| UNFAIR PARK | FREE SPEECH 911 BY SIMONE CARTER W hile watching the vice presidential debate in 2020, history professor Lora Burnett started to tweet from her living room in conservative Collin County. Then- Vice President Mike Pence wouldn’t stop talking when the female moderator had re- peatedly and kindly asked. Burnett, who’d been scrolling through her Twitter feed and reading comments from colleagues and friends, weighed in with a snarky quip. “The moderator needs to talk over Mike Pence until he shuts his little demon mouth up,” she wrote in an Oct. 7 tweet. Soon, right-wing websites cited Burnett’s “demon” tweet in articles about professors who dared to criticize the Republican vice president. Then came a wave of responses that demanded Burnett’s ousting. “People were like slobbering, baying dogs trying to get me fired for a comment that I made out- side the classroom and on my own time,” she recalled. The Collin College professor didn’t know it then, but the tweet would place her in her employer’s crosshairs and prompt a GOP state lawmaker to push for her firing. It would also serve as the start- ing point for a series of legal battles be- tween the community college and one of the country’s foremost free speech advo- cacy groups: the Foundation for Individ- ual Rights and Expression (FIRE, previously known as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). FIRE is headquartered in Philadelphia and works with those embroiled in free speech controversies nationwide. The non- partisan, nonprofit group has championed civil rights on campuses regardless of the speaker’s political views, and lately it’s taken up several North Texas-based controversies, including Burnett’s. Wherever free speech rights are set ablaze, FIRE shows up with the extinguisher. Shortly after Burnett’s tweet about 66 Pence, Collin College President Neil Mat- kin violated her civil rights, she said. She was restricted in using her school email and her personal political opinions were publicly denounced in an official college communication. So, some of Burnett’s friends recommended that she get in touch with FIRE. Before she could, FIRE reached out to her. After months of fighting for her job, though, the historian no longer works at Collin College. The school effectively fired her last year, leading to a FIRE-backed law- suit. Burnett didn’t get her wish of reinstate- ment, but thanks to FIRE’s advocacy, the college wound up agreeing to pay her $70,000 plus attorneys’ fees. For nearly two years, FIRE has advocated for Burnett and other Collin College profes- sors who have accused the school of tram- pling on free speech rights. Some say the administration has prioritized silencing lib- eral professors over upholding a commit- ment to academic freedom. Burnett points out that she posted those tweets on a week- night in her own home and was in no way performing any job duties. The way Burnett sees it, there’s an “almost hyper-fundamentalist religious insistence that professors … should be as morally up- right as Sunday school teachers every time they open their mouths, and that’s just silly.” Even other public sector workers like police officers and firefighters are allowed to ex- press opinions on their own time, something we should all be free to do, she said. Burnett added that there’s “nothing in the manual” that prepares professors to deal with attacks on their civil rights. She’s thankful that FIRE came to her defense. “They saw something amiss in what was happening to me and immediately stepped in to advocate for me,” Burnett said, “which I will never cease to be grateful for.” When colleges trample on free speech rights, FIRE’s fighters back teachers. courtesy FIRE E den Jacobowitz just wanted peace and quiet. It was Jan. 13, 1993, and a group of Black sorority sisters were talking outside of Jacobowitz’s dorm room window. The Chi- cago Tribune reported at the time that the University of Pennsylvania student yelled out: “Shut up, you water buffalo!” Israeli- born Jacobowitz claimed that “water buf- falo” was the English translation of a Hebrew word for someone who’s behaving boorishly. The university saw it differently and charged him with “racist hate speech,” according to the First Amendment-focused Free Speech Center’s website. The “water buffalo” incident upset University of Pennsylvania history profes- sor Alan Charles Kors, who argued that the term had no racist ties. Politically con- servative Kors rejected the notion of speech codes, and along with liberal-lean- ing Boston defense attorney Harvey A. Sil- verglate, authored a 1998 book examining the acceleration of university crackdowns on liberty. The next year, the pair founded FIRE. Columnists have penned think-pieces about how FIRE has picked up the slack for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in recent years. National Review noted in June that the ACLU earned its reputation for free speech absolutism thanks to its defense of the rights of ex- tremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Nation of Islam. Lately, though, critics have asserted that the ACLU has veered more and more to the left. FIRE, meanwhile, “has demonstrated in both rhetoric and ac- tion that it equally and fairly protects the Dr. Lora Burnett says she was terminated from Collin College after she criticized then-Vice President Mike Pence on social media. free-speech rights of those with varying political ideologies — unlike the ACLU,” the Review writes. But some have accused FIRE of harbor- ing a conservative bias, and indeed, it does receive support from conservative and liber- tarian funders. Left-leaning watchdog Me- dia Matters has flagged FIRE as rubbing elbows with an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group. And some say the organization’s executive leadership has perpetuated the narrative of “cancel culture,” which critics argue is an idea aimed at preventing one’s ability to re- spond to speech with more speech. Still, FIRE maintains that it defends the views of all sides. At the same time that the organization supported a student suspended for holding a legally owned gun in an off-campus Insta- gram post, it also defended a student who posted sex-positive lyric ideas for a remix of “WAP” by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion. FIRE’s legal director, Will Creeley, is the son of a poet and grew up appreciating the power of words. A hip-hop fan, he recalls that 2 Live Crew’s single “Banned in the U.S.A.,” which was a commentary on the rap group’s run-in with obscenity law, made a “pretty powerful” impression on him as a 10-year-old. Creeley knows that FIRE isn’t always popular. He said he could cite five cases that would make one person think he’s a freedom fighter and another believe he’s the >> p8 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 SEPTEMBER 8-14, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com dallasobserver.com
