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Short summary: People screw up.

Slightly longer summary: People screw up, particularly when they're trying to cover their (or their institution's) ass, and especially if there's any allegation of sexual impropriety involved.

I doubt that Dr. Wightman will return to an administrative position at Acadia -- working on a day-to-day basis with the senior administrators who fired him would be impossible -- but I'd place 100 to 1 odds on him being given financial compensation and offered his faculty position back.

I doubt it was that much of a screw up. People do casual hook-ups for fantasy play all the damned time, and only in a minuscule fraction of those does one partner later claim it was not consensual.
The police spent two months investigating and found that there was insufficient evidence to lay charges. That means that Dr. Wightman is considered to be innocent. If there were a university hearing on this matter, the allegations made against Dr. Wightman would not even be permitted to be introduced.

If Dr. Wightman had been accused of murder, torture, or war crimes, he would never have lost his job.

100% agreed. This is moral panic, pure and simple.

What's disturbing is that a University would remove a tenured professor based on sexual preference / fetish.