UCF Forced to Reinstate Professor Fired After Writing About “Black Privilege”

We previously discussed about the effort to fire University of Central Florida Professor Charles Negy after he tweeted about “black privilege.” UCF President Alexander Cartwright abandoned any pretense of academic freedom or principle in falling to protect a colleague from an anti-free speech campaign. Now, after a major court ruling against the university, an arbitrator has awarded Negy all back pay and benefits from the time of his firing. That is good news. What is not good news is that, despite shredding core principles governing higher education, Cartwright remains the UCF president after seeking to curtail free speech and academic freedom at the university. To the contrary, the university issued a statement that indicated that it is undeterred by the adverse court rulings.Negy, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida, required police protection after he tweeted about what he views as “black privilege.” There was a petition demanding his termination with more than 30,000 signatures and, as we have seen in other schools, his colleagues were virtually silent as Negy was attacked for expressing his views. While classroom misconduct has been raised by some critics, most of the effort (and the focus of this posting) is on his statements on social media. That petition focused on Negy’s statements on social media as unacceptable and grounds for termination:

“We are calling on the University of Central Florida to dismiss psychology professor Charles Negy due to abhorrent racist comments he has made and continues to make on his personal Twitter account. In addition to racism, Negy has engaged in perverse transphobia and sexism on his account, which is just as reprehensible. While he has a right to free speech, he does not have a right to dehumanize students of color and other minority groups, which is a regular occurance [sic] in his classroom. By allowing him to continue in his position, UCF would simply be empowering another cog in the machine of systemic racism.”

Negy faced protests at his home and on campus, according to news reports after he explored the concept of “white shaming” as an academic, including his book “White Shaming: Bullying Based on Prejudice, Virtue-Signaling, and Ignorance.”

Negy’s work is highly controversial and his tweets have inflamed critics. In a now deleted tweet, he wrote “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.”

He has also written, again on Twitter, “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?”

Again, the question is not the merits or tenor of such writings but the right of academics to express...

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