TL;DR: University of Tennessee-Chattanooga assistant football coach Chris Malone has sued, saying his 1st Amendment rights were violated. Malone tweeted:
30 minutes later he deleted the tweet.
Tennessee is a right-to-work state, meaning employers can fire people at-will, but clearly this involves a government employer.
IMHO, this is a closer case. The coach’s criticism does not go to the heart of the football program. However, the way he conducted himself in his comments (calling Abrams fat in a couple of different ways) can cause embarrassment to the team. And, as I stated in the other thread, if he wants to get drunk and tell his buddies that Stacey Abrams is a fat pig, then that should be largely left alone due to alcohol and venting. If he purposely says it where virtually anyone will now be able to see it, he is making it a public event.
I might make a different decision, but I support the power of the school to fire him.
Whether the state has at-will employment is not particularly relevant to whether this guy has a case. You can fire someone for no reason, but you can’t fire them for a protected reason.
Just like you can’t fire someone for being black or a woman, the government can’t fire someone for protected speech. And if you are an employee of the government, there’s a whole mess of 1st Amendment precedent that goes into determining what counts as protected speech, which I am not an expert on, but my understanding is that it largely boils down to whether the speech was related to your job responsibilities.
In this case, it seems like it’s not (I don’t think that tweeting about GA elections are part of a TN football coach’s job description), and this guy has a legitimate case.
I think the school is justified because being an assistant football coach is a high profile public position who represents the University. They are justified in holding such employees to a high standard of decorum whenever they are in public, whether in a job-related context or not.
If he had been, like 99% of University employees, someone who nobody in the general public would have ever heard of, he would have a better case. If his speech had been merely politically controversial without being rude and creepy, he would have a better case. Given this particular constellation of circumstances, I don’t see this as being a tough call.
There’s definitely a limit, legally, because it’s a multi-part test and most of the Supreme Court decisions have been murky 5-4 decisions with several different dissents, but I couldn’t say exactly where it is.
At least part of the test is how much the statement interferes with the employee’s execution of their job and their employers mission. By that standard I would argue that the n-word is over the line.
I should clarify that when I say “this guy has a legitimate case” I don’t mean I’m certain he’ll win or even that I think he’s likely to win, but it’s not a totally crazy legal theory.
I’m not sure that we should let the government fire you for being an asshole on twitter for 30 minutes.
I’m sure he has players that show up for summer camp that are fat and out of shape. The school could argue that his dismissive and insulting comments about fat people would interfere with its mission.
I suspect you meant to type “Tennessee” since that’s where the coach worked, but I looked it up just in case, and confirmed that Tennessee is an at-will state.
I think the problem is that there are a lot of government employees in roles that don’t really feel “government.”
I mean, if we like the idea of first amendment protections for government employees who participate in political speech outside of work, then it seems like this guy should be protected. But somehow “assistant football coach” doesn’t feel like a “real” government employee to me.
(Of course, there are people who don’t believe that any employer should be able to fire an employee for off-duty political speech. And a few jurisdictions that have such laws. But that’s not a constitutional issue).
The thing about both of these cases is that good old fashioned shame would have had the same result as official dismissal without the messy constitutional issues. Both would have been persona non grata in their present positions and and would likely have left of their own accord. Government entities trying to regulate the speech of students and employees outside of their ordinary duties isn’t just unconstitutional; it’s just plain dumb.
Me neither. But this gets into the question of whether these decisions should be left to the administration or whether the Supreme Court should act as a national HR department making a complex set of rules that everyone must follow. I prefer the former. You have a right to free speech. You don’t have a right to be an assistant football coach.
I’m not sure what outcome I’d prefer. This case is a tricky one, but if you look at the past cases that established these kinds of rights, they seem like the kind of thing that should be protected. They’re things like a teacher arguing that the public school administration is doing a bad job with the budget and getting fired, or a district attorney suggesting that someone promoted above him is not as effective at his job and getting fired.
That kind of speech really is legitimately in the public interest to happen and people (teachers, prosecutors) employed by the government should be able to say it without being fired.
This tweet is basically
A conspiracy theory about election fraud
Invective
#1 is obviously bullshit, but election fraud is definitely the sort of thing that’s in the public interest if it were actually happening. And the 1st Amendment doesn’t get to be about correctness or you have the government deciding what’s true and punishing people who don’t toe the line. #2 makes us all dislike this guy, but the 1st Amendment also doesn’t get to distinguish on decorum. “Fuck the draft” is legitimate political speech (Cohen v. California) as is burning a flag. Offensive speech is not a category of unprotected speech.
I think the answer I’d really like is that the government shouldn’t employ football coaches at all, which sort of gets to @Falchion’s point.
I don’t agree with this framing. You have a right to not be fired from a job for something protected by law. I assume that if the football coach were fired for being black, you wouldn’t make this argument. You just don’t like that “being an asshole on twitter” counts as protected by law when your employer is the government. I admit that it’s kind of distasteful, but I think it’s better than the alternative, which is where I come out on most 1st Amendment issues.
Me too. This guy seems like a Grade-A asshole, and my first impulse would be to fire him. However, the government shouldn’t be able to fire people for offensive comments.
A huge part of college coaching is recruiting the best high school prospects. Having an assistant coach outed as a giant racist asshole is likely to be significantly detrimental to recruiting among black athletes. I think there’s a pretty decent argument to be made that the tweet harms the mission of the team in that respect, and that is the grounds for firing rather than just the offensiveness of the contents of the tweet.