jonathanturley | We have yet another teacher suspended or
put on leave for merely expressing her opinion of Black Lives Matter on
her personal Facebook page. After Tiffany Riley wrote that she does
not agree with the BLM, the Mount Ascutney School Board held an
emergency meeting to declare that it is “uniformly appalled” by the
exercise of free speech and Superintendent David Baker
assured the public that they would be working on “mutually agreed upon
severance package.” The case magnifies concerns over the free speech
rights of teachers on social media or in their private lives.
As we have previously discussed (with an Oregon professor and a Rutgers professor),
there remains an uncertain line in what language is protected for
teachers in their private lives. There were also controversies at the University of California and Boston University, where there have been criticism of such a double standard, even in the face of criminal conduct. There were also such an incident at the University of London involving Bahar Mustafa as
well as one involving a University of Pennsylvania professor. Some
intolerant statements against students are deemed free speech while others are deemed hate speech or the basis for university action. There is a lack of consistency or uniformity in
these actions which turn on the specific groups left aggrieved by
out-of-school comments. There is also a tolerance of faculty and
students tearing down fliers and stopping the speech of conservatives. Indeed, even faculty who assaulted pro-life advocates was supported by faculty and lionized for her activism.
Most recently, we discussed the effort to remove one of the country’s most distinguished economists from his position because Harald Uhlig, the senior editor of the Journal of Political Economy, criticized Black Lives Matter and Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson is reportedly facing demands that he be fired because he wrote a blog about the Black Lives Matter movement.
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