On November 7, 2025, something quietly revolutionary happened on the University of Chicago campus: a room full of professors who had been smeared, cancelled, investigated, or exiled by their own institutions locked the doors, turned off the DEI recorders, and spoke like human beings for an entire day.
Gad Saad, Amy Wax, J. Michael Bailey, Anna Krylov, Dorian Abbot, Bryan Caplan, Sally Satel, Garrett Jones, Harald Uhlig, Rachel Fulton Brown, these are not fringe cranks. They are tenured, highly cited scholars who have simply refused to recite the approved catechism on race, sex, immigration, merit, or biology. For that sin they have been branded "thought criminals," and the Freedom of Intellectual Navigation (FIN) Conference was their underground railroad station.
The event was deliberately structured like a speakeasy: no livestream, no press badges, no snitches with smartphones. As Dorian Abbot joked, they enforced "anti-Hotel California rules," you could check out any time you liked, but you could never leave… with a recording. The result was the rarest substance in 2025 academia: oxygen. Ideas that are unutterable at Penn, USC, Northwestern, or Yale, were dissected with rigour, humour, and zero fear of the Title IX office.
And the academy is dying for precisely this reason: it has become the one place on earth where the smartest people are forbidden to think out loud.
The Parasitic Mind Has Already Won Almost Everywhere Else
Listen to the roll call of casualties:
Amy Wax (Penn Law) – investigated for the crime of praising "bourgeois values" and citing inconvenient crime statistics.
J. Michael Bailey (Northwestern) – mobbed, investigated, and effectively driven out of sex-research for documenting autogynephilia.
Anna Krylov (USC) – denounced for writing that Soviet-style ideological corruption was infecting chemistry.
Dorian Abbot (UChicago Geophysics) – had an MIT lecture cancelled because he opposed racial preferences.
Gad Saad (Concordia) – lives under 24/7 armed security for criticising radical Islam and identity politics.
These are not obscure adjuncts; they are some of the most accomplished scholars in their fields. Yet at their home institutions they must speak in whispers, use burner accounts, or simply shut up.
So, they flee to Chicago, one of the last universities that still remembers the 1967 Kalven Report's commandment of institutional neutrality, and they talk. About suicidal empathy. About why "magic dirt" doesn't turn Somalian warlords into Jeffersonian democrats the moment they land at JFK. About the fact that socialism keeps returning because each new generation thinks it has discovered the one cheat code that will make it work this time.
Why These Fellowship Meetings Are Not a Luxury — They Are an Emergency Blood Transfusion
1.They keep the contraband literature alive. In most departments today, citing Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, or even Thomas Sowell is career suicide. At FIN, those books are simply evidence.
2.They remind junior scholars they are not crazy A grad student who secretly believes in merit, but is terrified to say it walks into that room and sees tenured giants who survived the purge. Suddenly dissent feels possible.
3.They generate the arguments the rest of us will need when the mob comes. When Wax asks, "If immigrants instantly adopt American values, why are their home countries such ****holes?" she is forging rhetorical armour that normal people can actually use.
4.They prove the parasitic ideas can be beaten with better ideas, not just louder shouting No safe spaces, no trigger warnings, no speech codes, just relentless, cheerful, evidence-based demolition of sacred cows.
We Need a Thousand More of These
One weekend in Chicago is not enough. We need:
A permanent "Free Speech Semester Abroad" program where cancelled professors teach intensive courses in states that have banned DEI bureaucracies (Florida, Texas, Tennessee). Yes, in Australia too, but that will be hard given the crippling level of anti-white racism institutionalised at universities.
An underground lecture circuit modelled on the old Federalist Society playbook, closed sessions, no recordings, NDAs optional.
A "Samizdat Press" that publishes the papers journals now reject for ideological reasons (Retraction Watch already documents hundreds). All open access online, no fees or paywalls.
Endowed "Contrarian Chairs" explicitly protected from administrative meddling, something Musk and a few brave billionaires could fund tomorrow.
Because the tragic truth is this: the modern university has become the most intellectually hostile environment in the Western world. The library is freer than the faculty lounge. A truck stop in rural Nebraska has more open debate than an Ivy League common room.
Until that changes, the thought criminals will keep meeting in secret. And the rest of us owe them an enormous debt, because they are the last people still doing what universities were invented for: pursuing truth without fear or favour.
So let the vice chancellors, chancellors of vice, clutch their armfuls of money from foreign students, and the DEI commissars draft their denunciations. In a small room on the South Side of Chicago, a handful of academics just proved that the Enlightenment is not dead.
It's just gone underground. And it's waiting for reinforcements. Us.