A First Amendment lawsuit against the University of North Texas (UNT) brought by a math professor who was fired for mocking the concept of “microaggressions” may proceed, a federal district judge ruled.
Judge Sean D. Jordan, a Trump appointee, wrote that the case would boil down to a single question: “What can a public employee say, and what can he choose not to say, without fear of reprisal from his employer?”
The case stemmed from a November 2019 incident, when someone anonymously left a stack of flyers warning about “microaggressions” in the UNT mathematics department’s faculty lounge. Nathaniel Hiers, an adjunct professor at the time, read through the leaflets and jokingly wrote on a nearby chalkboard, “Don’t leave garbage lying around,” with an arrow pointing to the stack.
Hiers said the head of the UNT math department pressured him to apologize for his views and asked him to attend extra “diversity training,” to which he declined. In December 2019, Hiers was notified that the public university had terminated his employment specifically because of his chalkboard message and subsequent response.
“Hiers’s critique of the flyer on microaggressions transcended personal interest and touched on a topic that impacts citizens’ social and political lives,” the judge wrote. “His speech did not address a personal complaint or grievance about his employment. The point of his speech was to convey a message about the concept of microaggressions, a hot button issue related to the ongoing struggle over the social control of language in our nation and, particularly, in higher education.”
The court also pushed back on UNT’s argument that the method used by Heirs was “uncivil” or otherwise wouldn’t fall under First Amendment protection, instead holding that the professor “expressed the kind of pure speech to which the First Amendment provides strong protection.”
In addition, the judge said he was persuaded that UNT had engaged in unconstitutional compelled speech when administrators allegedly demanded that Hiers apologize for his speech.
“Taking these allegations as true and viewing them in the light most favorable to Hiers, it is plausible that the university officials unconstitutionally punished Hiers for refusing to affirm a view—the concept of microaggressions—with which he disagrees,” Jordan wrote.
Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative Christian legal group representing Hiers in the case, welcomed the decision. Tyson Langhofer, a senior counsel at ADF, said Hiers should have had that same freedom of expression as the person who left the flyers in the faculty lounge.
“Public universities can’t fire professors just because they don’t endorse every message someone communicates in the faculty lounge. By firing Dr. Hiers, the university sent an explicit message: ‘Agree with us or else,’” Langhofer said. “The university should start modeling, instead of opposing, that right for everyone.”
