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The Supreme Court declined to hear the case of a North Carolina State University professor who alleged the university retaliated against him for speaking his mind and opposing some of the university’s social justice and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
Stephen Porter, a professor of higher education, alleged that university administrators violated his First Amendment rights by removing him from a Ph.D. program in the department of leadership, policy and human development in response to controversial past statements.
“Resolving the uncertainty around the scope of public university professors’ free speech rights is essential to ensuring that American academic institutions are not ruled by an ideological orthodoxy that ruthlessly eliminates dissent from its ranks,” Porter’s lawyers had argued in their petition to the high court, according to The Carolina Journal.
Their argument did not persuade the justices, who rejected Porter’s case Monday without comment. The decision not to hear his case follows a 2-to-1 ruling against him by the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2023.
The actions that led to Porter’s removal from the program included: questioning the addition of a diversity question to student course evaluations, criticizing colleagues on a faculty search committee via a departmentwide email after an Inside Higher Ed article referred to a controversial candidate they accepted as a finalist for an open position, and writing a blog post about the Association for the Study of Higher Education titled “ASHE Has Become a Woke Joke.”
Porter argued that by not placing him in another program, the university had “effectively siloed” him to an area of study that lacked students and resources.
