“A University of Oregon administrator has been placed on leave after expressing ‘hope’ that Donald Trump supporters would ‘go jump off a f***ing bridge’ in a now-deleted video posted to his Instagram account,” reports The College Fix.
After this created lots of bad press for the University, it put the administrator on temporary leave.
“Copies of the video by Leonard Serrato, assistant director of fraternity and sorority life at the public university, can still be watched on the Old Row account on X and at The Daily Emerald, the university’s student newspaper,” The College Fix says.
“In the video, Serrato expressed his anger after learning that Trump, a Republican, had won the presidential election.”
“My anger has set in,” he declared. “I am a very petty person, and I am very proud of that – love it about myself actually. And so I say this in the most disrespectful way possible. I don’t care if you are my family, I don’t care if you’re my friend. … You can literally go f*** yourself if you voted for Donald Trump.”
Serrato said Americans who are upset about higher grocery prices should “get a better f***ing paying job” and a better education.
“Do something because you’re f***ing stupid, and I hope you go jump off a f***ing bridge,” he added.
On social media, users expressed shock. One said, “WOW – University of Oregon Assistant Director, Fraternity and Sorority Life Leonard Serrato goes on unhinged tirade and tells Trump voters to commit suicide. This man is in charge of college students???”
If Serrato were conservative, he’d be fired by now. Moderate and conservative faculty have been fired for saying things offensive to progressives, even when what they said was much milder than what Serrato said, and did not express a desire to harm anyone (one center-left professor was punished for criticizing woke “land acknowledgments”). As an administrator, Serrato has more limited free-speech rights than faculty do, because faculty enjoy a measure of academic freedom, and administrators don’t, as a federal appeals court explained in Jeffries v. Harleston (1994). So even if a professor should not be fired for saying things akin to what Serrato said, maybe Serrato should be.
Even so, Aaron Terr, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, says that Serrato’s remarks are protected by the First Amendment, “even if they deeply offend others,” unless “the university can show it is so disruptive to its operations or so impairs Serrato’s ability to do his job that this outweighs his strong interest in speaking on matters of public importance. The First Amendment provides strong protection to public employees when, like Serrato, they speak in their personal capacity on issues of public concern. Serrato’s speech doesn’t constitute a true threat or incitement because he wasn’t expressing a serious intent to physically harm anyone, and the speech isn’t likely to immediately result in unlawful activity,” he says.
Donald Trump Jr. called Serrato’s comments “disgusting”:
Feel sort of ironic that the guy that runs fraternity and sorority life at University of Oregon probably could have never gotten into a fraternity. It’s disgusting, but not surprising, that an employee at a state University would speak this way about MORE THAN HALF of the… https://t.co/7soU92mzPa
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 7, 2024
