Sociology professor Wayne Brekhus is in trouble.

Why? Because Brekhus talked about research and academic practices at his university.

Last week, a video recorded by Accuracy in Media went viral on X. In it, Brekhus said the University of Missouri’s changes to DEI operations were “mostly cosmetic,” and campus members have “found clever ways to continue to have DEI centers but not call them that.” He added that restrictions on DEI activities had been “tough on research,” but had not affected curricula as severely. The video was recorded in January 2026, but only gained public attention when a prominent school-choice activist posted the video on his X account.

Subscribe now

In response to the attention, Mizzou announced an investigation into Brekhus’ conduct and stated that “Mizzou voluntarily eliminated all DEI programs and DEI requirements in the curriculum” and “has complied with all federal directives to end DEI research projects.” The university also posted an apology from Brekhus, in which he said, “I am fully aware that Mizzou no longer has DEI programs and does not conduct DEI research.”

First off, Brekhus should not be punished by Mizzou for his statements in the video. His commentary is protected under the First Amendment, because faculty academic freedom includes speech on matters of scholarship and teaching. Investigating him months later — after the video drew public attention — suggests that Mizzou is reacting to negative public attention.

The second problem is Mizzou’s insistence that it “complied with all federal directives to end DEI research projects.” The Missouri state government did take action to restrict DEI offices in the state, both through an executive order and through appropriations bills (though the governor’s office signaled that its executive order does not apply to state universities). The 2026 appropriations bill prohibits funding for DEI offices or their equivalents, but the best interpretation of the language indicates that the restrictions don’t prohibit classroom discussion or faculty speech related to DEI. FIRE previously wrote about the federal directives concerning DEI programming and how the implementation thereof could implicate speech rights.

However, whether or not Mizzou is complying with federal directives does not have a significant bearing on its treatment of Brekhus, who appears to be under investigation for clearly protected speech.

So, a professor shared his perspective on university matters. Several months later, the university launched an investigation into his conduct because of it. If this newly viral video is the crux of the investigation, Mizzou must end its investigation without disciplining Brekhus.

The investigation into Brekhus is egregious on its own. And FIRE has been on the record raising our concerns about how federal directives can implicate protected speech. We’ve reached out to Mizzou to learn more about the situation.

For 16 months, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley professor Clyde Barrow has been getting paid not to teach. On May 15, 2025, the school told him he was suspended. To this day, he cannot access his campus office, and the university has given him no clear indication of when — or whether — he will return to the classroom.

Subscribe now

Barrow has received little process and few answers about why he remains on leave, outside of an investigatory report issued a year ago. And UTRGV has shown zero interest in resolving Barrow’s situation. The university is apparently satisfied to spend taxpayer money to keep a tenured professor away from his students without making a final decision about what, if anything, he did wrong.

Late last month, an attorney for Barrow, arranged and funded by FIRE’s Faculty Legal Defense Fund, sent a letter to the school’s chancellor, John Zerwas, asking the UT System to intervene and help bring Barrow’s suspension to some sort of resolution.

The result? More crickets. No response, as before. Barrow remains suspended without a clear path forward.

When he initially received notice of his suspension, Barrow asked the university multiple times what he was accused of doing, what policies he allegedly violated, and how long its investigation would take. But every administrator he contacted was evasive and he got no concrete answers for months.

Barrow suspected that the suspension arose from his strong criticisms of UTRGV’s leadership. He had complained that an interim chair, Donkyu Kim, allowed faculty meetings to become disorderly and unprofessional. He accused Kim of showing “poor quality of leadership and meeting management.” He described a proposed change to faculty workload as “idiocracy.” And he repeatedly criticized proposed changes to university policies.

Those comments may have been abrasive. But at a public university, there is no exception to the First Amendment for abrasiveness, incivility, or disrespect. FIRE initially wrote UTRGV on July 11, 2025, raising concerns about both Barrow’s speech rights and the university’s handling of his suspension. At the very least, we said, the university needed to tell Barrow what accusations he faced and explain the process it would use to decide them.

We also explained that the First Amendment protects faculty members’ right to criticize the operations of a public university. Professors do not surrender their right to speak about university governance simply because their criticism irritates administrators or colleagues. And faculty members are often among the people best positioned to debate issues such as curriculum, workload, leadership, or institutional policy.

FIRE urged the university to give Barrow the due process necessary to adjudicate any legitimate allegations against him and, to the extent the university was targeting constitutionally protected expression, to end that punishment.

The university responded a couple of weeks later. But rather than address our concerns, the school simply said it was following its internal processes.

Barrow attended a couple of interviews throughout that summer. Then, in September 2025 — four months after his suspension — he finally received an investigative report laying out the allegations against him. The report chronicled years of Barrow’s harsh criticism of department leadership, including repeated criticism of Kim. Most strikingly, the report recommended disciplinary action “up to and including termination of tenure and employment.”

Yet a year later, Barrow still has not received a final resolution, and has heard nothing about his status, despite attempts by his FLDF attorney to engage university decision-makers, and FIRE sending another letter in April 2026. Two semesters have now passed since the report, and there’s no indication of whether he will ever be able to return to teaching. If his tenure is going to be revoked, a drastic action that should be reserved for the most severe misconduct, he has not received any substantive opportunity to defend himself.

That’s why FIRE is now publicizing Barrow’s case. The problem is not only that a tenured professor is facing potential termination for his speech. It is that he has had to wait for more than a year without a meaningful path to a final decision.

Paid leave may sound benign, but not when the government uses it to remove a professor from his job indefinitely. Barrow has lost his classroom, his office, and his ability to perform the central duties of his profession. He’s also lost the opportunity to advance his career, and the extended paid leave will reflect poorly on his work at the university. And because this is a public university, taxpayers are footing the bill while these school administrators play games.

FIRE has consistently argued that a faculty member criticizing the operations of their university on a matter of public concern is protected speech. That principle doesn’t depend on whether the criticism is polite, diplomatic, or welcomed by administrators. We have defended faculty expression ranging from parodic land acknowledgments to flyers criticizing colleagues.

UTRGV should give Barrow a genuine opportunity to defend himself and bring this investigation to an end. If a public university can leave a tenured professor in administrative purgatory for criticizing his bosses, then every professor watching is going to learn the same lesson. You may have the right to speak, but exercising it at UTRGV could leave your career frozen indefinitely.

This essay was originally published by Reason on Sept. 10, 2026.

On this day last year, just before 12:30 p.m. local time, a single shot rang out across the campus of Utah Valley University (UVU). That single bullet, which ended the life of political activist Charlie Kirk, has reverberated through American culture and politics ever since. While most of us were watching the atrocity and its aftermath on our screens, the students, faculty, and administrators at UVU were seeing, hearing, and living it on the ground.

Subscribe now

After Kirk’s murder faded from the news cycle, the university community continued to process the trauma, anger, and grief of that day. One year later, we now know the impact it has had on the campus’s free speech climate.

Yesterday, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), my employer, released its annual College Free Speech Rankings. Our rankings use a mixture of student survey responses, college policies, and campus speech controversies to assess the free speech climates at America’s top colleges. UVU’s ranking fell from 71 out of 257 schools last year to 210 out of 261 schools this year.

The deterioration of UVU’s speech climate demonstrates something clear: Political violence corrodes a culture of free speech, regardless of someone’s politics or administrators’ responses. We know this because UVU students told us so.

The chilling effect was immediate. A few weeks after Kirk’s murder, FIRE surveyed over 2,000 college students nationwide to assess how the assassination had affected campus life. The survey oversampled UVU students.

Students at UVU reported being less comfortable expressing their opinions on a controversial political topic in class, in a common space, or on social media compared to students at other colleges. They were also less comfortable attending public events, and they reported self-censoring more often than before the murder. Encouragingly, the students’ tolerance for using violence or other illiberal tactics to disrupt a speaker declined.

None of this should be surprising in the immediate aftermath of a violent tragedy. But the chill continued.

When we surveyed UVU students again during the first half of 2026, the free speech climate on campus hadn’t recovered. Over 50 percent of UVU students said that they had self-censored on campus at least once or twice a month. Before the assassination, it was 38 percent. Approximately 50 percent of students said they were uncomfortable expressing their views on controversial topics both in class and in common campus spaces, up from 40 percent before the assassination.

These student responses seriously impacted UVU’s place in this year’s rankings. Compared to last year, the school fell from 96th to 230th on self-censorship, 183rd to 251st on students’ ability to have open and honest conversations, and 23rd to 153rd on students’ comfort expressing controversial views.

Kirk became the most difficult topic to discuss openly and honestly on campus. Nearly two out of three UVU students said so—the highest percentage of the 261 schools we ranked this year. When we asked about a time they self-censored, many students simply replied, “Charlie Kirk.” Others gave lengthier answers.

The reluctance to speak, however, crossed ideological lines, exposing something not immediately apparent: Political violence doesn’t just silence people who share the victim’s beliefs. It disfigures political disagreement—and the stakes—for everyone.

One somewhat liberal student said: “After Charlie Kirk’s death, I felt concerned and frightened about expressing views that were regarded as more ‘liberal’ due to a concern that people would try to blame me (or my ‘like’).”

The most concerning response came from a very conservative student: “I have personally heard threats on campus of violence towards those who share opinions with right-wing figures like Charlie Kirk.”

What makes these results particularly striking is that UVU administrators responded thoughtfully and compassionately to the tragedy, and students gave credit where credit was due. After expressing shock at the shooting and condolences to the Kirk family in a public statement, UVU’s president doubled down on the institution’s commitment to free expression. “We firmly believe UVU is a place to share ideas and to debate openly and respectfully,” wrote Astrid S. Tuminez. “Any attempt to infringe on those rights has no place here.”

Many students believed her and other administrators. Forty-eight percent said it was “very” or “extremely” clear that UVU administrators protect free speech on their campus, up from 42 percent before the assassination. More impressively, 42 percent of students said administrators were very or extremely likely to protect speech during a controversy. Before the assassination, it was 29 percent.

UVU’s speech climate darkened despite the best efforts of administrators to defend free expression. And their record wasn’t spotless: This spring, administrators rescinded commencement speaker Sharon McMahon‘s invitation after conservatives protested her criticism of Kirk’s rhetoric.

On the anniversary of Kirk’s murder, UVU offers a grim case study in how political violence poisons free expression. Students there became less tolerant of violence and disruption. They grew more confident that administrators would defend their rights. Yet they still became more reluctant to speak.

That is the lasting damage of political violence. It does not have to persuade people to abandon free speech as a principle. It merely has to make speaking out feel dangerous.

The students at UVU experienced political violence up close. A year later, their campus is quieter.

Right in its student handbook, Whitman College specifically promises every student freedom of expression and association. So, when members of the Whitman Republican Club sought recognition to become a college-affiliated student organization, they had every reason to expect approval through the same review process as any other group.

Subscribe now

Instead, the student senate unanimously rejected their application. 25-0.

Was it something they had done? Was it something they forgot? No, the record points somewhere else: It was what they believed.

Immediately before the vote, members of the Associated Students of Whitman College’s Senate grilled the club’s representatives about their political views rather than limiting their questions to the club’s organization, constitution, or eligibility. Instead of using viewpoint-neutral criteria, senators asked probing, ideological questions like, “On the 2024 republican party platform subsection 18, what is your club’s take? Will you call the republican party out for things like this?” and “President Trump has made life hard for all international students. When you don’t get affiliated, what is your plan?”

At the end of the discussion, one senator made their objection remarkably explicit: “You can name yourselves whatever you want, but the language of your constitution is in direct contrast to our own constitution. I would suggest that you scrub the title and make a debate club.”

The senators didn’t identify any problem with the group’s application or reason it would not be eligible for recognition. Despite “creating equal and inclusive opportunities” in the ASWC’s own mission, they told the students to scrap their plans, scrub their name, and make their mission more palatable to the senators reviewing it.

This is blatant viewpoint discrimination.

For student organizations, college affiliation is the gateway to requesting funding, hosting events, and legitimacy. Other ideological groups such as Climate Justice Coalition and Planned Parenthood Generation Action enjoy the benefits of affiliation. Instead of giving the WRC its fair shot at gaining college recognition, ASWC senators cornered and prodded the students to justify or criticize specific platforms of a national political party, then denied their recognition for having the “wrong” political views.

It’s not surprising that some or all of the senators found the club’s Republican views offensive. Virtually every viewpoint is offensive to someone. Whitman recognizes dozens of diverse groups on campus, many with missions or purposes that likely conflict with each other or the ASWC: Like Whitman’s affiliated Don’t Eat The Wheat group, who may have some conflicting values with the also-affiliated Cooking and Baking Club. But to deny one club based on its view threatens the same rights of all groups. If dissent leads to exclusion, what happens to any viewpoint that disagrees with the majority?

In the past, prohibitions on viewpoint discrimination have protected groups whose views were not popular when they sought to form campus organizations. For example, the principle of viewpoint neutrality protected chapters of LGBT organizations in Arkansas and New Hampshire in the 1970s and ’80s when student senates and university trustees refused to “support a homosexual group” or their expression, which was considered “shocking and offensive” at the time. Using only viewpoint-neutral criteria means that voices that may not be popular can still be heard.

No one expects the ASWC — or anyone, for that matter — to wholeheartedly agree with every ideological group on campus. But everyone should expect that it will not deny an ideological group because its views are unpopular or offensive. Without viewpoint neutrality, the benefits of college affiliation are withheld from some groups, purely based on their beliefs.

Though Whitman is a private school, and so not directly governed by the First Amendment, it voluntarily promises students freedom of speech, expression, and association. And the ASWC, as an elected student body, is also obligated to uphold those promises.

The ASWC proved that their “discretion” is more of a popularity contest with senators’ own ideological preferences. When the WRC applies for recognition again, Whitman College must ensure that club recognition is instead a fair and viewpoint-neutral process. And if the ASWC again fails to use neutral criteria, Whitman must intervene and grant WRC’s affiliation. Anything less is an egregious violation of the very free speech principles that Whitman prides itself on touting.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to include information provided by Mount Tamalpais College about prison regulations and CDCR’s role in revoking Smoot’s access.

In order to teach, Bill Smoot had to leave everything behind. His wallet, cash, credit cards, and chewing gum — everything but his car keys, ID, and course materials.

Subscribe now

From Berkeley, Smoot drove 25 minutes over the bridge to the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, where he waited by the outer gate with a small group of professors. Then their little procession began, past the first guard, into the main gate, through the sally port with its steel bars and bulletproof Plexiglass, and into the heart of California’s most infamous prison.

Strangely, though, it was, in parts, quite beautiful. Green lawns. A small garden. A chapel. Men tending to rosebushes. It looked less like a state prison than the cloisters of a monastery hidden behind medieval fortifications. But going a bit further on, there emerged the familiar landscape of 20-foot walls, guard towers, rifles, razor wire, and men in blue pacing the yard. Sometimes, though, a friendly voice would break the heavy air, “Hey, Smoot!”

By all accounts, the convicts of San Quentin who became Smoot’s students adored him. The feeling was mutual. For 14 years, Smoot kept making the trip back, over the bridge and through the prison’s tediously layered security to return to his students. But these days, he no longer makes the trip. Earlier this year, San Quentin revoked his access, costing him his teaching job at Mount Tamalpais College, after he published a fictional novel about a teacher at San Quentin and a prisoner who finds hope in the classroom before escaping — with the teacher’s help.

Most of the teachers at Mount Tamalpais College, the accredited liberal arts college inside San Quentin, are, like Smoot, volunteers. But even though he wasn’t compensated, Smoot treated the job as if it paid six figures, exploring ideas in literature and philosophy no differently than he had anywhere else over his 50-year career, which spanned from UC Berkeley to the Castilleja School. “One of the keys to teaching effectively in prison,” he says, “is to recognize that it’s not that different.”

This may be the most radical thing Smoot believes about prison education — that it should be like education anywhere else. “They deserve a real college,” he says, adding, “There are already statistics about the recidivism rate of people who take college courses in prison versus those who don’t.” Indeed, multiple studies have found that prison education significantly lowers recidivism.

But for Smoot, education is not valuable only because it produces better outcomes. It also demands intellectual seriousness. A real college must expose students to difficult ideas and honest inquiry, challenging them to grow and be better, even if those ideas may make institutions uncomfortable. What else does academic freedom mean?

Smoot’s belief in free expression was forged long before he began teaching at San Quentin. In 1968, he was editor-in-chief of Purdue University’s The Purdue Exponent, and under his leadership, the paper became involved in reporting on and advocating for the issues of the day, from Vietnam and the civil rights movement to campus protests. But Purdue was a conservative campus. In fact, the entire state of Indiana was conservative. The school administration wanted something closer to a campus showcase: a public relations organ with pinnings, glee clubs, and no front-page evidence that the 1960s had reached the city of West Lafayette.

When Purdue’s president unilaterally removed Smoot as editor, the student staff revolted, and by the following Monday, Smoot announced in what he would call his “Tennis Court Oath edition” that he would continue in the role. Students, faculty, national organizations, and the press rallied. The administration could either send police to seize the newspaper office or back down. It chose the latter. Smoot was victorious. But more than half a century later, he would find himself defending free expression once more in a remarkably similar fight.

The escape plot

The compromise that ultimately cost Smoot his classroom had nothing to do with his teaching. It had to do with his book San Quentin Exodus, published in June, about a fictional white suburban prison tutor with a Nancy Drew obsession and a black inmate whose life has gone terribly wrong. The book includes an escape plot, as well as descriptions of the many decent-hearted men Smoot came to know in Mount Tamalpais classrooms during his time there.

“I see men who have done very bad things years ago,” he once wrote, “now trying to make themselves better. Convicted felons take classes, commit themselves to self-help groups, organize peace days on the yard, and walk to raise money for breast cancer care. Those with the necessary clearance fight wildfires.”

Smoot thought prison higher-ups might like the book. After all, it doesn’t trash San Quentin or prisons in general. It doesn’t depict guards as monsters or prison administrators as sadists. Indeed, according to Smoot, the book shows the very thing California officials say they want the newly renamed San Quentin Rehabilitation Center to represent: rehabilitation. Specifically, “the California model” with its drama workshops, peer mentorship, and life-changing classrooms.

But Mount Tamalpais College President Jody Lewen tells FIRE that Smoot knew there was a risk well before publication. In March 2025, she says, after he told her about the planned novel, she warned him that using San Quentin in the title could provoke blowback and that prison officials might view the book as glorifying or facilitating escape, potentially jeopardizing his access. Smoot nevertheless chose to proceed.

Smoot says the escape plot “freaked out” Lewen. He had given her an advance copy, and he says she worried that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation might react badly. However, Smoot says he later learned that no one at CDCR had actually read his novel in full. When he spoke to the warden, Chance Andes, Smoot says he noted that Smoot hadn’t gotten permission to use “San Quentin” in the title of the book, despite the fact that the prison is a household name and regularly appears throughout popular culture.

Nor is the book a manual for escaping prison. The fictional scenario he describes in his book depends on a highly specific combination of factors that are unlikely to ever align for success: an accomplice obtaining the right UV stamp from a party store, widespread COVID masking that makes identities easier to obscure, and prison staff failing to closely verify the identities of people leaving the facility.

But in Lewen’s email to Smoot announcing the decision to not renew his contract once his prison access was revoked, a different concern becomes clear. “When you first started as a volunteer,” she wrote, “you received that list of institutional rules, as part of a very in-depth, hours-long presentation by me on institutional rules, regulations, and culture.”

Lewen then explained that she has spent the last 25 years trying to convince San Quentin officials, as well as correctional administrators nationwide, that their concerns about such college programs are unwarranted and that, “as college instructors are sufficiently vetted, trained, and supervised, they will not disregard the rules of the institution and undermine anyone’s safety.” But, she told Smoot, his book does exactly that because it used “San Quentin” in the title, “created an actual threat to safety and security,” and “fulfilled the most negative stereotypes of volunteers: not just that they do not understand the rules and regulations of the institution; but that they do not care about them and will flout them at will.”

As a result, she said, while expressing regret at the loss of a beloved teacher, Smoot could not be allowed to continue working at the school. Once prison officials had revoked his access for violating institutional policy, the college’s hands were tied. Lewen stresses that once the prison barred Smoot, MTC could not simply bring him onto campus. And just like that, San Quentin’s gates closed on one of its best professors. But it would be easy, and wrong, to tell this as the story of a censorious bureaucrat silencing a brave teacher.

Lewen is not the villain one might imagine. Heterodox Academy profiled her as a member of the group who wants to bring heterodox speakers inside so her students can engage with broader societal issues and conversations. She became involved with the school after attending a conference on psychoanalysis, where she ended up sitting next to one of the people who helped found San Quentin’s college program. Soon, Lewen began co-teaching a communications course at the school. “I fell totally in love with it,” she told Heterodox Academy. “These were adults who really wanted to be in college — incredibly diverse intellectually, politically, demographically. Intellectually, it was so stimulating.”

Mount Tamalpais College’s stated commitments to academic freedom track with a priority to provide expressive rights to its faculty and students by offering the same rights that most other colleges do. Its General Catalog promises to protect “the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” Mount Tamalpais proclaims “debate or deliberation may not be suppressed just because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the college community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”

These are noble promises. But if Mount Tamalpais wants to be seen as providing a credible college education to the inmates of San Quentin, it must normalize enforcing the principles of academic freedom that undergird that credibility. College professors, after all, are prone to writing books. Sometimes those books are controversial. They might name real places, and they might make administrators sweat. They might write novels with characters who do alarming, illegal, morally complicated things. Faculty’s freedom to do this is part of the fabric of the higher education experience at just about every college in America. If San Quentin wishes to deliver a comparable education within its walls, how can it treat Smoot’s book any differently?

FIRE wrote to Lewen on July 9, explaining the importance of Smoot’s case for principles of academic freedom at the institution, and asking for clarification on the rules he may have broken. If there’s one thing a prison can be counted on to have, it’s a rulebook.

The college replied to us on Aug. 2, articulating its position regarding the revocation of Smoot’s security clearance and his violation of prison regulations. That letter cited several regulations, including California Penal Code, § 5058, which authorizes the corrections director to make prison rules, Article 13 of CDCR’s Operations Manual, which says the department should balance public transparency against institutional interests, and CDCR media policy and procedures that favor public and press access — so long as that access doesn’t threaten institutional rules concerning security, privacy, and consent.

Prison dreams

During the pandemic, San Quentin shut down educational programming, with no online classes. Smoot missed teaching there so much he began dreaming about it. He pined for his classroom at San Quentin, and in his longing to be back in, he began to build the idea of a tutor who wondered about getting out. The prisoner character emerged from his mind fully formed from years of experience with countless men who fit the description. It came easy. He wrote the first draft in six months.

But the deeper engine for the book was not the mechanics of escape. It was the society of men he discovered in the classroom. In a 2013 essay for Salon, Smoot described assigning Homer to men he feared might dismiss an ancient Greek king as irrelevant to their lives. Instead, he wrote, Odysseus, the man “much turned” and “much turning,” made immediate sense to men whose lives had turned, and been turned, again and again. When Odysseus gazed across the sea and wept for home, the classroom fell silent. From San Quentin, incarcerated men can see San Francisco Bay.

When the class moved from The Odyssey to The Catcher in the Rye, some students initially dismissed Holden Caulfield as a rich kid wasting opportunities they never had. But the book, with its universal concerns about authenticity and self-actualization, eventually got under their skin. Smoot remembers one middle-aged black man serving time for murder quietly realizing out loud, “I’m like this dude.”

A few weeks later, one student returned from a medical appointment, absolutely glowing. He had talked with a nurse about Holden’s obsession with the ducks in Central Park. “She remembered the part about the ducks on the pond,” Smoot recalled him saying. “We talked about that.” This man had stumbled upon one of the greatest gifts of literature — human connection — and Smoot had helped give him that. More than this, Smoot had given the man “a seat at the cultural table.”

But of all his memories there, one of Smoot’s favorites is of an older student from the Mississippi Delta who had never gone to school. For much of his life, the old man had been illiterate. In prison, the chaplain taught him to read, but he never made much use of it. Then he landed in Smoot’s class, where characters in books were discussed and debated the way men in the yard talked about women or sports. Years later, the old man found Smoot crossing the yard one day and his face lit up with pride. He had spoken to his daughter on the phone the night before. He had told her he was reading Shakespeare now.

To understand what San Quentin and Mount Tamalpais lost in not keeping Smoot, start there. Start with a man who could once barely write his own name, now sharing with his daughter whatever wisdom he learned from the greatest playwright in history. Or think of the student who could talk to a nurse about Holden’s ducks. Or the student who wrote, after taking Smoot’s class, “I had a hunch there was more to my story. Now I know I was right.”

Second acts

To be clear, Smoot has no grudge against Mount Tamalpais College or its leadership. Quite the opposite. He speaks of Lewen’s role in building out the college program and saving it from budget shortfalls with real admiration. He describes with respect how Warden Andes is a hard worker who rose through the ranks from an entry-level correctional officer job. Smoot knows the college’s work matters, and he believes that it is run by people doing their best within a complex system. He knows San Quentin is politically complicated, and that there are people inside and outside the prison who think free college for incarcerated people is outrageous.

But to him, that’s exactly why principle matters, and he hopes the school will reconsider, for the sake of the one thing it exists to serve: its student body. In her email to Smoot, Lewen herself described the decision to not to renew his contract as “a huge loss to us and above all to our students, given your tremendous contributions as a teacher and beloved colleague for so many years.”

Gifted and passionate teachers are incredibly hard to find. Even more so those who will devote themselves to prisoners — and for free.

San Quentin has long been a site for reinvention and artistic breakthrough. Merle Haggard was incarcerated there when he saw Johnny Cash perform for the men inside, a concert he later credited with helping turn him toward music. Years earlier, the Actor’s Workshop of San Francisco brought Waiting for Godot to the prison, helping inspire the San Quentin Drama Workshop, an early landmark of American prison theatre. And a little over a decade ago, Joyce Carol Oates taught a creative writing class there. Throughout its history, Smoot says, San Quentin has been a place of second acts.

Now, after 14 years, the gates that opened for Smoot twice a week have closed. The clang is familiar. But this time the man on the wrong side of the gate is not trying to break out. He is asking to be let back in.