'One of the worst cases that I've seen': Lawyer on college's punishment of a professor's tweet
The case of a professor's free speech saga at the University of Central Florida has caught national attention.
Charles Negy, a University of Central Florida (UCF) professor at the center of a years-long saga, is fighting back after he was fired for speaking out against the notion of systemic racism and White privilege.
Negy was eventually given his job back when an arbitrator ruled he did nothing wrong, and he filed a lawsuit last week accusing the university’s board of trustees of violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments, along with negligence, abuse of process, and intentional infliction of severe emotional distress.
"In terms of the pure mistreatment of a faculty member by a university, this is one of the worst cases I have seen. And, you know, not only because he was punished in retaliation for his protected tweets, but also because when they decided to punish him, they decided to treat him like less than human," Negy’s attorney Samantha Harris told Fox News Digital.
"Their treatment of him, I think, really speaks to this broader trend of how we dehumanize people we disagree with. We don't only say, ‘Oh, I think they're wrong, or even, ‘Wow, I really don't like what they have to say," Harris continued. "We say, ‘You know what? They're no longer a person to me and what happens to them doesn't matter.’ And I think that's really evident in the University of Central Florida's treatment of Charles Nagy."
University of Central Florida psychology professor Charles Negy filed a lawsuit last week accusing university’s board of trustees of violating the First and Fourteenth Amendments, along with negligence, abuse of process, and intentional infliction of severe emotional distress. (George Skene/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
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Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson, who founded both the Legal Insurrection Foundation and CriticalRace.org, has been an outspoken opponent of critical race theory and diversity, equity, and inclusion training– commonly referred to as DEI.
"Charles Negy, in many ways, is the poster child for what goes wrong when DEI takes over a campus, what goes wrong for free speech and for academic freedom," Jacobson told Fox News Digital.
Earlier this month, Jacobson started the Equal Protection Project (EPP), a new initiative to battle racial discrimination in the workplace. He has been chronicling Negy’s ordeal since the professor sent a pair of tweets in the summer of 2020 – at the height of racial tensions in America following the death of George Floyd in police custody – that questioned the belief of systemic racism and White privilege.
Nagy asked in a tweet that is no-longer available, "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?"
The professor also tweeted, "Black privilege is real: Besides affirm. action, special scholarships and other set asides, being shielded from legitimate criticism is a privilege. But as a group, they’re missing out on much needed feedback."
What happened next was a tumultuous three years in which calls for his termination led to a month-long investigation that resulted in his firing. There were petitions, protests and even a hashtag dedicated to the university dismissing Negy over his tweets.
"This is really one of the worst examples I've seen where a university, to placate the mob and also because they don't like his opinions, really used the entire machinery of a major public university and taxpayer funding to go get this professor," Jacobson said. "He filed a union grievance and went to arbitration. And lo and behold, the arbitrator cleared him, found he did nothing wrong, found the university was in the wrong, had no good cause to fire him, no legal cause to fire him and ordered him reinstated."
UCF maintained that Negy's firing was not because of his tweet, instead claiming he was fired because of student complaints and creating a hostile working environment.
On Thursday, Negy took steps to hold the school accountable when he filed a lawsuit in federal court in the Middle District of Florida.
"In the name of a crusade ‘to be actively anti-racist,’ as Defendant Alexander Cartwright announced on June 2, 2020, the University of Central Florida (UCF) harassed and retaliated against Professor Charles Negy because he dared to publicly express viewpoints out of step with the prevailing campus orthodoxy on anti-racism," Harris wrote in the 41-page complaint.
"After Charles Negy posted several tweets to his personal Twitter account expressing his view that, contrary to the ascendant orthodoxy on campus, Blacks are not systematically oppressed in the United States, he became the target of a Twitter mob that demanded he be fired. Protests erupted at UCF and even at Negy’s home, leading him to require police protection," the complaint continued. "Forbidden by the First Amendment to explicitly fire him for his tweets, UCF administrators publicly solicited people to come forward with complaints of discrimination and harassment against Professor Negy and then launched a malicious, pretextual investigation into every aspect of his 22-year career at the university."
The complaint stated that Negy was interrogated for nine hours as part of the school’s probe, and the professor was "barraged" with hundreds of allegations by a senior university administrator.
"The interrogation — which included wide-ranging allegations, many of which bordered on the absurd — made clear that UCF was not merely investigating Negy for alleged harassment and discrimination, but rather was looking for any information it could use to get rid of a faculty member who had become politically inconvenient to the university administration," Harris wrote.
The complaint said Negy, who was fired in Jan. 2021, did not receive six months’ notice of termination after an "inapplicable exception" to the collective bargaining agreement was triggered.
"As a result of this sudden loss of income, Negy — who is the sole caretaker of his mentally and physically disabled brother — was forced to sell his home and move in with a relative," Harris wrote.
In May 2022, an arbitrator ordered the university to reinstate Negy with back pay and benefits, finding he was terminated without just cause.
"However, the award cannot compensate Negy for the massive loss he incurred on the sale of his home; for the out-of-pocket medical expenses he faced after UCF’s destruction of his life led him to be diagnosed with anxiety and depression; or for the severe emotional distress he suffered for nearly two years at the hands of UCF administrators who, because they disliked his political views, treated him as less than human," Harris wrote.
Cornell Law School professor and Legal Insurrection Foundation president William A. Jacobson. (FOX)
Jacobson believes Negy has a legitimate case that the university unfairly retaliated against him.
"He's alleging that he went through almost two years of extreme pain and suffering, extreme hardship that cannot be restored merely by giving him his job back with back pay," he said. "Of course, the facts are going to have to come out. But based on what's been revealed so far, it does look like he has a very strong claim that he was subject to retaliation."
Harris feels that Negy’s lawsuit is particularly important because it "isn’t just about him," and being awarded his job back through arbitration doesn’t change the university’s actions.
"I think that since 2020, it has been very much focused around these issues of racial tension and people who say anything that diverges from what has kind of become the official orthodoxy on campus, which is not only that racism is a terrible thing that we should all be concerned with, with which I think all good and moral people can agree on, but that America is a systemically racist country. And if you don't believe that, then you are a racist," Harris said. "Part of what he's asking the court to do is to issue injunctive relief, declaring that this was a violation of his First Amendment rights… these types of lawsuits have a nationwide effect."
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Fox News Digital reached out to the University of Central Florida for comment.
Fox News' Jon Brown contributed to this report.