Back in March, my Taki’s column “To Encourage the Others” looked at the trend toward colleges trying to fire tenured professors for sacrilege, such as Charles Negy, who was fired by Central Florida for, among other heresies, retweeting my one-liner: “Instead, The Establishment views blacks as our Sacred Cows, above criticism, but beneath agency.”
Now, the Washington Post news section wonders why it’s so damn hard to fire tenured professors who say things that privileged students don’t like. Think of the children!
The professor is canceled. Now what?
An ‘intolerant’ professor is higher ed’s toughest subject
No tolerance for the “intolerant“!
By Jack Stripling
Updated June 21, 2023 at 4:47 p.m. EDTPsychology professor Charles Negy was fired from the University of Central Florida in 2021 after complaining on Twitter about “Black privilege.”
On a Thursday morning in February, Charles Negy stood before a group of about 40 students, presiding over his theories-of-personality class at the University of Central Florida. Scattered across a large auditorium, students jotted notes as Negy, a 62-year-old associate professor of psychology, spoke about Sigmund Freud. Projection, Negy explained, is when “we see in others what we don’t want to see in ourselves.” It’s like calling someone else a racist, Negy continued, when, in truth, “everybody is a little bit racist.”
This lecture would have seemed unlikely two years ago. UCF fired Negy in early 2021, months after the professor provoked a firestorm by complaining on Twitter about “Black privilege” just days after George Floyd’s murder.
University officials insisted that Negy wasn’t fired for his views. Instead, an exhaustive investigation concluded that the professor had created “a hostile learning environment.”
Under the 14th Amendment, the legal concept of “hostile learning/work environment” obviously ought to apply to whites as well. In fact, this article unwittingly documents that Negy has a strong case against UCF for maintaining a hostile work environment against him.
UCF cited comments he made in class: that being anti-racists gave students “a little boner,” and that a woman is “kind of like a Ford pickup truck, built to take a pounding.”
Much later in the article, the Washington Post reveals that Negy was jokingly making a valuable public health warning: that sodomy is much more likely to transmit HIV than vaginal sex.
But in 2022, an arbitrator reversed Negy’s dismissal.
Basically, the arbitrator told the university, “You can’t do that to somebody to whom you granted tenure. That’s how it works. And you knew that.”
So, with gritted teeth, UCF reinstated him in August, returning to the classroom a professor about whom it had sent an undeniable message: This person is toxic to our university. …
Yup. Hostile work environment.
‘Black privilege is real’
“Sincere question,” Negy tweeted on June 3, 2020, a little over a week after Floyd had been killed by a Minneapolis police officer. “If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systemic racism’ exists?”
A few minutes later: “Black privilege is real,” Negy posted, describing affirmative action as one example.
How dare anyone publicly admit the existence of affirmative action!
A tenured professor who had worked at Central Florida since 1998, Negy often played provocateur, prodding his students with observations about race and political correctness. In 2020, he published a book on similar themes, “White Shaming: Bullying Based on Prejudice, Virtue-Signaling, and Ignorance.” Negy, who was born to a Mexican American father and a White mother, is gay and, as an atheist, describes himself as a “religious minority, too.”
On occasion, students had complained about Negy. But UCF had awarded him three times for his teaching, and recent evaluations rated him “outstanding.”
In other words, he’s a fine professor, but then practically everybody in academia, except Negy, went nuts right after May 25, 2020. As Kipling would write today:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you
Then they’ll fire you
Back to the WP:
Within weeks of the June 2020 tweets, however, UCF informed the professor he was under investigation. The university reviewed 37 hours of classroom recordings, heard from hundreds of witnesses, and interviewed Negy for about nine hours over two days.
Negy admitted to making some crude comments in class. But he told investigators he was trying to be humorous in discussions pertinent to course material. His comment about the “Ford pickup truck,” Negy said, was made to describe a “vagina”—not women in general—during a discussion with a sexual behavior class about HIV transmission. He had spoken to students, too, about correlations between race and penis size—and he had jokingly high-fived an African American student during the discussion. (Everyone laughed at the time, he said.)
… Many of Negy’s classroom comments were protected by academic freedom, a bedrock principle in higher education designed to ensure that faculty can explore controversial subjects, UCF’s Office of Institutional Equity concluded in a 244-page report of its findings on Jan. 13, 2021. It added that his tweets were protected under the First Amendment.
Yet, Negy had created “a hostile learning environment,” investigators found. For example, he had used a multiple-choice question on an exam that forced students to accept that a “rational person” would equate a religious upbringing with “child abuse.” They also cited the high-five.
On the same day the report came out, Negy received a “Notice of Intent to Terminate.”
Experts who spoke with The Post generally agreed that social media posts about matters of public concern are typically considered protected speech. A university that tries to fire a professor for tweets alone is likely to face strong head winds, including lawsuits or reputational damage, said Risa L. Lieberwitz, a professor of labor and employment law at Cornell University and general counsel of the American Association of University Professors. That’s one reason investigations often focus on a professor’s classroom conduct, such as whether a professor targeted a student based on race, sex or religion.
But Negy claims that UCF’s investigation was just a ruse to terminate him over unpopular speech. “The mission was to fire me,” he told The Post earlier this year.
UCF administrators involved in Negy’s case declined interview requests. At an arbitration hearing in 2022, Provost Michael Johnson described the case as “the worst behavior of this sort that I’ve ever seen in my 30 years in higher education.” The investigation showed that Negy was “dangerous,” Johnson said, which justified firing him without standard notice. “We didn’t see any way to put him safely in a classroom situation again,” the provost said, according to a transcript.
His removal would be short-lived.
A ‘radioactive’ colleague
For years, Indiana University at Bloomington had struggled with how to respond to Eric Rasmusen, a tenured economist in its Kelley School of Business. Past controversies—such as one in which Rasmusen argued on a blog that gay men shouldn’t be hired as schoolteachers because they could prey on children—had faded from attention.
A tipping point came in 2019, when Rasmusen tweeted a link to an article titled “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably.” He highlighted a quote from the article, which claimed “geniuses are overwhelmingly male.”
It’s the fact that that statement is obviously true that is so outraging to female nongeniuses in academic administration.
Lauren Robel, then Indiana’s provost, decided she’d had enough. In a fiery public statement, Robel slammed Rasmusen for expressing “racist, sexist, and homophobic views,” which she labeled “stunningly ignorant.” Robel said the university could not fire Rasmusen for his tweets because they were protected by the First Amendment. (“That is not a close call,” wrote Robel, who teaches constitutional law.) But if Rasmusen “acted upon his expressed views” in violation of IU’s nondiscrimination policy, she said, the university would take action.
For some, Robel had modeled a perfect response: Fight speech with more speech, and draw a hard line against discrimination. Ari Cohn, a First Amendment lawyer, declared the provost’s statement a “masterpiece.”
But a very messy case was about to unfold.
Battle lines took shape. Women at IU sported custom hoodies with “Female Genius” emblazoned across the front.
Cringe.
… The dean assigned Rasmusen to a new office in an adjacent building. “He was radioactive,” said Charles Trzcinka, a finance professor at IU and a friend of Rasmusen’s.
Hostile work environment.
… IU cut Rasmusen’s pay by 10 percent and barred him from teaching required courses or participating in faculty hiring, he said. Removing him from “onerous chores” was like “throwing Brer Rabbit in the briar patch,” he said in an email. “But, of course, the point is to keep conservatives from having influence on how the department is run.”
… Despite the initial furor after Rasmusen’s tweet, IU never publicly said what its investigation had found. Rasmusen retired in 2021 at age 62 after about three decades at the school.
… Steve Sanders, a law professor who saw him there, said these cases put universities in a terrible bind. They can’t punish professors for saying unpopular things, Sanders said, but “the perceptions of students matter. Once a professor has been canceled, they’re canceled.”
… Several of Negy’s students said that they had signed up for his psychology course without knowing the professor had been fired—but that he had shared it with them during his first lecture. One student, a Black woman, said she thought Negy was a good teacher. But she was disturbed by his suggestion that, “statistically speaking, minorities are just not as smart as other people. I don’t know. I feel like that’s kind of offensive.” The student spoke on the condition of anonymity because she worried about criticizing one of her professors.
Asked about the student’s concerns, Negy said that he lectures about “observed differences” among races on test scores, but that he doesn’t have “training in genes” to assess why these differences exist.
In March, Negy filed a federal lawsuit saying UCF had violated his First Amendment rights. Apart from department meetings once a month, Negy said, he seldom sees his psychology colleagues. He hasn’t returned to his office since he was escorted off campus by a police officer in 2021. “No one says a word to me,” Negy said. “That’s fine.”
Hostile work environment.
University officials did not respond directly when asked whether UCF still considers Negy “dangerous.”
Hostile work environment.
… This article has been updated to include additional context from Charles Negy about a comment he said he made in class related to HIV transmission.
