“NO CLASS TODAY,” read the email. It was the morning after the November 2024 presidential election. “Need time to mourn and process this racist, fascist country.”
The email rapidly spread on social media and would soon unravel the career of Prof. James Bowley, who had sent it to the three students enrolled in his “Abortion and Religions” class at Millsaps College. One of them shared it on Instagram. The professor was ordered to leave campus the next day.
The episode reflected a growing clampdown on campus speech that had been gaining steam since the onset of pro-Palestinian campus protests. And it presaged the enormous current backlash against teachers and professors following the killing of Charlie Kirk. Many of those educators now face investigations or dismissal after voicing criticism of Mr. Kirk.
The American Association of University Professors, an organization founded to defend academic freedom, said it was aware of retaliation against about 60 professors and teachers in connection with critical comments they made about Mr. Kirk or people mourning him.
Faculty First Responders, an organization that works with the association to advise educators who are the victim of doxxing and harassment campaigns, has reached out to 35 academic workers in the past week, most of them professors, whose comments about Mr. Kirk have been spread in right-wing media, according to Heather Steffen, the group’s director.
At Clemson University, a public institution in South Carolina, two professors and a staff member have been fired over social media posts, including one that called the murder of Mr. Kirk “swift and ironic” karma because of offensive things Mr. Kirk had said over the years. The firings followed pressure from Republican politicians.
A law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock was suspended after comparing people mourning Mr. Kirk to the Ku Klux Klan.
A retired professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law lost his emeritus status, which gave him special campus privileges, over a social media post that referred to Mr. Kirk. A campus publication, the Independent Florida Alligator, reported that the post said, “I did not want him to die,” and added, “I reserve that wish for Mr. Trump.”
The Texas Education Agency has said it is investigating hundreds of employees at elementary or secondary schools for similar reasons.
The campaigns to silence educators who speak critically of figures on the political right have been effective, suggesting they are likely to expand, Dr. Steffen said. “I’m concerned that this will continue to be a strategy used to limit free speech and academic freedom,” she said.
The strategy has the endorsement of the Trump Administration, as evidenced by comments Vice President JD Vance made recently to Fox News. While acknowledging that the First Amendment protects “very ugly speech,” he added, “If you are a university professor who benefits from American tax dollars, you should not be celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death, and if you are, maybe you should lose your job or your university should face a loss of funding.”
Dr. Bowley, the former Millsaps professor, is a scholar of religion and an expert on the political and social factors that gave rise to the Holocaust. He said he was considering suing Millsaps, a small United Methodist Church-affiliated college in Jackson, Miss., where he had taught for 23 years, over his dismissal.
Dr. Bowley said he believed he was a victim of homegrown American fascism. “I did not use the word fascist lightly,” he said.
Officials at Millsaps declined to be interviewed about the matter, citing privacy concerns. They said in a written statement that “Millsaps is dedicated to academic excellence and open inquiry.”
The American Civil Liberties Union has condemned the firings, saying they infringe on the First Amendment rights of the educators.
If they choose to mount a legal fight, fired employees of public institutions, which are bound by the First Amendment, probably have better chances of prevailing in court than those fired from private institutions.
In a letter last week, for example, Alan Wilson, the attorney general of South Carolina, wrote to Clemson, saying that if the dismissed professors believed their First Amendment rights were violated, they may sue the university. “However,” he wrote, “it should be noted that the First Amendment is not absolute.”
Although some states have restricted the ability of private employers to fire employees for their opinions or speech, in many places private employers have broader discretion to do so than public employers do.
The killing of Mr. Kirk, an influential figure on the right, devastated his fans and people close to President Trump, who has himself been the target of assassination attempts. Mr. Kirk’s supporters, including many in the Trump administration, have made strong statements in the past supporting free speech, no matter how ugly. But now, many of those same officials are trying to limit speech that they say could lead to more violence.
Mr. Kirk, who was known for making statements that were often criticized as racist, antisemitic and sexist, declared himself to be a proponent of free speech. Though comments made by some of his critics may seem callous and inappropriate in the wake of his shooting, even some of his right-leaning supporters have defended people’s right to say them.
Most of the attacks on professors have come from the right, but progressive activists have also waged campaigns at times against educators and others they disagree with.
In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the unrest that it spawned, Charles Negy, a psychology professor at the University of Central Florida, found himself under attack over his social media posts about race. “Black privilege is real,” he wrote.
When the university tried to fire him, he sued on First Amendment grounds, and in May, a federal judge ruled that his case could proceed.
Proponents of academic freedom see the current crackdown on professors as an assault on freedom of expression that echoes dark periods in American history. At Brooklyn College, where four adjunct professors were dismissed this year for their pro-Palestinian activism, a faculty union called the movement to curb educators’ speech the “New McCarthyism.”
One of the four, Corinna Mullin, who was an adjunct professor of political science said that recent developments show that academic freedom is not a universal right but a conditional privilege.
“And it seems that it’s granted or withdrawn based on the context of our speech — those who echo power are shielded,” said Dr. Mullin, who was arrested during a police raid on a Gaza Solidarity encampment at City College in 2024. Trespassing charges against her were later dropped.
She said she believed that activists on the right will continue to expand their attacks to take in “all speech on the left associated with social justice, racial justice, all these uncomfortable truths that challenge power in this country.”
In written statement, a spokesman for Brooklyn College, Richard Pietras, said the school strongly supports freedom of expression. He said the college chose not to reappoint the four adjunct faculty members based on their conduct, not their political beliefs. He declined to give more specifics.
Katherine Franke, a well-known professor at Columbia Law School, was forced to retire in January following comments she made criticizing Columbia students who had served recently in the Israeli Defense Forces over what she viewed as the students’ harassment of Palestinian students.
She said in an interview that the growing attacks on Mr. Kirk’s critics was a frightening, but not surprising, next step.
“In some ways, this bears a family resemblance to the Red scare of the 1950s,” Ms. Franke said. “In other ways, this is different. It’s not just a single ideology, and it’s not just one senator. It’s an across-the-board exercise of the whole of government to bully universities, law firms, the media, all of us into a kind of obedience.”
A recent case at Texas A&M University illustrates the increasing breadth and depth of outside influence over speech on university campuses. A professor there was fired over a lecture about gender expression, an episode that also spurred last week’s resignation of the university’s president, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III.
The controversy arose after a student circulated a video of an exchange with the professor over the lecture — an increasingly common worry for professors. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas and other Republican state politicians complained ti the university about the lecture.
Turning Point USA, the campus group Mr. Kirk led, often placed giant beach balls on campuses and invited students to write on them, in a symbolic exercise of their free speech rights. Mr. Kirk also invited students to debate him, advocating “reasonable disagreements.”
In several instances, Mr. Kirk has used the First Amendment to sue universities that tried to block his organization’s campus presence.
But critics have argued that Mr. Kirk’s promotion of free speech was riddled with hypocrisy. Matthew Boedy, a professor at the University of North Georgia who has written a book that focuses heavily on Mr. Kirk, “The Seven Mountains Mandate,” called Mr. Kirk’s stance “an empty support of free speech.”
Turning Point’s efforts to target professors it sees as radical dates back nearly a decade, to 2016, when it began asking students to report professors who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Some of the educators whose names were put on the group’s “watch list” have said they became the targets of merciless harassment on social media.
A spokesman for Turning Point USA, Andrew Kolvet, said the watch list “doesn’t target professors.” “It simply organizes already public statements, articles or quotes professors make, putting them in one easy-to-find places as a resource for parents and prospective students,” Mr. Kolvet continued. “Families deserve to know what professors really believe.”
But Dr. Boedy, whose name was placed on the list over an opinion piece he wrote criticizing legislation that permitted weapons on campus, said the list was “a prime example of their free speech hypocrisy — they’re targeting people they don’t like.”