From yesterday's opinion by Judge Gene Pratter (E.D. Pa.) in Monge v. Univ. of Penn.:
In The Canceling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott argue that the "modern era of Cancel Culture" began in 2014 and continues to the present. From 2014 to mid-2023, the authors argue that there were "more than 1,000 attempts to get professors fired, punished, or otherwise silenced." Of those, two-thirds of cases were successful in that they led to "consequences from investigation to termination." The authors argue that the sheer number of professors being fired is "truly unprecedented" and has not "been seen since the Supreme Court first established First Amendment protections of academic freedom and campus speech." According to the authors, "more professors have been terminated during the era of Cancel Culture than in the era of McCarthyism[.]"
Enter Dr. Janet Monge, who spent much of her academic career working for the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr. Monge alleges that she is one of the numerous professors who has been a victim of the modern era of Cancel Culture. Dr. Monge brings defamation [claims, among others] against, among others, the University of Pennsylvania, former Penn President Dr. Amy Gutmann, and former Penn Provost Dr. Wendell Pritchett ("Penn Defendants") for statements that they made regarding Dr. Monge's role as an anthropology professor when she used bone fragments and unidentified remains of victims of the 1985 MOVE bombing in an online anthropology course….
To vastly oversimplify the factual backstory, in 1985 the Philadelphia police bombed a building inhabited by "the MOVE family," also known as the Africa family, a commune of self-described revolutionaries, killing "Eleven MOVE members …, presumably six adults and five children." There was some uncertainty about the identity of some of the remains, and Dr. Monge was one of the people who eventually investigated the matter, and was in charge of storing the bones. She also discussed and showed bone fragments in an online course, "Real Bones: Adventures in Forensic Anthropology":
