\n<\/p>\n
Hook is one of dozens of faculty members who have been punished for their comments about Kirk\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Photo illustration by Inside Higher Ed | LeoPatrizi\/E+\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
A South Dakota district court judge ordered the University of South Dakota on Wednesday to reinstate Michael Hook, a tenured professor of art who was put on leave with an \u201cintent to terminate\u201d after he posted comments on his personal Facebook page about Charlie Kirk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe court concludes that Hook spoke as a citizen and his speech was on a matter of public concern,\u201d district court judge Karen Schreier wrote. \u201cDefendants note that Hook\u2019s Facebook page identified himself as a professor at the University of South Dakota\u00a0\u2026 but this alone does not show that a post made on his personal Facebook account is speech that arises from Hook\u2019s duties as a professor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hook is one of dozens of faculty and staff members who have been punished for their comments about Kirk\u2019s death. He was put on leave two days after posting, \u201cOkay. I don\u2019t give a flying fuck about this Kirk person,\u201d on his Facebook page on Sept. 10, the day Kirk was shot and killed in Utah.<\/p>\n
\u201cApparently he was a hate spreading Nazi. I wasn\u2019t paying close enough attention to the idiotic right fringe to even know who he was,\u201d Hook continued. \u201cI\u2019m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I\u2019m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives. But geez, where was all this concern when the politicians in Minnesota were shot? And the school shootings? And Capitol Police? I\u00a0have no thoughts or prayers for this hate spreading Nazi. A shrug, maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hook later deleted the post and posted an apology.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Hook was informed in a letter from Bruce Kelley, dean of the University of South Dakota College of Fine Arts, that in posting the comment on Facebook he\u2019d violated two university policies. The first dealt with \u201cneglect of duty, misconduct, incompetence and abuse of power,\u201d and the second detailed that when employees speak publicly \u201cthey should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence, they should at all times be accurate, show respect for the opinions of others and make every effort to indicate when they are not speaking for the institution.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
As part of the temporary restraining order, Schreier ordered that the university may not proceed with a disciplinary meeting between Hook and university officials scheduled for Sept.\u00a029. The temporary restraining order will remain in effect until a preliminary injunction hearing on Oct.\u00a08.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hook is one of dozens of faculty members who have been punished for their comments about Kirk\u2019s death. Photo illustration by Inside Higher Ed | LeoPatrizi\/E+\/Getty Images A South Dakota district court judge ordered the University of South Dakota on Wednesday to reinstate Michael Hook, a tenured professor of art who was put on leave<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24257,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[12590,160,10474,12560,1435,6504,14652,14758],"class_list":{"0":"post-24256","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-comments","9":"tag-court","10":"tag-fired","11":"tag-kirk","12":"tag-order","13":"tag-prof","14":"tag-reinstates","15":"tag-s-d"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/24257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}