'Always stand your ground'
"Right after this incident took place, one of my colleagues -- a former faculty senate president, a leader on campus -- developed the idea that I'd broken into her office and sprayed tear gas around, and actually accused me of felony breaking and entering," Adams said.

"The FBI went in and ran tests, and they didn't find anything," he added. "They passed the information on to the school in the spring of 2002, but no one passed that to me until 2006." As a result, he said "a cloud of suspicion" hung over him for a long time.

Through it all, Adams said he has maintained a sense of humor. "It's like a 'Naked Gun' movie," he said of the situation. "You have to wonder: What head injuries would these people have to have sustained to come up with this kind of script?"

But when Adams was passed over for promotion last September, he decided it was time to take action.

"I am coming forward and saying, 'look, you've denied me for religious and ideological reasons my promotion to full professor, and I deserve it,' " he said. "You just can't give a person three teaching awards and then write a letter saying he's deficient in teaching."

"We categorically deny Mike Adams' statements," Cynthia Lawson, assistant to the chancellor for marketing and communications at UNCW, told Cybercast News Service in an email on Tuesday.

"It is not uncommon for tenured associate professors, employed by any department at any university, including UNCW, to be denied promotion to a full professor," Lawson said.

"An applicant's record is evaluated by senior faculty in the department, who make their recommendation based upon a variety of factors.

"While the university has not yet been served with the lawsuit, we are prepared fully to defend ourselves," she added.

Despite enduring what he called "a clear pattern of retaliation," Adams had some advice for others undergoing similar ordeals in academia: "Always stand your ground."

"I often end a lot of speeches talking about Numbers 13 in the Old Testament, about Caleb and Joshua being unbelievably full of courage," he said. "But they were surrounded by 10 cowards," he said.

(The reference is to the 12 spies sent into Canaan. Ten of those who returned advised Moses not to invade the land promised to the Israelites by God because of the strength of the enemy. In the end, the two bold spies where the only ones who survived the subsequent 40 years of desert wandering and were allowed to enter Canaan.)

"The problem right now in society is we have a five-to-one coward-to-hero ratio in America," Adams said.

"I just tell people there's only one way to change the ratio, and that's by stepping forward."

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