to its faculty. Jackson is not a professor going viral after mouthing off on Twitter, although those professors need protection too. He offered a serious critique of that scholar’s work, based on archival research within his highly specialized field, and after lifelong study of Schenker specifically and music theory more generally. He now has a legitimate fear that he may lose his job and be rendered persona non grata at any other institution. Questioning the current campus orthodoxy even in the context of serious academic inquiry is now considered a capital offense by the growing number of people who, as Daniel Schwammenthal put it earlier this week in the Wall Street Journal, “seem to understand George Orwell’s ‘1984’ not as a warning but as a manual.”

It is difficult to overstate what an existential crisis this represents for a free society. I worry that people will be fatigued by yet another cancel-culture story, or that this may appear as simply an internal squabble among scholars in an obscure field. But if we do not stand up to this mob behavior each and every time, it will quickly swamp civil society. Simply put, the behavior of those who want Timothy Jackson’s life ruined over his academic critique of an article applying critical-race theory to music theory is not compatible with freedom. And if we do not see our own freedom as threatened by this situation and the countless others like it, that freedom will perish swiftly and silently.