Sometimes an academic’s instinct, when attacked and even when attacked unfairly, is not to fight back. I’ve always thought this to be a bad strategy.
Support for my view comes from the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Although many younger readers may not know that name, from the 1960s through the late 1970s, he was thought of, along with Paul Samuelson, as one of the chief left-wing rivals to Milton Friedman.
Here’s what he writes in his memoirs, A Life in Our Times, published in 1981:
Both scholarly and political life require criticism of others and invite attack or reprisal. Anyone who is initiating combat should, as a matter of elementary caution, gauge the extent and severity of the probable reaction and consider his defense. If attacked, he should promptly and thoroughly respond. This is vital. In the past, it has often been possible to attack academic people with impunity, for they are thought unlikely to react in any dangerous way. Their rule is to remain silent, “not stir up the animals.” This is most unwise; a demonstrated capacity for reprisal serves valuably as a deterrent. (italics added.)
In late 1952 or early 1953, my neighbor and friend, a financial columnist and reporter for the Boston Globe, John Harriman, went to Washington to interview Joe McCarthy. He asked him if, in the aftermath of the great Republican victory, he wouldn’t be opening a major campaign against the Cambridge subversives, a term that would now be enlarged to include all liberal Democrats. [Galbraith was, at the time, an economics professor at Harvard, in Cambridge; he spent most of his academic life there.] Joe said that such was his patriotic intention. Harriman asked if he had in mind such targets as Galbraith and Arthur Schlesinger. Joe replied, “No, I am going after people who aren’t that politically sophisticated.”
By the way, even though I wrote the Wall Street Journal op/ed on Galbraith the day he died, and I was critical of his economic views, my later reading of his writing on war altered my view of him in a more positive direction. So I later wrote that up too.
Fighting back gives some disposed to ad hominem or veiled threats pause. If that doesn't deter them, I rely on on the great street philosopher, Mike Tyson, for advice.