Three Florida Atlantic University professors who were suspended for their speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination should never have been punished in the first place.
It’s time for the university to send them back to their classrooms. But instead, FAU has launched an internal investigation run by a pricey law firm and is being sued by one of the suspended professors.
A university cannot simply fire a faculty member for speech the way a private business could. For those working at a public university, the government is the employer, which gives them added job protection.
“Academics have always enjoyed broad academic freedom in their workplace, and also broad protection for freedom of expression outside their workplace,” said FAU faculty Senate President Bill Trapani, a university trustee. “Those things work hand in glove.”
Unless the professors were speaking about their work environment in a way that was threatening to the broader FAU community, the university should not be able to punish them for speaking out as private citizens, as they were.
Locked out of class
Art history professor Karen Leader, finance professor Rebel Cole and English professor Kate Polak were put on paid leave in September after posting social media comments about Kirk.
The first target, Leader, a professor at FAU since 2009, has been out of her classroom for more than two months, and for what? Her supposed transgression was merely retweeting the words of others who posted Kirk’s controversial statements, each time adding, “This was Charlie Kirk.”
Polak’s posts on the Threads social media site were reposted by FAU’s student newspaper, The University Press. “Delighting in the death of someone who wished death on us isn’t sick,” Polak wrote in one passage. “It’s self-defense.”
Cole, a conservative economics professor, took a different tack on X, verbally threatening those who disparaged Kirk.
“Be very afraid,” he wrote. “We are going to hunt you down. We are going to identify you. Then we are going to make you radioactive to polite society. And we will make you both unemployed and unemployable.”
Former Florida Supreme Court Justice Alan Lawson was hired by FAU in a free-speech case.
As first reported by WPTV Channel 5, FAU hired the Tallahassee law firm of Lawson Huck Gonzalez to investigate the three.
The lead investigator, Alan Lawson, resigned as a state Supreme Court justice in 2022. He’s being paid almost $1,000 an hour for what should be a perfunctory review of relevant case law.
A key two-part test
Two landmark cases, Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) and Connick v. Myers (1983), created a two-part Pickering-Connick test to determine whether a public employee can be fired on free-speech grounds.
The first test is whether an employee spoke about a protected matter of public concern in a workplace context (such as Kirk’s assassination) or shared private grievances with bosses or co-workers.
The second test is whether an employee’s right to free speech outweighs any disruption in the workplace.
Applying both measures, Supreme Court opinions have tilted in favor of free speech rights — and that should be the result here.
In a third case, Rankin v. McPherson (1987), the court sided with a Texas court employee who was fired for her comments after an assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
“If they go for him again, I hope they get him,” Ardith McPherson said.
None of the three FAU professors voiced an opinion as inflammatory as that. Yet this groundless investigation grinds on, weeks after all three teachers were interviewed, we are told.
An upside-down world
“On paper, we have strong rights, written over the last 15 years to avoid what lay people might call ‘cancel culture,’” Trapani said. “These policies were written in an era in which conservatives were afraid they would be banned from university discourse. But in reality, as we’ve seen more political leaders become university leaders, you see an upside-down world.”
The First Amendment is sacred. All three faculty members should be back in class.
The worst-case scenario would be to fire all three.
Almost as outrageous would be a transparently political outcome with the reinstatement of Cole and dismissals of Kirk’s critics. That would lay bare that all this has nothing to do with threatening speech and everything to do with partisan politics.
Either result would damage FAU’s reputation and raise grave doubt about its commitment to free speech. It would severely tarnish the Boca Raton school in a year in which FAU, for the first time, made the list of America’s top 100 public universities in U.S. News & World Report.
For FAU, that would be a far worse outcome than anything the three professors have done.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2025/11/18/reinstate-three-muzzled-fau-professors-editorial/
