Ball State U. Settles With Employee Fired for Comments About Charlie Kirk
“eventually sued Ball State for infringement of her First Amendment rights”
There were so many of these people last fall. None of them deserves any recourse, in my opinion.
The College Fix reports:
Ball State U. settles with employee fired for anti-Charlie Kirk remarks
Ball State University has reached a settlement with a former employee fired for comments made following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
According to the Muncie Star Press, details of the deal were not disclosed at an April 7 “settlement conference.”
Last September, posts made by BSU’s then-Director of Health Promotion and Advocacy Suzanne Swierc on her personal (and private) Facebook account included “Let me be clear: if you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends,” Kirk’s death “is a reflection of the violence, fear, and hatred he sowed,” and Kirk “excused the deaths of children in the name of the second amendment.”
A screenshot of her comments subsequently went “viral,” triggering an investigation. The Indiana Lawyer reports that among others, Elon Musk, Rudy Giuliani, and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita publicly ripped Swierc’s post.
Swierc allegedly “faced derogatory language and even threats from anonymous callers,” while Ball State said it “fielded a ‘deluge’ of complaints, comments and inquiries from the media and public.”
BSU claimed Swierc’s remarks were “inconsistent with the distinctive nature and trust of [her] leadership position […] and that the post caused significant disruption to the University.”
It cited the case Hedgepeth v Britton in which the Seventh Circuit upheld the firing of a teacher who, like Swierc, had made controversial remarks on a private Facebook account (in this case, regarding George Floyd after his killing).
Swierc, with the assistance of the ACLU, eventually sued Ball State for infringement of her First Amendment rights. One of her attorneys questioned what sort of “disruption” Swierc’s post could have caused given she didn’t hold a teaching position.
In a statement, Ball State Vice President for Communications and Digital Strategy Greg Fallon said last Tuesday’s settlement conference was “successful,” and that “the parties ‘reached agreement on the material terms to resolve the matter.’”
The ACLU said it had “nothing further [to] share at this time.”
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Comments
Did she have the right to make those comments? Yes.
Should she have been fired for them? Probably not.
Should she be ostracized by people of good conscience? Definately.
If she wasn’t in a teaching position then how can a state entity be justified in firing her? It’s settled law that a police department can’t fire an employee for expressing the hope that the president would be assassinated. How is this different?
Hedgepeth was able to be fired only because she was a high school teacher, and once her students found out what she had written about George Floyd she could no longer effectively teach them. Had she been an administrative employee she would have won her case.
You don’t think her being the director of the college’s healthcare system put her in an equivalent position of power that would make students with conservative opinions “feel unsafe?”
She wasn’t director of the health care system. She was Director of Health Promotion and Advocacy. “Health promotion” seems to be another name for “community organizing”. No connection with the provision of actual care.
She was an employee.
She has a director title. If you swap out Kirk for Floyd in her statement then she is fired and would not collect a dime in any attempt at a lawsuit,
How is the “director” title relevant? The point is that she’s not in a teaching position, nor providing health care to students, she’s just in charge of some sort of woke propaganda program, so there’s no reason her opinions being known should cause any disruption or difficulty in doing her job. And it would make no difference whether she spoke about Kirk or Floyd, the outcome would be the same.
The law is clear, that if the person is still able to do their job then they cannot be fired for expressing their opinion no matter how disgusting it is. A police department, of all things, must put up with an employee who says she hopes the president will be assassinated. They cannot fire her for that. That is the law.
It means she is supervising other people and a face of the institution. They would struggle to prove that she is a back room ministerial employee with the maximum protection. Again all that you need to do is imagine she made the same statement about George Floyd.
Seems like a lot of people conflate freedom of speech with freedom from consequences of speech. There is a difference.
When those consequences are being delivered by a government entity there is NO difference. What can freedom possibly mean, if not that the government may not act against you for it? What private employers do is a completely different matter, but government employers are bound by the first amendment, so they can only fire someone if the opinion they’ve expressed prevents them from doing their job.