What the Charlie Kirk Fallout Reveals About Professors’ Job Security—And Yours

Women mourn Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk at a memorial outside of the organization’s headquarters. The conservative political activist was killed on Sept. 10. (Charly Triballeau / AFP /Getty Images)

About the author: Deepa Das Acevedo is an associate professor at Emory Law School and author of The War on Tenure (Cambridge, 2025).

Middle Tennessee State, East Tennessee State, Cumberland, Clemson, Emory. Universities—especially in red states—seem to be racing one another to fire faculty for social media comments responding to Charlie Kirk’s murder. Tenured jobs that are supposedly for life are vanishing in a matter of hours after closed-door meetings.

According to one count, at least 40 university faculty and staff have been terminated, suspended, or investigated for their comments on Kirk. Their comments vary widely in tone and content. Joshua Bregy, a now-terminated paleoclimatologist at Clemson, reposted someone else’s post on X that “karma is sometimes swift and ironic.” Darren Michael, a tenured professor of theater at Austin Peay State University, was fired, then suspended, for posting a screenshot of an old news headline that stated “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.”

Others were harsher. But many lawyers, including conservative ones, recognize that these types of comments rarely meet the standard for legally actionable “true threats.” The First Amendment doesn’t demand good taste.

Professors are scared—but they aren’t surprised. Faculty on the right and the left have long faced discipline or termination for personal speech and action. In fact, this kind of “extramural speech” was a driving force behind developing tenure as a type of job security in the early 20th century because so many professors were being fired at that time for controversial—but legal—speech.

In 1913, Wesleyan University demanded the resignation of economist William C. Fisher because of a lecture he gave to a private social club in Hartford, Conn. While commenting on Connecticut’s strict laws prohibiting certain business activities, such as selling alcohol, on Sundays, Fisher “wondered aloud how society might benefit if churches instead of businesses were ordered closed on Sundays.”

Mild as Fisher’s comment might seem today, it scandalized one of his listeners into speaking with a newspaper reporter about the lecture. The reporter’s story went national—the New York Times declared that Fisher wanted churches closed on Sundays. Wesleyan’s president asked Fisher to resign.

Fisher wasn’t speaking on behalf of Wesleyan, but he also couldn’t have hidden his status as a Wesleyan employee. Hartford is around 20 miles from Middletown, where Wesleyan is located and where Fisher had twice been mayor.

Social media has transformed the world into a type of small-town Connecticut. Many of today’s terminated professors were posting in their individual capacities on personal accounts. They weren’t speaking as university employees. But—like most of us—their accounts identify where they work. And much like Fisher, these professors have discovered what they thought was a personal conversation can blow up into a national affair that ends with termination or forced resignation.

Tenure was supposed to protect faculty from this kind of fallout. It is a type of “just cause” contract that requires universities to articulate a valid reason for firing someone and provide due process beforehand. In theory, if you are tenured and let go for anything short of clear misconduct or professional failure, you have legal recourse. But in practice, courts rarely force reinstatement. Instead, they often award money—assuming you can afford to sue.

For most workers, a firing is a setback. For academics, it can be the end of the line. With only a handful of universities in any state, being let go often means leaving the industry entirely—an industry it took these faculty a decade to train for and that pays most of them far less than their credentials could command in the general labor market. Job security used to be one of the few benefits of academia. Now it is unclear whether tenure is meaningfully on offer.

But faculty firings aren’t just career casualties. They are cultural ones. Firing scholars over constitutionally protected speech sends a signal to professors—and to students—that difference, dissent, and discomfort are liabilities. That the safest way to exist in public is to stay silent. That your employer can and will punish you for being provocative, even off the clock.

And that message is spreading.

In the past few weeks, Delta Air Lines and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta have both suspended or fired employees over Charlie Kirk-related posts. A Nasdaq strategist, a sports journalist, a Big Law attorney, and even a Carolina Panthers staffer have been dismissed for similar reasons. What is happening to professors isn’t isolated. It is part of a new reality in which every employee is presumed to represent their employer 24/7—online and off—and can be punished for controversial speech.

This isn’t a higher ed problem. It is a labor problem. And if it hasn’t come for your sector yet, it will.

Terrified educators don’t teach students to think freely. But just as importantly, terrified workers don’t build bold companies. They don’t challenge ideas, question decisions, or take creative risks. If your workforce has been trained to fear being visible, then what you are building isn’t innovative. It is compliant.

If even tenured professors aren’t safe, who is?

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