U of T prof's tweet, assumed by some to refer to Charlie Kirk killing, was bad, but so is the University's reaction

[Note: a commenter has pointed to this PressProgress report suggesting that the media’s coverage of this story, including the CBC story linked below, may be in fundamental error, as the tweet in question may not have been about the Charlie Kirk killing at all but a response to an interlocutor about Gaza. Readers should take account of this important new context. Whether the tweet applied to Kirk or to ‘fascists’ in debates surrounding Gaza, the analysis that follows generally stands.]

[Note 2: (September 14, 2025), the University of Toronto’s Director of Media Relations wrote to me objecting to the characterization below that the university ‘caved’ to pressure from the provincial government, writing that the university “acted independently and apprised the government of its actions after they were complete.” It is important that they be able to get this clarification on the record, and so I include it here. This does not change the infringement of the professor’s academic freedom. I requested the university’s rationale for placing the professor on leave, but received only the boilerplate statement that the matter is being looked into and the university will not be commenting further.]

A University of Toronto professor has been placed on leave after writing on X, in apparent reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk, that “shooting is honestly too good for so many of you fascist c--ts.”

I’d hope thoughtful people would be horrified at the idea of celebrating what was likely politically-motivated violence (at the time of writing, despite early speculation that the perpetrator was some left-wing activist who killed Kirk for his far-right and hateful views, details about the suspect, Tyler Robinson - apparently a white, Christian male in the Republican heartland - are far murkier than that simple narrative suggested. The same thing happened after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. One day maybe we’ll all learn to stop speculating in the immediate aftermath of horrible events).

It may be part of the academic mission to ask provocative questions about when violence becomes justified in the context of authoritarian regimes, and there is certainly no onus on citizens to grieve the death of people they believe made the world a worse place, but we are at a perilous moment in our politics, and weakening the sinews of basic democratic norms by expressing support for violence as a solution to someone holding odious views should be considered socially and morally wrong.

The tweet will also, sadly, reinforce the false idea that university faculty across this country are bunch of rabid far-left indoctrinators of your children - despite the fact that most are apolitical at best, and many of the rest are as annoyed at the smaller segment of radical colleagues as anyone else. This is not to deny university faculty lean more to the left than the population in the aggregate, but there are far more boring centrists - and yes, conservatives - in academia than the anecdotal National Post stories about these controversies would have you believe.

Having said all this, I am nonetheless compelled to write this post to defend the academic freedom and free expression of this professor.

Why? Because it is far from clear that this professor said anything contrary to the law. And if what she expressed - however repugnant we might rightly find it - was lawful speech, then her university has no business sanctioning it.

I have already written about how and why a faculty member’s extramural expression is expressly protected by academic freedom:

“Extramural speech is speech concerning the issues of the day, political and social speech in any form, including media interviews, public speaking, protests, social media, and yes, blog posts.

… this protection afforded to extramural speech is not limited to speech falling within the ambit of the faculty member “expertise”. In other words, whether the professor is speaking as a professor or as a regular citizen is entirely irrelevant, because the protection for extramural speech isn’t about the speech, it’s about the protection of the faculty member’s freedom to teach, research, and engage in scholarship free from political or social pressures that may or may not be related to their work.

Simply put, the university doesn’t get to punish a faculty member because they’re a libertarian or a communist, or because they have a particular view on the Middle East, or on whether Marvel movies count as “film” or not. This isn’t because the university necessarily values what faculty do or do not say outside of campus, but because to punish them for their extramural speech would be a violation of their freedom to teach, to research, and to engage in scholarship. In other words, academic sanction for non-academic speech violates academic freedom.”

One of the best ways of describing this particular protection that I’ve seen recently is to describe it as a “jurisdictional line,” in Jacob Levy’s words. Once we empower university administrators to punish or censor extramural speech, the core of academic freedom - the protections geared directly towards the research, teaching, and scholarship production functions - becomes meaningless.

This is also why it is irrelevant whether the speech in question is related to a faculty member’s expertise. It’s not the substance of any speech that’s being protected per se, it’s the employment protection afforded to the faculty member from being subject to political pressure or retaliation.

It is not clear that the professor’s tweet here violates any law. It is not unlawful hate speech (fascists not being a protected class). Nor can it reasonably be said to be likely to incite violence. There is, indeed, a distinction between utterances that celebrate a death and advocating violence. Wishing someone worse than death, telling someone to burn in hell, or telling fascists they deserve a fate worse than death, may (in the context of a recent killing) be deserving of moral opprobrium.But it seems rather unlikely that this sort of tweet could prompt criminal charges in Canada.

What is, then, the university’s responsibility in this case? This professor has offended people, certainly, and administrators are likely to be concerned about the university’s reputation, about reaction from alumni and students, and there will no doubt be claims about people feeling unsafe as a result of the tweet.

In the CBC report on this story, an employment lawyer states that faculty “can get terminated depending on university policies, including any policies around social media use and whether she has caused reputational harm to the university. ‘Your employer can terminate you for any reason, so long as that reason is not discriminatory or not a reprisal for you pursuing your employment law rights’.”

With respect, this is simply not accurate in the university context, at least not if the university actually respects academic freedom. Faculty cannot be punished merely for risking “reputational harm” for the university. If this were true, academic freedom and free expression would be rendered entirely meaningless.

Worse still, in a climate where right-wing populists are actively trying to destroy post-secondary education, and where in the US in particular Donald Trump’s fascist regime has sought to eliminate university speech and university policies it deems undesirable, by caving to pressure from the Minister of Colleges and Universities, who stated that U of T “needs to act” against the professor, U of T has severely and voluntarily weakened its institutional autonomy.

Moreover, this is not the first time the Ford government has made demands contrary to its own free speech policy on university governance.

Freedom of speech means people get to say odious and repugnant things in a free and democratic society. Academic freedom means that faculty members are free to engage in public without reprisal from their employer institutions, so long as they do not break the law or leverage their credentials to engage in fraudulent behaviour. And institutional autonomy demands that universities be given the freedom to govern themselves according to these principles without interference from the state. The reaction to this professor’s extramural speech risks eroding all of these core values.