Landry swings at professor's speech
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Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is calling on LSU to punish a law professor for comments he made about the presidential election in the classroom.
Administrative law professor Nick Bryner drew the ire of the governor for calling on students who voted for Donald Trump because they like his policies, and not him personally, to prove it through their actions. Landry posted a video of Bryner’s comments on social media last week.
“I don’t know if anybody falls in that category, but if you voted for Trump on the idea that you don’t like him personally but that you like his policies, I just want you to think about the message that that sends to other people and how you can prove that, by treating other people in a way that matches that sentiment,” Bryner told his students Nov. 6, the day after the election.
Landry posted the video of the professor’s comments last week on X, formerly Twitter, and followed that up Monday with a letter to LSU President William Tate, LSU Law Dean Alena Allen and members of the LSU Board of Supervisors calling on them to discipline Bryner.
“If the school does not discipline Mr. Bryner for his comments, I hope that the Board will look into the matter, as LSU professors are prohibited from utilizing state resources to influence public policy,” Landry wrote.
Neither Bryner, LSU spokesman Todd Woodward, Allen nor Board of Supervisors Chairman Jimmie Woods have responded to requests for comment.
Attorney General Liz Murrill followed suit with a letter sent to Allen shortly after Landry’s.
“[Bryner] expressed partisan political views, he suggested students who voted for President Trump had to ‘prove’ something to him (and their peers), and he implied that being a Trump supporter or voter was somehow racist or threatening to other students,” Murrill wrote. “His conduct shocked me and many other proud LSU law graduates but more importantly it undermined the educational objectives of respect and intellectual diversity.”
First Amendment advocates are criticizing Landry for his response to what they believe is protected speech.
“The professor’s comments are very clearly protected by the First Amendment and academic freedom,” said Katie Schwartzmann, director of the Tulane First Amendment Law Clinic. “It is absolutely terrifying for our governor to call upon LSU to discipline a professor for his speech.”
“Our classrooms are the incubators of our democracy, and they must be protected for the free exchange of ideas. We cannot allow the persecution or prosecution of teachers for the ideas discussed in their classrooms,” Schwartzmann added.
Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan campus free speech organization known for defending controversial conservative speech on university campuses, said Landry was using the banner of free speech to engage in censorship.
“Here you have a state official, you know, the highest official in the state of Louisiana, focusing on a maybe two-minute comment by a law professor to adult law students and commenting on civility and using current events as a basis to encourage civility, and the governor is [stating] that the mere discussion of a professor’s political views is imposing it on law students,” Steinbaugh said.
Steinbaugh said Bryner’s comments are lawful, especially because they pertain to his area of expertise.
“The law is going to change, and administrative law is going to change,” Bryner said in the video. “I perceive this vote as really like a rejection of the idea that we are governed by a people with expertise … There is a lot in administrative law about ensuring that the government makes rational decisions.”
The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, a conservative court that encompasses Louisiana, has held that faculty members have the First Amendment right to “discuss pedagogically relevant material in their classes,” Steinbaugh said.
“I have had the unfortunate experience of having gone to law school, and if they cut out all of the lectures and comments about civility, it’d be about probably taking a year off the three years of law school,” Steinbaugh joked.
This is not the first time Landry has asked for LSU to punish a professor for making comments he doesn’t like.
When he was the attorney general in 2021, Landry called on the university to take action against tenured mass communication professor Bob Mann, who referred to Assistant Attorney General Lauryn Sudduth as a “flunkie” after Sudduth appeared at a Faculty Senate meeting to read a letter from Landry containing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.
Landry spokeswoman Kate Kelly has not yet responded to a question regarding how Landry got the video, which appears to be a classroom video typically made accessible to students enrolled in a course.
Here’s a detail that didn’t make it into the story: Steinbaugh told me that, while conservative professors also face calls for investigations and ousters for their speech, it usually doesn’t come from elected officials. It usually comes from students or liberal activists. Steinbaugh could think of just one example of a conservative professor facing backlash from public officials: when the Philadelphia City Council sent a letter to the University of Pennsylvania calling on them to investigate a controversial conservative law professor.
I’m not sure what the takeaway from that is, but it’s an interesting bit of trivia.
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