A history professor in Texas sued her former employer after the university fired her for criticizing the campus’s COVID-19 rules and attacking former Vice President Mike Pence on Twitter.
Lora Burnett is a former professor at Collin College, where she taught history. Burnett has partnered with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education to sue Collin College and its president, H. Neil Matkin. The lawsuit is being filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, accusing the school of firing her unjustly for expressing personal opinions.
“Professors like me shouldn’t lose our jobs just because we have opinions,” Burnett said in a press release. “In the classroom, my job is to teach the material and to hold open a space where students can freely express themselves and fully engage with the ideas we’re talking about. Outside the classroom, I have the right to express myself too.”
During the 2020 vice presidential debates, Burnett tweeted, “The moderator needs to talk over Mike Pence until he shuts his little demon mouth up.”
The tweet caught the attention of Texas State Rep. Jeff Leach, who texted Matkin to see if Burnett was “paid with taxpayer dollars.” Matkin responded by noting that Burnett was “already on my radar” and that he intended to “deal with it.”
Burnett also challenged Matkin in January 2021 over his claim that the pandemic was “blown utterly out of proportion.” The history professor noted that COVID-19 had already killed at least one other professor during the pandemic.
Nine days later, Burnett was notified that her contract would not be renewed due to “insubordination, making private personnel issues public that impair the college’s operations, and personal criticisms of co-workers, supervisors, and/or those who merely disagree with you.”
Leach tweeted his approval of the decision to end Burnett’s contract prematurely, calling it a “BIG WIN.”
The university would later spend four months attempting to hide the details of Leach and Matkin’s text chain from the courts.
Burnett and FIRE hope that the judge will declare Collin College’s termination of Burnett’s contract to be a violation of the First Amendment. They also wish to see Collin College rehire Burnett and the judge award her compensatory damages.
FIRE, an organization that advocates for free speech on college campuses, named Collin College in its 2021 “10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech” over its treatment of Lora Burnett.
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Collin College is a public community college in Collin County, Texas. As of 2021, the college had more than 35,000 students in attendance.
Collin College did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner.
