Last week we wrote up the continuing struggle of University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy to get justice for UCF retaliating against him because internet and student mobs objected to his tweets disputing systemic racism and white privilege, Prof. Charles Negy, Investigated and Fired After Tweets Disputing Systemic Racism, Files Federal Lawsuit Against U. Central Florida.
The story has been picked up by Fox News Digital, Central Florida professor fired for disputing systemic racism and White privilege fights back, files lawsuit, highlighting that Legal Insurrection has been chronicling the Negy story:
Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, who founded both the Legal Insurrection Foundation and CriticalRace.org, has been an outspoken opponent of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion training– commonly referred to as DEI.”Charles Negy, in many ways, is the poster child for what goes wrong when DEI takes over a campus, what goes wrong for free speech and for academic freedom,” Jacobson told Fox News Digital.Earlier this month, Jacobson started the Equal Protection Project (EPP), a new initiative to battle racial discrimination in the workplace. He has been chronicling Negy’s ordeal since the professor sent a pair of tweets in the summer of 2020 – at the height of racial tensions in America following the death of George Floyd in police custody – that questioned the belief of systemic racism and White privilege….”This is really one of the worst examples I’ve seen where a university, to placate the mob and also because they don’t like his opinions, really used the entire machinery of a major public university and taxpayer funding to go get this professor,” Jacobson said. “He filed a union grievance and went to arbitration. And lo and behold, the arbitrator cleared him, found he did nothing wrong, found the university was in the wrong, had no good cause to fire him, no legal cause to fire him and ordered him reinstated.”UCF maintained that Negy’s firing was not because of his tweet, instead claiming he was fired because of student complaints and creating a hostile working environment.On Thursday, Negy took steps to hold the school accountable when he filed a lawsuit in federal court in the Middle District of Florida….Jacobson believes Negy has a legitimate case that the university unfairly retaliated against him.”He’s alleging that he went through almost two years of extreme pain and suffering, extreme hardship that cannot be restored merely by giving him his job back with back pay,” he said. “Of course, the facts are going to have to come out. But based on what’s been revealed so far, it does look like he has a very strong claim that he was subject to retaliation.”
Fox News Digital posted a short interview of me talking about the Negy case (an edited-down version of a longer interview):
(Transcript auto-generated, may contain transcription errors)
Well after George Floyd’s death, as we know, there were riots and protests all around the country, but there was also a purge in academia at many universities, and it hit a lot of people. It almost hit me. But it hit somebody named Charles Negy, who was a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida. And it hit him in one of the most disgusting cases that I’ve seen, and we’ve covered dozens, if not hundreds of these cases at Legal Lnsurrection.And what happened was he tweeted that he disputed that there was systemic racism that negatively affected blacks. And he also tweeted that in fact, because of affirmative action and other things, there actually was a black privilege because at the time everybody was talking about white privilege. Now you can agree with him or you can disagree with him, but he’d been at UCF for 22 years, extremely highly rated, extremely popular.And in a uniquely June 2020 phenomenon, the mob descended on him. There was a change.org petition, I think signed by 15,000 people to get him fired. There was a Twitter campaign. There were protests outside his house, which is really unprecedented act of intimidation. And even the president of the university participated in the protests against him. I’ve never seen that anywhere else. Because of that pressure, the university had a problem because his tweets were constitutionally protected. University of Central Florida is a public institution. It’s bound by the First Amendment without question, and they couldn’t punish him for what he said on Twitter. So they launched a campaign, they suspended him, and they launched a campaign to drum up complaints about him. And this is something I’ve seen before, but never so egregiously.
Being able to elevate someone in trouble to a place where the media sunshine is the best disinfectant is one of the things we do best, and I’m most proud of.
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