An English professor at South Florida State College was fired for assigning an award-winning short story to her freshman class. Now Vinita Prabhakar is suing her former employer, reports the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, claiming it breached her First Amendment rights.
Prabhakar, who has 20 years of experience teaching, assigned Ottessa Moshfegh’s Bettering Myself, first published in The Paris Review and winner of the Plimpton Prize to illustrate unreliable narrators. Written in an intimate first-person perspective, the story follows a Catholic school teacher who the reader learns not to trust.
“For 20 years, I’ve taught students how to engage with stories that excite them, challenge them, and broaden their experience of what it means to be human,” wrote Prabhakar. “If what happened to me becomes the norm, colleges across America will become less curious, less vibrant, and less free.”
According to her lawsuit, SFSC President Fred Hawkins summoned Prabhakar to a meeting and ordered her to stop teaching the story. The only reason he gave was that it was “political” and she was fired the next day without a hearing and without being told what policy she had violated.
Hawkins, then a Republican state legislator, was appointed to run the school after being named the sole candidate for the position. Hawkins has no experience working in higher education and resigned his House seat to take the job.
Prabhakar is represented by FIRE’s Gary Edinger, who said firing a public college professor over the viewpoint of assigned course material violates the First Amendment and called the firing “a betrayal of every principle that a university is supposed to embrace.”
And here’s FIRE senior attorney Greg Greubel: “President Hawkins cannot dictate which viewpoints belong in the classroom.”
Though Hawkins is an ally of Governor Ron DeSantis and plainly empowered to act as a political commissar at SFSC, Prabhakar’s case lands in a circuit that just addressed the question directly. Earlier this month, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the higher-education provisions of Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act,“ rejecting the state’s argument that professors’ classroom instruction is government speech it may control as “positively dystopian.”
She was fired for teaching English literature in an English class. Now she’s suing. [FIRE]
