On Wednesday, Auburn University announced it had fired several employees over social media posts. The nature of the posts is not clear, but the decision may have been related to the recent wave of firings over people’s comments on the assassination of media figure Charlie Kirk.
“It has come to our attention that there are Auburn employees who made social media posts that were hurtful, insensitive and completely at odds with Auburn’s values of respect, integrity and responsibility in violation of our Code of Conduct,” Auburn President Christopher Roberts wrote. “We are terminating the employment of those individuals. We unequivocally condemn this conduct, which is antithetical to values we hold dear in the Auburn creed.”
So far, no information has been released about who was fired as a result of their social media posts, nor what the “hurtful, insensitive” messages included.
Soon after Auburn University issued its announcement, both of Alabama’s Senators, Tommy Tuberville and Katie Britt, issued similar statements praising the decision. Neither of the posts mentioned any possible First Amendment concerns about the news, but Tuberville’s posts expressly linked the decision to comments on Kirk’s death.
Tuberville also recently called for the University of Alabama to fire journalism professor A.J. Bauer, who posted “this right on right violence is out of control” a couple days after Charlie Kirk was killed.
“As someone who spent 40 years working in education, Sen. Tuberville believes those who are entrusted with teaching our young people have a moral obligation to teach students how to think, not what to think,” Tuberville’s communications director, Mallory Jaspers, told APR. “Taxpayer-funded universities should hold their professors accountable for the things they say both in class and on their social media.”
She also stated that while the Constitution prohibits government retribution for free speech, it “does not, however, absolve people from the natural consequences that result from the words they say.”
Asked if Tuberville would believe a hypothetical professor at a blue state university being fired for conservative speech is not a First Amendment issue, Jaspers said “the same standard would apply.”
Sen. Britt’s office has not replied to APR’s request for comment yet. But during an interview on Fox News this past Sunday, Britt said anyone “celebrating the political assassination of a man who is exercising his free speech” needs to be “held accountable” and “should be fired.”
On September 15, the American Association of University Professors issued a statement “to remind leaders of colleges and universities of their fundamental duty to protect academic freedom.” The response explicitly condemned Kirk’s murder but still criticized the “rash of recent administrative actions” retaliating against faculty members’ speech in the aftermath.
“At a moment when higher education is threatened by forces that seek to destroy it and its role in a democratic society, the anticipatory obedience shown by this rush to judgment must be avoided,” the organization asserted.
FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has also repeatedly criticized the recent spate of firings by pointing out that “as government actors, public colleges are bound by the Constitution.”
Charlotte Arneson, program counsel for FIRE’s Campus Rights Advocacy project, wrote in one letter to the president of Clemson University that their “obligations under the First Amendment thus limit the types of consequences that can be imposed, and disciplining faculty or students for their protected expression clearly violates that obligation.”
In 1968, the Supreme Court ruled in Pickering v. Board of Education that public employees, including teachers, still enjoy freedom of speech protections. The appellant, high school teacher Martin Pickering, had penned a letter criticizing the local school board over how it handled financial matters and was dismissed from his position as a result.
The Supreme Court found Pickering’s rights had in fact been infringed upon. “In sum, we hold that, in a case such as this, absent proof of false statements knowingly or recklessly made by him, a teacher’s exercise of his right to speak on issues of public importance may not furnish the basis for his dismissal from public employment,” Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote.
