When the administration of Simon Fraser told David it wanted to do a background check on him they told him the names of the people who would be doing the check. All these people had been criticized by David in his writing. One of them was the CEO — the Chief Executive Officer — of Virtual U. David realized that these people could not be fair to him, so he said he didn’t want the university to do the check. About a month later, he was told that his application had been rejected because it was incomplete.

David decided to sue Simon Fraser University. Many of the other professors there sympathized with him and encouraged him to fight against the administration. One professor in the physics department said, “In a university you have to have the right to express yourself no matter how obnoxious those views are to other people.”

- information from: The New York Times (97.10.03)