Just What the Doctor Ordered

Dr. Norman Wang’s fight for justice received a powerful shot in the arm earlier this summer, following a major victory at the U.S. Court of Appeals. In 2020, his bosses at the University of Pittsburgh waged an all-out cancellation campaign against Dr. Wang for his peer-reviewed research paper that questioned racial preferences in medical education. Following CIR’s recent victory, he will finally have the opportunity to hold Pitt’s leadership accountable.

Dr. Wang’s paper argued that racial preferences often harm the very students they try to help. He also argued that advancing students based on race likely violates federal civil rights law—a view since adopted by the Supreme Court. The carefully researched paper, with more than 100 endnotes, was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Heart Association.

Yet, his article suffered from one fatal defect: He published it in 2020, when campus activists sought to discredit anyone who challenged extreme progressive ideas about race. Dr. Wang was a ready target. Pitt officials publicly accused him of dishonestly misquoting sources to push racist views and rallied faculty to spread that lie online. They stripped him of his fellowship director position and pressured the medical journalto retract his paper.

When Dr. Wang filed suit, Pitt officials tried to pass off their malicious campaign as a normal part of the rough-and-tumble of academic debate. The argument should have been laughed out of court. Instead, Dr. Wang’s case was thrown out. The trial judge disregarded mountains of evidence—including smoking-gun emails among faculty coordinating their attack—and dismissed his claims.

But like any good doctor, Dr. Wang requested a second opinion, seeking review in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. And unlike the district court, the Third Circuit had no time for Pitt’s excuses.

Writing for the court, Judge Bibas found strong evidence that school officials intentionally attacked Dr. Wang’s reputation to shut him up—and that they violated federal civil rights law by silencing a critic of racial discrimination. He added, “A culture that cancels instead of counsels sacrifices persuasion on the altar of power. In doing so, it forgets that the remedy for disfavored speech is more speech, not coerced silence.”

The Third Circuit’s opinion strengthens our claim for punitive damages against the entities and individuals who attacked Dr. Wang. It can be difficult to pierce the progressive campus bubble, but a sizable damages judgment would go a long way toward showing that there are real costs to destroying a colleague’s career and reputation simply for disagreeing on political issues.

Judge Bibas’s common-sense opinion is the antidote we need to the poisonous intolerance on campus. With this victory behind him, the prognosis for Dr. Wang’s case is excellent.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2026 edition of CIR’s Docket Report. Read the full publication here.