Trump assassination posts test boundaries of academic freedom

As the news broke about a gunman’s 13 July attempt to kill former president Donald Trump during a Pennsylvania rally, John James, an English instructor at Bellarmine University in Louisville, posted on Instagram above one of the latest headlines: “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”

Dr James took down his post the next day, he said, and later deactivated his Instagram account. But Libs of TikTok, an X account that often personally targets liberals, had already broadcast a screenshot of his post to its millions of followers and hateful messages began pouring in to him and university employees.

The university said it received a bomb threat on 15 July connected to anger about the post, although police eventually determined the threat wasn’t credible. Bellarmine fired Dr James the next day, three days after the shooting, he said. “I wasn’t given an opportunity to clarify my statement, to apologise or anything,” he said.

These are the types of faculty member statements that test the boundaries of traditional academic freedom protections. They often crop up at times of intense controversy such as this. And Dr James wasn’t the only academic to post something about the assassination attempt that attracted social media and media attention.

Also on the day of the shooting, Uju Anya, a tenured associate professor of second-language acquisition at Carnegie Mellon University, posted on X that “It was staged”. That might offend some as well. But things appear to have gone differently for her.

Dr Anya, who didn’t return Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment, hasn’t taken down her post. A Carnegie Mellon spokesperson provided only a brief statement on the issue: “Free expression is core to our democracy and to the mission of higher education. Faculty commentary on personal social media accounts do not represent our institutional views.” (Dr Anya is the same professor who attracted controversy when she posted, as Queen Elizabeth of the UK was dying in 2022, “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving and raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”)

Across the Canadian border, CBC/Radio-Canada reported on a conversation two professors had with each other on X. According to that public broadcaster, University of Guelph professor Shoshanah Jacobs posted a video of the shooting’s aftermath alongside the words “When 4 inches really matters”, and University of British Columbia professor of teaching Karen Pinder replied, “Damn, so close. Too bad.”

Neither professor responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment, but their universities said they were investigating. A University of British Columbia spokesperson said in an email that the university was “aware of Dr Pinder’s post and is looking into the matter”, that the university did not “condone violence” and privacy laws prevented commenting further. A University of Guelph statement said it was “aware of comments posted to social media” by a professor it didn’t name and it was “currently looking into the matter”.

Back in the US, there were murkier cases. As it did with Dr James at Bellarmine, Libs of TikTok posted allegations last week that Louise Kelly, an associate professor of exercise science at California Lutheran University, had posted online, “I hope next time they don’t miss and I really hope this isn’t the last attempt too…I would love to do it myself if I wasn’t so far away.” Libs of TikTok tagged the Secret Service in its post.

In this case, however, Cal Lutheran has said that Dr Kelly did not actually write that and the Simi Valley Police Department was investigating who was behind the allegedly fraudulent post. Mark Berry, a Cal Lutheran spokesperson, said the university took Dr Kelly’s profile page off its website to protect her from threats and insults and said, “Professor Kelly isn’t doing interviews.”

In Alabama, a conservative site called 1819 News reported that Jennifer L. Collins, whose Facebook account listed her as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama, had posted on Facebook, “Someone is a really lousy shot because they not only missed his large ass but they missed AAALLLL those people behind him too. Weird, huh?”

The alleged post by Dr Collins seemed to suggest that she also thought the assassination attempt was staged, but she ended it by quoting the refrain from a song from the musical Chicago, sung by female murderers. The refrain includes the words “He had it coming/He only had himself to blame.”

The news outlet reported that a University of Alabama spokesperson, Alex House, said Dr Collins was no longer employed at the institution but didn’t say why or when she stopped working there. Ms House told Inside Higher Ed via email that Dr Collins “has not been employed by the university since May 2024”, before the assassination attempt and Dr Collins’s alleged post about it. Dr Collins did not reply to emails sent to her at another job where 1819 News reported she works.

All these statements about the assassination attempt – whether faculty members actually made them or not – revive once more the ancient academic freedom debate: when faculty members speak outside of their classrooms or scholarships on political issues, when does their speech cross a line that should involve punishment?

Extramural activities

The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) 1940 “Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure”, which it wrote in partnership with the American Association of Colleges and Universities, has been emulated by universities across the country. But it doesn’t provide much clarity on where the line should be. It includes multiple caveats.

It says that when faculty members “speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline”. That seems clear enough, and these faculty members seem to have been speaking or writing as citizens.

But there’s a caveat: “Their special position in the community imposes special obligations,” AAUP says. At the same time, “they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.”

Were those who posted about the attempted assassination exercising “appropriate restraint”? Is suggesting the shooting was staged without providing convincing evidence accurate?

That section of the 1940 statement is further qualified by a 1970 footnote that itself quotes from the 1964 “Committee A Statement on Extramural Utterances”. That statement says, “The controlling principle is that a faculty member’s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member’s unfitness for his or her position. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member’s fitness for the position. Moreover, a final decision should take into account the faculty member’s entire record as a teacher and scholar.”

Do controversial statements about the assassination attempt demonstrate unfitness?

Regardless of the answers to these questions, the AAUP argues that, if a university administration believes that a faculty member’s “expression of opinion” has made them “unfit”, it should make that case in a hearing before a faculty committee, and the administration should bear the burden of proof. Greg Scholtz, a senior programme officer in the AAUP’s Department of Academic Freedom, Tenure and Governance, noted that those principles weren’t followed in Dr James’s situation at Bellarmine.

“A faculty member should not be dismissed unless the administration can demonstrate that they’re either incompetent as a teacher or incompetent as a scholar or have engaged in serious misconduct as a teacher or serious misconduct as a scholar,” Dr Scholtz said. He said a dismissal should have “nothing to do with stuff that’s not relevant to your teaching and scholarship”.

At public universities, faculty members are protected by the First Amendment. Many private universities have copied similar protections into the written rights they promise their faculties. Robert Shibley, special counsel for campus advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a pro–free speech group, said, “It’s a rare private university that hasn’t adopted some form of the principles AAUP discusses.”

Mr Shibley said that, for employees in and outside higher education, “FIRE’s position is that we should have a culture where even if you can be fired for things that don’t affect your job, it would be better if you weren’t.” But he also argued that free speech protections were particularly important for faculty members.

“It’s a greater threat to their ability to perform their job when you censor a professor than when you censor, say, a farmer,” Mr Shibley said. “The general job of farming is not necessarily to engage in the spread of knowledge and the exploration of new ideas, but that is vital to the job of being a professor in a university. You need to be able to experiment with new ideas and you need to have the ability to sometimes say things that will turn out to be wrong.” Further, he said, “the only reason we can have certainty that something is true is if the people who think it’s not true are free to make those arguments”.

Dr James said he was deluged by “disgusting, death-threat kinds of messages” after his post. “These people were very directed in what they were trying to do, and they knew precisely what they were going to accomplish from the outset,” he said. He criticised his university for giving in to the pressure and said his targeting by Libs of TikTok was part of a trend of faculty members being subjected to a kind of “McCarthyist blacklisting campaign”.

As for his post, Dr James said, “I apologise for any hurt it might have caused people” and “I didn’t mean at all to condone violence”. He said he meant to suggest that a failed assassination attempt only empowers a candidate and heroises them. “I’m not saying it’s a good idea to assassinate anybody,” he said.

Over at Carnegie Mellon this week, Dr Anya’s pinned post on her X account continued to be defiant. “Hello, my enemies! Don’t know if you heard, but I earned tenure EARLY…May my success continue to agonize you.”

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.