Who is the only person to appear in both the hacked 2009 Climategate emails and in the stolen 2016 Hillary Clinton Wikileaks emails?

That would be me. Both cases exposed efforts to censor my research and damage my career at the University of Colorado Boulder. And in each case I thought, “Thank goodness for tenure and academic freedom!”

These days, I have less confidence in academic freedom. In December, at age 56, I left the University of Colorado after 24 years as a tenured professor, spending much of that time focused on climate change. In the 10 years before my departure, I was investigated, bullied and shunned to the point where leaving the university—once unthinkable—became inevitable.

Colorado shut the science policy center I started and led, and canceled the graduate classes I developed and oversaw. It moved me to a tiny “office” that was actually a storage room and then commandeered the space to store boxes and empty filing cabinets. Later, it moved me to an office in the football stadium that was inaccessible for months. Finally, it refused to place me in any department, so I had no classes to teach.

During these years, climate change became a deeply politicized issue on campus. A cadre of faculty worked to transform the university into an activist organization dedicated to pursuing a left-wing agenda. This is antithetical to the traditional mission of a university to research, debate and teach in a forum tolerant of different opinions. It was even more disturbing that this was happening at a flagship state institution, one with a student body of more than 38,000 and ranked as a top 100 national university by U.S. News & World Report.