Charles Negy should be an academic freedom and free speech cause around the nation, but sadly, some academic freedom and some free speech matters more than others in the age of Black Lives Matter.

By William A. Jacobson, Saturday, January 30, 2021

Defenders of academic freedom and freedom of speech throughout academia should be rallying to the defense of University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy after egregious retaliation against him for expressing constitutionally protected views on Twitter.

The American Association of University Professors, the premier faculty organization defending academic freedom, should be marshalling its substantial resources and committees behind Prof. Negy, as it has done for other professors over the decades. Public interest lawyers and law professors across the land should be volunteering their services.

Instead, Negy stands almost alone against the administrative and legal weight of the massive publicly-funded UCF.

There has been near silence because Negy’s protected speech was critical of the prevailing campus racial politics. In the age of Black Lives Matter dominance on campuses, anything that questions the prevailing racial narrative could be a career-ender.

Readers of Legal Insurrection are familiar with the Negy story, because we have covered it several times, starting with The administrative torment of UCF Prof. Charles Negy:

Negy’s alleged crime that sparked the controversy was two tweets questioning the orthodoxy of systemic racism and white privilege.

One tweet, which no longer is available,said:

“If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming ‘systematic racism’ exists?”

A second tweet, also no longer available, said:

“Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. Negy’s alleged crime that sparked the controversy was two tweets questioning the orthodoxy of systemic racism and white privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback.”

Legal Insurrection Foundation already has obtained substantial public records from UCF pursuant our joint effort with Judicial Watch, but we have a long way to go before we complete review, and we are owed many more documents.

Negy’s tweets, which UCF admits were constitutionally protected and for which they could not punish Prof. Negy, set in motion a particularly vicious online and on-the-ground mob, which included participation in protests by senior UCF administrators, including the President of UCF, Alexander Cartwright.

What resulted was a retaliatory investigation of Negy seeking to find a reason UCF could fire him, including the solicitation by the UCF administration of complaints regarding his 22-years on campus and in the classroom. The investigation took 8 months, consummed several hundred witness interviews and thousands of pages of documents, all in an effort by UCF to find a pretext to fire Negy without having to admit it was the tweets and the online mob at issue.

Predictably, at the end of the investigation, UCF found Negy to have committed wrongdoing, as released in an over 240-page Report and accompanying notice of intent to terminate, which we covered in Prof. Charles Negy: Investigative Report is “UCF’s attempt to justify getting rid of me because I have become a political liability”. Read that post for all the details, including Negy’s rebuttal, which read in part:

This letter serves as my written response to your Notice of Intent to Terminate dated January 13, 2021.

In the response below, I will address each of the four major categories of allegation in the Notice of Termination. Before I do that, however, I want to clearly state the following:

This investigation was initiated – by a public message from top administrators openly soliciting complaints against me – in retaliation for my constitutionally protected speech on Twitter. Knowing that it could not fire me for those tweets, UCF has obviously gone to great lengths over the last seven months to try and find legitimate grounds for my termination. I challenge you to find any UCF employee, yourself included, whose entire life could withstand the type of scrutiny mine has been put through in UCF’s attempt to justify getting rid of me because I have become a political liability. And make no mistake, that is precisely what UCF has done: We have President Cartwright on video agreeing with a student protester that I should have been fired before I got tenure. We have on video the UCF Provost telling students through a megaphone that the way to avoid “this type of problem” is to let UCF know: “…you have to file a complaint about discriminatory behavior.” And we have on video the UCF Chief Diversity Officer telling students on UCF’s official Twitter account that “#UCFFireHim…I understand all of that, but the fact of the matter is it’s not going to happen overnight.”

The goal from the day #UCFFireHim began trending was to terminate my employment with UCF because of my unpopular views conveyed in my constitutionally protected speech. The investigation/inquisition that followed was nothing less than “show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” If this unlawful effort to terminate me stands, not only will it severely chill the speech of faculty and students at UCF who might wish to express controversial views, but I will have no choice but to pursue legal action.

With that said, I would like to address each of the four major issues raised in your Notice and explain why they do not constitute legitimate grounds for my termination. I would also like to state that I am more than happy to discuss in greater detail any of the individual findings in the OIE report that comprise these broader findings: while you stated in your Notice that they are “too numerous to fully document here,” I am prepared to defend against each and every one of those findings in detail and, to the extent your ultimate decision relies on one or more specific findings not covered in my response here, I would appreciate the opportunity to address those specific findings.

UCF now has followed through, and fired Negy in a letter (pdf.) distributed by UCF to media without redacting what appears to be Negy’s home address despite protesters having approached his home in the past (we have redacted from our image below), and posted by media outlets including the UCF student newspaper, Knight News:

#UCF just gave us this letter confirming the school fired Prof. Charles Negy today.

Bild entfernt (keine Rechte)

On January 27, 2021, just before Negy’s termination letter but when the outcome was obvious, The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote about Negy’s treatment, UCF is killing academic freedom to punish tweets it didn’t like. Read the whole thing, here is an excerpt:

The University of Central Florida is trying to fire tenured professor Charles Negy for his speech, and if they succeed, it will undermine the concept of academic freedom. No UCF professor — and, if a court permits this termination, no professor in that jurisdiction — will be able to rely on it.

To be clear, UCF does not want you to think Negy is being punished for his speech. They’ve written a 244-page report, which involved interviewing over 300 people over seven months about incidents covering more than 15 years, to convince you otherwise.

But this is all either theater or self-delusion by UCF administrators who want to think they aren’t motivated by a desire to censor a controversial professor. The entire process of preparing this report was motivated by complaints about Negy’s tweets. Nobody interviews 300 people over seven months about incidents covering 15 years unless they’re desperate to find something, anything, to use against their target. UCF’s lack of sincerity in their investigation of Negy’s tweets — which, technically, was what they were investigating, based on the spurious allegation that Negy’s offensive tweets were required reading in his classes — is reflected in their decision to investigate allegations as far back as 2005, the year before Twitter was founded.

No, nothing was going to stand between UCF and Negy’s termination: not the First Amendment, not due process, and not academic freedom. That’s why Negy was set up to fail the nine hours of interrogation he went through and why UCF’s conclusion rests on a nonsensical implementation of academic freedom so razor-thin as to be transparent.

Negy has started a Go-Fund-Me page, trying to raise $50,000 to cover his living expenses now that he is unemployed, and his legal fees. His full response to the termination, posted at the fundraising page, also is reprinted at the bottom of this post.

[UPDATE – NEGY’S GOFUNDME PAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED – Was active when this post went live, taken down around 8:30 p.m. Will report details of what happened when I find out.][Further update: His page apparently was taken down by GoFundMe for violating its terms of service because you can’t raise money to defend yourself against charges of discrimination (seriously). He has set up a PayPal account, let’s see how long that lasts.]

https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/01/uc...-investigation/