Florida Atlantic University administrators were investigating three professors over their public reactions to Charlie Kirk’s killing.
The public research university in Boca Raton identified the professors on administrative leave as Karen Leader, Rebel Cole, and Kate Polak.
“What I did is posted or reposted a lot of content that offered proof that he had said vile things,” Leader recently told WPTV about her reaction to Kirk’s assassination on X.
Leader, who teaches art history, said she and the other two professors — Cole, who teaches finance, and Kate Polak, who teaches English — have a First Amendment defense in common.
“Any university administrator who pursues actions against faculty for exercising their free speech should be terminated for wasting university funds,” Cole wrote on Friday on X. “Any university General Counsel who failed to advise their superiors also should be terminated. The settled case law is clear.”
Before the professor’s responses, Adam Hausner, the president of FAU, released a statement on FAU’s X account saying there were “specific processes regarding tenured faculty members” and the focus was “on our academic community’s responsibility to promote civil discourse, conduct healthy debate, and treat one another with respect.”
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