Keith Whittington
Chronicle of Higher Education
Excerpt: Professors speak and write in a wide range of contexts, in all of which they receive, however unevenly, some level of protection under college policies, traditional academic-freedom principles, and First Amendment doctrine. Those First Amendment protections just took a hit in a newly issued opinion by a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
A professor in the College of Education at North Carolina State University claimed that he had been punished by his employer as a result of his constitutionally protected speech. He had on various occasions complained in faculty deliberations that the program with which he was associated had become too focused on “social justice” at the expense of its intellectual integrity. He was sanctioned for raising those concerns. A majority of the court disagreed that such speech is constitutionally protected.
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