Professor Allyn Walker was recently placed on leave from Old Dominion University and will step down next year. In an interview promoting the book A Long, Dark Shadow, the professor said that sexual attraction to children, by itself, isn’t immoral and should not be stigmatized. People have no control over their sexual attractions, the argument went, and while child abuse is undeniably wrong, some people have these attractions without acting on them. These thoughts echoed material in the book itself, published by the University of California Press months earlier—not to mention Walker’s dissertation from 2017—but they went viral in a way that the book hadn’t and led to Walker’s firing.
One can make a case that Walker’s academic freedom was violated, and that Walker may be conducting important work in an area few people are willing even to think about—but Walker is also a fringe figure spouting dangerous nonsense. Academics should not lose their jobs for expressing controversial views, especially when their universities were aware of those views long before the mob got wind of them. And to prevent child abuse, we must study pedophiles, including those who manage not to act on their desires. Yet the future course that Walker proposes for society is crazy.
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