The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"Professor Sues University of Texas for First Amendment Violations"
This is just a complaint at this stage (Lowery v. Mills (W.D. Tex.)), so these are only the plaintiff's allegations, but he's being represented by the people at the Institute for Free Speech, whose work I've generally found quite reliable. (I e-mailed UT on Thursday to ask if they had a statement, and have so far gotten no response.) From IFS's announcement:
A finance professor is suing officials at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) who threatened to punish him for his criticism of the university by threatening his job, reducing his pay, and removing his affiliation with UT's Salem Center.
In a complaint filed in the Austin federal court, Dr. Richard Lowery, an Associate Professor of Finance at the McCombs School of Business at UT-Austin, said the officials at the state's flagship university violated his constitutional right to criticize government officials. The lawsuit also claims the UT administration harmed his right to academic freedom.
Professor Lowery is well known for his vigorous commentary on university affairs. His articles have appeared widely, including in The Hill, the Texas Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, and The College Fix. He questioned the UT administration's approaches to critical-race theory, affirmative action, academic freedom, competence-based performance measures, and the future of capitalism.
One key target of Prof. Lowery's critiques was the UT administration's use of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) requirements to filter out competent academics who dissent from the DEI ideology.
Lowery's lawyers wrote in the complaint that UT's administration "responded with a campaign to silence Lowery."
The campaign started by pressuring Carlos Carvalho, another professor of business at the UT McCombs School who is also the Executive Director of the Salem Center for Public Policy, an academic institute that is part of the McCombs School. Lowery is an Associate Director and a Senior Scholar at the Salem Center and reports to Carvalho.
In the summer of 2022, Sheridan Titman, one of the senior UT officials named in the lawsuit, told Carvalho, "We need to do something about Richard." According to the lawsuit, "he added that [UT] President [Jay] Hartzell and Dean [Lillian] Mills were upset about Lowery's political advocacy." Titman wanted to know if 'we can ask him to tone it down?'"
Carvalho understood this as a threat by Titman, directed at Lowery, but initially refused to convey it. Carvalho explained to Titman that the First Amendment protected Prof. Lowery's right to expression.
Despite this, the administrators ratcheted up the pressure on Carvalho and Lowery. When Carvalho again resisted calls to discipline Lowery over his speech. Dean Mills, the lead defendant in the lawsuit, threatened to remove Carvalho from his Executive Director post. "I don't need to remind you that you serve at my pleasure," she said.
These were among the UT administration's threats to Lowery's "job, pay, institute affiliation, research opportunities, [and] academic freedom."
Some in the administration even "allowed, or at least did not retract, a UT employee's request that police surveil Lowery's speech, because he might contact politicians or other influential people." … As one employee wrote, when urging campus police to surveil his now-protected tweets, "we are more worried about the people he reaches than him. Some of his supporters are authors, podcasters, and politicians." Lowery's tweets often tagged the Texas Governor and Lt. Governor, which added to the UT administration's concerns.
In addition to chilling Lowery's speech, UT's actions also "effectively removed an important part of his job duties by restricting" his academic freedom as a UT professor. The defendants deprived him of his right to critique ideas, policies, hiring, … and to otherwise participate in the life of the mind and academic dialogue on terms equal to his peers on the faculty." …
