Can a State University Fire a Professor for Being an Ass on Twitter?

She also told people to contact her, and gave out the schools counseling hotline number instead of her real one. She deliberately messed with the school and dragged them into her personal conflict. Why shouldn't they fire her, if they can, in that case?

Two questions on this:

- What if @janeschmoe mostly tweets about USC and her work there? Even if they are not officially saying, “this is an official twitter account of a USC professor”, her activity could cause people to think the account is official

- Does merely mentioning your employer cross the line? Not mentioning this could also be kind of sketchy if, for instance, @janeschmoe starts tweeting “USC has the best professors!!!”

(Totally just asking for a friend)

The way it actually works is this:

Private employers can fire you for anything you do on social media, whether you associate yourself with your employer's name or not. This was just covered in a training I sat through--given by a lawyer with experience in this area--a couple weeks ago. It might not seem fair, but that's how it is.

It's more complicated when the employer is the government. This is what popehat's blog post covers.

> My opinion would be this: you should be able to express yourself as a private citizen any which way you want, withinn the law.

I suspect you might not feel this way if you ran a business and one of your employees caused huge controversy that threatened your business. You would probably want to fire that person to save your business.

So there's a very practical problem I have with this. Say you maintain a blog promoting the disenfranchisement of women, things like "We need to send women back to the homes, barefoot in the kitchen." While reprehensible, perfectly legal.

Your employer is faced with both an external and internal problem.

1) The more public your views, the more people see these views as condoned by the company as being acceptable, whether you agree with that the perception is likely. Even if protection is afforded under the law it's widely understood that you can "manage out" problem employees and people will judge the company for not doing that.

2) The employee is likely hampering their own effectiveness in the workplace substantially. In this example it's going to be very difficult to get women, a huge chunk of a likely workforce, to work effectively with the person in question. The company cannot realistically resolve the feelings of enmity that arise from this kind of speech and the best remedy to the situation is going to be empoyee termination.

Oftentimes engineers see law like code, if you can find a way to break it, great!

In practice, this wouldn't fly, the whole point of court is to negotiate between the letter of the law and the situation to obtain justice. In the hypothetical it's very clear why she actually got fired

At will means you can be terminated for no reason, but not for any reason. Stating that it was for no reason doesn’t make it so.

CSU professors (and professors in general) may technically be at-will (I don't know) but they are definitely members of a union that has negotiated various employment rights, including around how dismissal works. Furthermore, I think the article says she is tenured, which adds another layer of protection to her employment. If CSU did want to dismiss her (after going through the various steps as the popehat article describes), there would be further review steps based on the union rules and tenure.

> Aren't California Professors at-will employees?

No, non-executive public employees in California are mostly not at-will employees. They tend to have protection by civil service laws and union contracts and federal due process protections related to employment, none of which apply to private at-will employment.

She is tenured. She brings it up in one of the tweets: “I work as a tenured professor. I make 100K a year doing that. I will never be fired. I will always have people wanting to hear what I have to say.”

I'm always amused when these type of people tweet something offensive and stand by it; but, immediately make their Twitter account private. (I can tweet something very offensive, but don't be mean to me.)

but not beyond the law, so an analysis that completely ignores "who was the biggest ass" and instead focuses on what laws apply to this situation, and to which degree interpretation can be extended, is most refreshing.

I think if you're at the point where you're willing to say a person will or will not do something because of some institutional rule when their job is also to uphold the law and the constitution, and there may indeed be conflicts in what their priorities are as they see them, you've become far too lost in the weeds.

Mueller is a person, not a state machine. Let's not act like we can completely predict the future here, especially given the dearth of information we have compared to him.