Professor Who Questioned Systemic Racism Sues the University That Fired Him

In modern academia, doctrines like systemic racism become orthodoxy because they fit the agenda that the left wants to foist on society. It doesn’t help that these doctrines go unchallenged too often and when people do push back, leftist institutions turn them into pariahs.

Meet Charles Negy. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in the spring and summer of 2020 when the outrage over the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd boiled over into protests across the country.

Negy posted two tweets that he later deleted, but Fox News saved the text of them to recount the beginning of his controversy. He tweeted, “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?”

Another tweet read, “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.”

At the time of the tweets, the school newspaper cited a statement from UCF President Alexander Cartwright that “systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, and other hateful ideologies seek to deny shared humanity and must be called out and confronted. Cartwright said they do not reflect the values of the UCF community.”

(Remember that UCF is the school that anointed itself the 2017 National Champions in football despite the fact that the College Football Playoff committee didn’t include UCF in that year’s playoff. UCF put up a sign in its stadium and even wrapped a police car touting the pretend championship, so it stands to reason that the university would buy the fallacy that standing up to the idea of systemic racism is “hateful.”)

UCF fired Negy but later reinstated him at the direction of an arbitrator, and now he is suing UCF.

“In terms of the pure mistreatment of a faculty member by a university, this is one of the worst cases I have seen. And, you know, not only because he was punished in retaliation for his protected tweets, but also because when they decided to punish him, they decided to treat him like less than human,” said Negy’s attorney Samantha Harris to Fox News.

“Charles Negy, in many ways, is the poster child for what goes wrong when DEI takes over a campus, what goes wrong for free speech and for academic freedom,” agreed Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson.

“This is really one of the worst examples I’ve seen where a university, to placate the mob and also because they don’t like his opinions, really used the entire machinery of a major public university and taxpayer funding to go get this professor,” Jacobson added.

For the school’s part, UCF maintains that it didn’t fire Negy specifically for the tweets but because students and other faculty complained.

“[T]he University of Central Florida (UCF) harassed and retaliated against Professor Charles Negy because he dared to publicly express viewpoints out of step with the prevailing campus orthodoxy on anti-racism,” reads the complaint.

“After Charles Negy posted several tweets to his personal Twitter account expressing his view that, contrary to the ascendant orthodoxy on campus, Blacks are not systematically oppressed in the United States, he became the target of a Twitter mob that demanded he be fired. Protests erupted at UCF and even at Negy’s home, leading him to require police protection,” the complaint continued. “Forbidden by the First Amendment to explicitly fire him for his tweets, UCF administrators publicly solicited people to come forward with complaints of discrimination and harassment against Professor Negy and then launched a malicious, pretextual investigation into every aspect of his 22-year career at the university.”

We’ll be watching this one to see what happens. Good for Negy for standing up to the leftist orthodoxy on display at UCF.