A right wing heckler's veto
Abandoning an employee at a time of personal crisis is cowardly and shameful.
The following is an open letter to the trustees of Ball State University. I posted the full text of the offending post on Substack Notes and on Facebook.
Trustees,
I am pleased that you agreed to settle with the employee you fired over her post about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but I am disappointed that you did not admit fault. I hope you understand why what you did was wrong, especially for an institution of higher learning. The free exchange of ideas is critical for educational progress.
I do not agree with your former employee's post, especially the claim that Charlie Kirk sowed "violence" and "hatred." I believe that she misrepresented his comments about the Second Amendment. But unlike a number of social media posts at the time that resulted in professional consequences, she did not celebrate Mr. Kirk's death. She explicitly said his death was a tragedy. Her comments were well within the norms of political speech.
You claim that her post had caused a disruption, but that is a dangerous position to take. That standard means that if people become unreasonably angry, anyone can be terminated for any reason. This is the same excuse that a number of universities have hidden behind to cancel speeches by conservatives because of threats of violence by radical Leftists. This creates a "heckler's veto," where if enough people get angry, no matter how unreasonable that anger may be, that anger can be used to professionally punish or silence someone.
Say, for example, that someone argues renovation of a sidewalk in Neighborhood A should not be prioritized over Neighborhood B based on how much both are used and the fact that Sidewalk B is in worse shape. If people in Neighborhood A become unreasonably angry and start calling Human Resources, should the person who offered what would normally be an uncontroversial opinion about infrastructure resource allocation lose her job?
What you should have done is stand with your employee, who was receiving a large volume of obscenity-filled hate mail and death threats. This was radically disproportionate to what she said, and I believe Charlie Kirk himself would be opposed to this behavior. Instead of standing with your employee at a time of personal crisis, you abandoned her and surrendered to the mob that was screaming for her professional head on a plate. This was a shameful decision.