For the past year, history professor Michael Phillips has been warning about a right-wing “purge” taking place at Collin College, led by administrators angling to remove progressive voices from the Texas school. Then he himself was purged.

Last month, Phillips, an award-winning professor of history, was called to a meeting about his impending removal from the institution he’d taught at for the past fourteen years. As he recalls, he was offered a deal: he and college leadership would “craft a narrative” that he had left voluntarily, and they’d help him find a job to move on to, giving him a “graceful exit.” He refused. Not long after, he was told he would not be employed come May 15. He’s now the fourth professor to be fired from the public community college in Texas over free speech issues.

The firing of Phillips and his colleagues is first and foremost a story about administrative abuse at Collin College, where administrators have used the deliberate lack of tenure to single out and punish faculty who are too outspoken. But it’s also part of a larger story we’re seeing unfold across the country, of the Right working with increasing ferocity to stamp out what they see as progressivism in education, trampling over free speech rights in the process.