Last month De Paul University made the unwise move of suspending a professor for expressing views--outside of class, in the context of heated dialogue--that offended some pro-Palestinian students. When those students complained, Klocek was relieved of his duties, without ever having a chance to face his accusers. De Paul's viewpoint discrimination against Klocek, as well as its failure to accord him the due process that the school guarantees professors, were glaringly obvious; the media picked up Klocek's story, and FIRE announced that it was defending him.

The case has now taken an unusual turn: Klocek filed a defamation lawsuit against De Paul last Tuesday, alleging that the university damaged his reputation by characterizing him as racist and bigoted. FIRE's David French notes that De Paul also suggested that Klocek suffered from unspecified health problems that interfered with his work.

As an adjunct, Klocek never really had the same rights and protections as tenure-track faculty; his position made him exceptionally vulnerable to the sort of arbitrary and unlawful attack De Paul visited on him when he committed the cardinal sin of offending students by rejecting their political viewpoint. As De Paul dean Susanne Dumbleton put it in a letter to the student paper, "The students' perspective was dishonored and their freedom demeaned. Individuals were deeply insulted. ... Our college acted immediately by removing the instructor from the classroom." De Paul president Dennis Holtschneider later echoed that sentiment when he characterized Klocek's actions--which amounted to exchanging heated words with several students at a student activities fair--as "threatening and unprofessional behavior." Usually, when institutions punish professors for their speech, those professors defend themselves by appealing to the principles of academic freedom and, if the school is public, to the First Amendment. But adjuncts don't do well with such defenses and are usually just screwed when their speech becomes an issue. A defamation suit--one that also cites breach of contract, as Klocek's does--is an interesting end run around the problem. If it works, there may be a whole lot more such suits where this one came from.

Via Sherman Dorn.

"...their [the students'] freedom [was] demeaned."

What does this mean? How can you demean somebody's freedom? I don't think I could work for somebody who is capable of making such an idiotic statement.

I just put up a post on this matter:

>What Is Going on at DePaul?