The chairman of the University of Florida Board of Trustees last week sharply criticized several professors who filed a lawsuit challenging the school’s policies on academic freedom and faculty members’ outside activities.
Professors Sharon Wright Austin, Michael McDonald, Daniel Smith, Jeffrey Goldhagen, Teresa Reid and Kenneth Nunn are suing in federal court over the university’s conflict-of-interest policy. They were initially denied permission to act as expert witnesses in litigation on issues such as the state’s new voting-rights law and coronavirus-related public health policies.
They are now challenging the university’s policy in the Northern District of Florida on free speech grounds.
“We saw that some (of our faculty) have taken advantage of their positions,” Mori Hosseini, chairman of the university Board of Trustees, said at last week’s board meeting. “I am speaking here of faculty members taking second jobs using the university’s state resources for their own personal gain. I am speaking about faculty members who use their position of authority to improperly advocate personal political viewpoints to the exclusion of others.”
The professors’ attorneys challenged the trustees’ rebuke of their clients and affirmed their commitment to the primary mission of the university.
“The University of Florida is fortunate to have professors brave enough to stand up for the First Amendment rights and academic freedom of the faculty,” David O’Neil and Paul Donnelly said in a statement emailed to the Florida Record.
In a Dec. 3 filing with the federal district court, the plaintiffs filed a motion for a preliminary injunction against the university’s recently updated conflict-of-interest policy.
“(The) defendants have suppressed plaintiffs’ speech through the university’s unconstitutional Conflicts of Commitment and Conflicts of Interest Policy … which requires that faculty obtain express permission before speaking in litigation against the state of Florida,” the motion states. “That extraordinarily broad policy provides the university unbridled discretion to restrict faculty speech on public issues based on impermissible considerations that have nothing to do with faculty integrity or discipline.”
The university only made superficial changes to their policies in the wake of recent media criticism, rather than address the need to fully protect professors’ academic freedom and free speech rights to weigh in on controversial issues, the motion says.
“This crisis is not a mere public relations problem that the university can sweep under the rug with a superficial and hastily assembled task force report,” O’Neil and Donnelly said. “It is high time for a court of law to stop the university from violating the First Amendment rights of its faculty and abridging academic freedom.”