WE NEED FREE SPEECH ON CAMPUS, EVEN FOR IDIOTS: Texas Tech Investigates Professor for Social Media Posts: The AFA objects. “Funez-Flores has shared his thoughts on the events in Israel and Gaza on social media. As with many academics, his views on Israel are controversial. In his case, expressing his private political opinions on social media resulted in his being suspended, investigated, and threatened with termination by his state university employer.”

From the Academic Freedom Alliance: “There can be no question that the social media posts of Professor Funez-Flores are constitutionally protected expressions of private political opinions and cannot themselves form the basis of university discipline. For the university to explicitly leverage complaints about such social media posts into grounds for a fishing expedition into the professor’s professional conduct on campus is not only inconsistent with the university’s policies and constitutional commitments but has a direct chilling effect on all members of the faculty who might wish to engage in their own constitutionally protected expressive activities on controversial topics. The publicly announced suspension and investigation is itself a form of punishment, and the stated cause of this punishment is that the faculty member engaged in protected political expression that some found ‘hateful, antisemitic, and unacceptable.'”

That’s right, and Texas Tech should know better. The only bright side is that as campus leftists face the kind of negative repercussions for their speech that they’ve been happily doling out to conservatives and libertarians, perhaps they’ll once again support free speech. Perhaps.