Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Heterodox STEM on July 19, 2026. Written by National Association of Scholars External Affairs Coordinator Suzannah Alexander, it is cross-posted here with permission and lightly edited to conform to Minding the Campus’s style guidelines.

No research, no data, no discussion of brain chemistry or societal development, none of it, a Champlain College student wrote, could change the student’s views. Nothing would.

This wasn’t a social media post or a protest chant. This was a line in an email to Professor David Tomasi, a behavioral neuroscientist teaching a class on Positive Psychology. It was prompted by a course assignment asking students to reflect on how they decide if a piece of information is reliable and valid.

At a functioning college, that email is a symptom. At Champlain College, it proved to be a winning argument.

The assignment was called “Thinking Outside the Box.” It was pre-approved by the dean and other appropriate college institutions, and it asked students to watch videos from a list of high-profile scholars and thinkers including: Tabia Lee, a black former DEI director; Magatte Wade, a Senegalese entrepreneur; Debra Soh, a Japanese American neuroscientist; Douglas Murray, a gay British activist; Sasha Ayad, an Arab feminist counselor; Calvin Robinson, an Afro-Caribbean cleric; and Luana Maroja, a Brazilian evolutionary biologist.

Then the students were asked to reflect on three questions:

How do you decide whether a piece of information is reliable and valid?

What ways are you willing to ‘think outside the box’ to understand and relate to (not necessarily justify) opinions which might be different from your own?

Can you think of strategies we can all use to ‘bridge the differences,’ develop love and empathy, and a civil, nurturing, and mutual understanding of a variety of perspectives?

Tomasi, an immigrant from Italy, taught at several institutions of higher learning in New England. His students gave him high marks on Rate My Professor, 94 percent and higher. At Champlain College, this pre-approved assignment about critical thinking and empathy triggered a grueling semester-long bias investigation, a months-long public harassment campaign, and, by Tomasi’s account, the end of his teaching career at the college.

This case could be painted as a free speech controversy or a cancellation story. Truth told, it is both.

But it is also something more fundamental. The students who objected to Tomasi’s instruction are the students who need it the most. The assignment they rejected was designed to develop exactly the capabilities the resulting firestorm shows they lack: the ability to engage with new evidence, test assumptions against the data, and tolerate the discomfort of being wrong.

Champlain’s curriculum, bias reporting system, and institutional culture have produced students who reject scientific evidence as a matter of principle, and the institution sided with them.

The friction didn’t start with that lesson. A student was already challenging Tomasi’s basic authority to expect that assignments be turned in on time.

According to Tomasi, the student made similar challenges at each class, at times staying an hour afterward to lecture him about the importance of not having deadlines. The student also objected to addressing him as Dr. or Professor and dismissed grammar rules as a remnant of a colonialist-bigoted framework.

The student involved other classmates, urging them to resist the assignment and demand the entire next class be devoted to interrogating the intentions of the lesson and the material the student described as upsetting or damaging to even encounter. In other exchanges, the student complained that the assignment caused upset feelings, with the student claiming to feel unsafe.

The student declared an unwillingness to find common ground with anyone who questions transgender identity, asserted that the existence of transgender and nonbinary people is proven by the student’s own existence, and stated plainly: no piece of research or discussion of brain chemistry or societal development would change that.

Tomasi has firmly stated that he never said trans people do not exist, neither in the assignment nor online.

This was quickly followed by a bias complaint–which the college declined to share with Tomasi–triggering an investigation, a mediation session, and a semester-long fact-finding process. Tomasi offered to share recordings of the lecture to reveal what happened, but the college could not guarantee in writing that doing so would not violate FERPA, and several students feared the activist classmates would post footage online, leaving them open to harassment. Tomasi never withdrew the offer; he says the college never returned with workable terms.

In December 2025, the investigation closed as “inconclusive.” Despite this, the college recommended he change how he frames future assignments, a clever way to assign the discipline the college wanted, without having to prove a problem exists.

That also should have been the end of the matter.

Instead, some students took their grievances to the internet. In Reddit threads, Instagram posts, and college YikYak, commenters called for Tomasi’s license to be revoked and for him to be fired from all teaching positions. Even his wife’s background as a Bosnian refugee was discussed. The administration privately promised to protect Tomasi, but publicly conceded his old LinkedIn posts “have caused real hurt and concern.” He filed his own bias complaint; the college took no action. When he repeatedly reported he felt unsafe on campus, the college’s response was to have him teach online.

By the end of the spring semester, students were holding rallies in Burlington. Several walked onto campus with flyers and a bullhorn. After months of ongoing harassment, it was this action that the college used to take action against the students, not for harassment, but for violating the campus rules for protesting. Someone writing from a Champlain College account emailed Tomasi, cc’ing all staff and administration, calling him a fool and dangerous, and wishing his name “be besmirched and quickly forgotten.”

The college took no action.

On YikYak, commenters said Tomasi didn’t deserve to breathe. On Reddit, another made a veiled threat asking where he goes for coffee. Champlain College made no public comment. The student threatened with expulsion was listed in the graduating rolls at commencement, and an Instagram post from students claims they got a slap on the wrist. While Tomasi hasn’t resigned or been formally fired, he says he doesn’t expect to teach there in the fall, citing a conversation with the assistant dean.

What makes the student’s rejection of chemistry and science so revealing is that it is not a statement about transgender identity. It reflects a relationship to evidence itself. Science is not a body of settled conclusions. Science is a process, structured to examine ideas by testing them against evidence, then accepting the results even when they contradict your beliefs. A claim that cannot be proven wrong is not a scientific claim. It may be a belief, a value, or an identity commitment, but it’s not science. Science demands a level of humility that must be learned through experience. That is exactly what Tomasi’s assignment was designed to do.

The student who described feeling unsafe watching videos of scholars discussing sex, gender, and identity presented that feeling as evidence that the assignment was harmful. In a scientific framework, a feeling is not evidence of harm. It is, however, a common reaction to encountering information that challenges preexisting assumptions and beliefs, which is an intended function of education. The inability to distinguish between emotional discomfort and actual danger is the deficit that inquiry-based teaching most effectively addresses.

Egregious as the students’ behavior is, it makes sense after scanning Champlain College’s mandatory core curriculum. Required classes include:

Critical Worldbuilding;

Decolonizing Video Games: Multispecies Ethics, Colonialism and Climate Change;

Experiment and Anti-Methods for Digital Resistance; and

Resist 24/7.

When the mandatory core curriculum is composed of such offerings, decolonial narratives characterize academic structures as instruments of power, and the appropriate response is resistance. It should be no surprise that a student would emerge from this environment telling a neuroscience professor that neuroscience insights on reality don’t matter.

At a follow-up protest against Tomasi on April 28, 2026, senior Simone Lerner, who briefly enrolled in Tomasi’s spring semester behavioral neuroscience class, reported that after hearing of his online posts she believed, “The bottom line is students should never be forced into deciding between their education and future career endeavors and their values and safety.”

One wonders what “safety” looks like without adequate reality testing, but by the look of it, that’s how things work at Champlain College, at least for the students. The curriculum now conforms to her values; no need to care about research, chemistry, or societal development. Real education was only an option, and apparently so is real empathy.

Follow Suzannah Alexander on X.