Lora Burnett headshotThis week on The PEN Pod, Jonathan Friedman, PEN America’s director of Free Expression and Education, spoke with Lora Burnett, who has been engaged in an escalating battle with the leaders of Collin College over their response to COVID-19 and her right to criticize their decisions. She was recently notified her contract would not be renewed for the fall semester for “insubordinate conduct.” We spoke to Lora about this decision and the potential ramifications it could have for universities moving forward. Check out the full episode below (our interview with Lora begins at the 13:25 mark), and read PEN America’s full statement on her dismissal.

What makes you think that Collin College is retaliating against you for your previous criticisms?
Well, partly because they told me so, and in their letter informing me that my contract wouldn’t be renewed, and because of what they’ve said in past communications. In October, I came on the national right-wing attention span momentarily for tweeting something critical about Mike Pence during the vice presidential debates that was picked up by a campus reform propagandist, and then shoveled it from there to Fox News.

So I had a lot of public criticism coming my way from email and on social media—which is fine by the way. I believe in other people’s First Amendment rights to criticize me for things that I say on Twitter. That’s fair game. And my college also received these communications, including—as my college president Neil Matkin said—calls and contacts from legislators. That’s what he claimed, that people were calling who were elected representatives, who were contacting the college to fire me over a single tweet about Mike Pence talking over the woman moderator of the debate.

Because of how the college responded to that public criticism, which was not to issue a simple statement like, “Our employees on Twitter don’t represent our views, and they have first amendment rights”—the college could’ve handled that in a sentence—instead, the college president issued this long email to all my colleagues. It went to all faculty and all staff on every campus decrying my horrible choice to make political statements on Twitter as if this were somehow something that doesn’t happen on Twitter every day, all the time, and saying that personnel actions aren’t going to be played out in public, but implying that they were coming.

“I realized everything about it is because of COVID, and because I joined some of my colleagues this summer in collectively asking for a change in the college’s COVID plans. I was one of many colleagues who signed an open white paper. it was open in the sense that it circulated among faculty asking the college to reconsider its plan for mostly face-to-face instruction in the fall. I guess that’s what put me on Neil Matkin’s ‘radar screen,’ as he put it, when school reopened in the fall.”

Then he posted a public statement on the college’s webpage that called my speech “vile, hateful and ill-considered.” His claim to have been contacted by legislators caught the eye of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). It caught the eye of Adam Steinbaugh at FIRE, and so, he issued a Freedom of Information Act request that the college has then spent the last four months fighting.

The college fought this FOIA request from October 15th when it was first issued, to January, when the attorney general’s office in the state of Texas finally ruled that yes, the college must turn over these calls and contacts from legislators, and I kind of expected a tranche of documents, and instead, what was turned over was a single text message from a single legislator, who asked the president if I am paid with taxpayer dollars—which I am, as is the college president—and the college president responded by saying, “I’m taking care of this, she was already on my radar screen before the current issue,” and that was really telling for me.

Not only did I discover that the college president greatly exaggerated the political outcry he was getting about a single tweet about Mike Pence on a night when there must have been 50 million tweets about Mike Pence circulating in the Twittersphere, but he told that legislator I was already on his radar screen, and I thought, “For what?” I’ve been at the school as a full-timer for just two semesters before last fall semester with stellar evaluations, all the good stuff, a great relationship with my deans, and great emails from my students. Why would I be on his radar screen?

I realized everything about it is because of COVID, and because I joined some of my colleagues this summer in collectively asking for a change in the college’s COVID plans. I was one of many colleagues who signed an open white paper. it was open in the sense that it circulated among faculty asking the college to reconsider its plan for mostly face-to-face instruction in the fall. I guess that’s what put me on Neil Matkin’s “radar screen,” as he put it, when school reopened in the fall. He sent out an incredibly irresponsible email to all faculty and staff saying that reopening plans are great, we’re ready to roll, our enrollments are good, and that the COVID crisis has been overblown by the media and people are overreacting, and because they have been frightened by the media, and he cited some statistics that were not particularly well-calculated on his part.

“We have different specific circumstances, but for all three of us, we were told that the things we are saying is what’s getting us fired. That we are speaking in a way that goes against the messaging of the college and that is somehow making it difficult for the college to function, because apparently disagreement is enough to make the college stop functioning. That doesn’t say much for the robust humanistic training of whoever’s in charge of the college, but that’s really it.”

He said, “If you have something better, email me and let me know,” and I wrote him a pretty polite email and just said, “I’m not a statistician, I’m not an epidemiologist, and it’s not going to help to send you a raft of statistics, but I do want to ask why you sent this particular message to all of us, because it really minimized the concerns of people with preexisting conditions or people who may have taken extra steps during this pandemic to stay safe.” It was really inconsiderate in that way, and I told him, “I’m sure you didn’t mean to be inconsiderate, but I wonder if you could issue some kind of clarifying statement because as it stands, this is really dismissive of the concerns of so many faculty.”

So this puts you on their radar, and now in hindsight, everything that happened since feels retaliatory. You’re also, I understand, not the first professor who has been effectively terminated for signing that letter.
No, in fact, they kind of tackled us in chronological order. The other two professors who have been fired—all three of us are women. All three of us were fired within less than four weeks of one another, and Professor Audra Heaslip is a humanities professor. She has been the director of the Humanities Center at one of our campuses, and she is the person who took it upon herself to put together that original white paper. It was a document with the latest research available to people at the time when the resolution circulated and provided space for faculty to sign the statement, which requested a greater faculty voice and as much online teaching as possible. There was no request for 100 percent online, but as much online teaching as possible.

So she wrote this very well-written and very well-argued position paper and invited all the faculty to sign it, and the signing statements were absolutely heartbreaking. Signing statements from people who had had family members die of COVID, signing statements from people who have preexisting conditions and can’t imagine stepping into a classroom. One hundred and twenty-nine full-time faculty signed that white paper, and parallel to that effort, my other colleague, Suzanne Jones—who is a professor of education—was active in organizing a local chapter of the Texas Faculty Association so that Collin professors would have an organization to help them use their voice to ask for safety and have the administration’s ear for our concerns.

Professor Heaslip and Professor Jones were fired first, and then my firing came almost four weeks later, and we have different specific circumstances, but for all three of us, we were told that the things we are saying is what’s getting us fired. That we are speaking in a way that goes against the messaging of the college and that is somehow making it difficult for the college to function, because apparently disagreement is enough to make the college stop functioning. That doesn’t say much for the robust humanistic training of whoever’s in charge of the college, but that’s really it. The three of us were canned for talking to the press, for talking online, for talking to one another about what the college has done that has been so unsafe.

“Who has suffered the most during this pandemic in terms of job losses that aren’t coming back? It’s been minorities and women, and it’s a little bit chilling to say the least—and I think deliberately chilling—as in a deliberate attempt to chill free speech, for the college to single out three women for firing, when every statistic we have shows the losses that have accrued to women professionally, because of this pandemic and the sustained loss of jobs that are not coming back.”

We had a professor die of COVID last fall, we had a student die of COVID last fall, and just last night at the board meeting—which was broadcast online, where 200 people showed up to protest on behalf of all three of us—right after 30 minutes of public comment and then some board meeting business, and then another 20 minutes of public comment, only then did the college president announce that we have lost three more Collin faculty members. It was just outrageous, it was buried in the middle of this meeting, and as part of the president’s report: “First, we’re sorry to announce the death of these members of our Collin family. Next, let me tell you about basketball trivia night.” I mean, really that crass. So that’s why I can say, with some confidence, that the college is retaliating against me for my speech, because there’s a literal text message from a legislator to the college president asking him to do just that, and he’s done it.

And not just you, but these colleagues as well. I mean, I think it’s pretty blatant and a bit shocking to think that a college would decide that some kind of dissent or disagreement about these issues would be so unwelcome or detrimental when it’s really quite core to what the academy stands for. I wonder if you can put your historian hat on for just a minute—what worries you about your treatment at Collin in light of the broader cultural and political moment we’re in as a country?
There are a few things at work, and of course one of them is this economic moment that we’re in. Who has suffered the most during this pandemic in terms of job losses that aren’t coming back? It’s been minorities and women, and it’s a little bit chilling to say the least—and I think deliberately chilling—as in a deliberate attempt to chill free speech, for the college to single out three women for firing, when every statistic we have shows the losses that have accrued to women professionally, because of this pandemic and the sustained loss of jobs that are not coming back. So that’s part of it, that’s a real concern.

I think historically, people need to understand the connection between the outcries about liberal professors and this sort of long-term plan that has been effectuated and paid for by some libertarian activists and profiteers who are looking to defund public higher education. These two things go together: the outcry against professors or higher education or postmodernism or whatever the signal of the moment is, and the calls to defund higher education. In fall 2020, our own president at the college talked about how he was working toward the “Amazonification of Collin College.” That was his exact word, the “Amazonification of Collin College,” to transform the school into a nimble organization. If you hear the word “nimble” applied to a college, run.

There’s nothing nimble about the careful scholarly consideration and pursuit of knowledge. It’s the slow growth kind of life. So he wants to turn it into a nimble organization, he says, that can respond quickly to changing business conditions. I guess for nimble organizations and Amazon and organizations that want to be like Amazon, dissent or disagreement—or even discussion—grinds their gears. It gets in the way of their plans for efficiency, homogeneity, and turning us all into cogs that are going to produce identical and interchangeable bunches of knowledge that we can just drop into passive students’ heads. That’s really the vision behind this. It’s a weird 21st-century Taylorism.

“The endgame of that narrative is to end up with a bill like the bill that’s being discussed in the Florida legislature, where students who want to major in history or English don’t get financial aid, and that creates this suspicion around the very disciplines that encourage critical thinking and careful evaluation of information and sources. Those are the disciplines that can help people to become resistant to being turned into cogs in a machine. . . They’re punishing their own students by taking away from them opportunities to imagine a world beyond their own horizons, and that’s a real shame.”

In the ’80s and ’90s, the scary buzzword for these libertarian profiteers was “political correctness”: “Be aware of political correctness.” Today, the buzzword is “cancel culture,” right? This is a new packaging, the same idea that somehow higher education is a threat to free speech and free discourse. And so, what happens is that somebody in the ’90s cries, “Political correctness!” or somebody today, like Jim Jordan in the House of Representatives says, “We need hearings on cancel culture!” This creates this narrative that colleges are wasting taxpayer dollars, and the result of that narrative is very deliberate.

What’s the result of that narrative? The endgame of that narrative is to end up with a bill like the bill that’s being discussed in the Florida legislature, where students who want to major in history or English don’t get financial aid, and that creates this suspicion around the very disciplines that encourage critical thinking and careful evaluation of information and sources. Those are the disciplines that can help people to become resistant to being turned into cogs in a machine. Those are the disciplines where people learn to argue, so those are the disciplines that they would like to see disappear when the village morality police start to punish liberal professors for violating the norms of the community. They’re not sticking it to the liberal elites on the coast—they’re sticking it to their own students. They’re punishing their own students by taking away from them opportunities to imagine a world beyond their own horizons, and that’s a real shame.

I hope that college professors who hear this will talk to their colleagues, join the AAUP or your local faculty association even if it doesn’t provide collective bargaining rights, and speak up together for one another if any of you are ever targeted by a right-wing outrage machine. Speak with one voice to your administrators and say, “This is an organized campaign that we can safely ignore because it has no bearing on the quality of our colleagues’ performances as a faculty member.” I think those things would help a lot.