A tenured professor is suing the University of Texas’s flagship campus, accusing college officials of chilling academic freedom, threatening professors and limiting free speech.
The lawsuit was filed earlier this month by Richard Lowery, a conservative finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Lowery says his employment, salary, research opportunities and academic privileges have been threatened in response to his criticism of college officials and left-wing academics on social media and via email. He is an opponent of critical race theory and diversity policies and programs. Lowery frequently tweeted about this subjects, and was quoted in the media, up until last August, when he chose to self-censor out of fear, the lawsuit says.
The Free Speech Institute, which represents Lowery, has asked a judge to bar UT officials from threatening or acting on threats made against Lowery for his protected speech; declare that the threats against Lowery violated the First Amendment by retaliating against him for his speech, and deliberately chilling his speech; and pay Lowery’s attorneys for the time they have had to spend bringing the lawsuit.
“The First Amendment protects the right of citizens to criticize government officials, including administrators at Texas’ flagship state university for their use of public funds for ideological indoctrination, and their hostility to viewpoint diversity and academic freedom,” the complaint states. The First Amendment “also protects the right of public university professors to engage their colleagues and administrators in debate and discussion concerning academic matters, including what should be taught and the school’s ideological direction and balance,” it says.
Endel Kolde, Lowery’s attorney, plans to file a motion for a preliminary injunction against college officials barring them from taking action against Lowery over his speech. That motion “will contain additional evidence and details,” he said.
Kolde said Lowery will also seek a permanent injunction to protect his free-speech rights. If he does not obtain that from the trial court, he says he would likely “appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.”
The lawsuit says the campaign to silence professors at UT Austin began with pressure aimed at Carlos Carvalho, another outspoken professor. Carvalho, the Salem Center for Public Policy’s executive director, is a supervisor of Lowery’s.
When Carvalho resisted calls to discipline Lowery, he was apparently threatened and told by his boss: “I don’t need to remind you that you serve at my pleasure.”
Lowery and Carvalho sought funding for a Liberty Institute on UT’s campus as a counter to DEI and critical race theory training. Their efforts, however, were apparently thwarted by University President Jay Hartzell.
“The Texas legislature’s 2022-2023 state budget allocated $6 million in funding for the Liberty Institute,” Kolde says. “The enabling legislation was somewhat vague, which allowed President Hartzell and his allies in the UT Administration to hijack the project,” says Lowery’s court complaint.
According to Lowery’s complaint seeking injunctive relief, Professor Lowery stopped tweeting in August 2022 due to repeated threats from faculty and officials at UT Austin. Lowery feared the loss of his research position at the Salem Center, which provides him with a $20,000 annual stipend.
Last summer, Lowery had weighed in on the legal challenges to affirmative-action admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina in a column in the Washington Times. “The explanation of why universities fight so hard for such morally repugnant policies, even in the face of increasing evidence that they harm the intended beneficiaries, not just the intended targets, is actually quite simple: hate. The takeover of universities by critical race theorists — often through the mechanism of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ offices and the strategic placement of critical race theorists in positions of authority — is effectively complete,” he wrote.
The Texas Tribune quoted Lowery criticizing President Hartzell: “The President of UT, in coordination with one of his chief deputies, Richard Flores, chose to completely default on the plan agreed to for bringing needed intellectual diversity to campus and push back against the persistent attacks on free inquiry and academic freedom at UT-Austin.”
Lowery is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed in September 2022 against Texas A&M University alleging that it is guilty of preferential hiring at the expense of white and Asian males.
