When Teachers Cheer a Killing

Courts broadly protect educators' private speech, but not without limits

In the days since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we’ve seen an unsettling pattern: teachers, professors, and education staffers taking to social media not just to denounce Kirk’s politics, but to openly celebrate his murder. Some cheered. Others justified it with a glib “he had it coming.” Almost immediately, many of those voices found themselves suspended, fired, or otherwise disciplined by their schools and universities.

The reaction is understandable. For parents, students, and the broader public, it is shocking—even revolting—to see adults entrusted with shaping young minds reveling in political bloodshed. Schools are within their rights to ask whether someone capable of such comments belongs in front of children. But the legal questions are less clear-cut, and they will not go away.

In a paper I co-authored last year with Cory Brewer of the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty and my AEI colleague Riley Fletcher, we noted that teachers don’t check their First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door. The Supreme Court has been clear at least since Pickering v. Board of Education (1968) that public employees, including teachers, have a right to speak as citizens on matters of public concern.

That doesn’t mean their speech is untouchable. Courts apply a balancing test, weighing the teacher’s right to speak against the school district’s interest in maintaining order, safety, and the effective functioning of the school. In practice, that means that outside-of-classroom speech—even when crude, obnoxious, or politically radioactive—is often protected unless the district can show that it caused substantial disruption.

By contrast, inside the classroom, teachers’ rights are sharply constrained. In cases like Garcetti v. Ceballos and Mayer v. Monroe County, courts have made clear that K–12 teachers’ classroom speech is “hired speech.” School boards set the curriculum; teachers must stick to it. Unlike university professors, who enjoy broad academic freedom, public school teachers cannot use the classroom as their soapbox. Said bluntly, there’s no such thing as “academic freedom” in K–12 education.

But the Kirk cases are mostly about what was said outside of the classroom. They are about what was said online, as private citizens. And on that terrain, the law leans heavily toward protecting even the most despicable speech.

That doesn’t mean every one of these firings will be overturned. There are real limits.

In the higher ed context, consider the University of South Dakota professor who admitted he didn’t “even know who [Kirk] was” yet proceeded to call him a “hate spreading Nazi” and expressed the wish for his family that “maybe good people could now enter their lives.” Pickering noted that false statements made knowingly or recklessly are not protected, and academic freedom presumes honesty. A college professor who confesses ignorance yet presses ahead with potentially libelous accusations is not a free speech martyr. He is an incompetent. Whether he is incompetent enough to deserve discipline may be for a court to decide.

Or consider the New York public school teacher who posted, “good riddance to bad garbage” and reveled in Kirk’s assassination, sharing a picture of himself wearing a shirt that said, "IS HE DEAD YET?" This high school physics teacher at Naples Central School District also wrote, "The aspiring Goebbels was interrupted by a bullet to the neck which quickly cured him of HVLD,” which he said stood for “high-velocity lead deficiency.” Kirk, he wrote, had become “a good Nazi,” that is, a dead one. Parents whose kids were fans of Charlie Kirk would not be wrong to ask: is my child safe in this person’s classroom? The legal bar for anticipating future disruption is high, but the common-sense bar for trusting such a person with children has likely been met. Schools have a compelling interest in student safety and parental trust.

To my mind, there’s also a distinction worth considering between firing offenses and hiring offenses. Courts may well reinstate some of these teachers and professors who were fired in the heat of the moment. But would any school district or university knowingly hire someone who cheered an assassination? Hard to imagine.

One teacher put it perfectly on Facebook: “If you don’t understand that celebrating an assassination is wrong, you have no business being around children….Our kids deserve role models who teach them how to handle conflict with words, not with violence. If an adult can’t grasp that celebrating death is unacceptable, they should never be trusted to shape the hearts and minds of the next generation.”

That is not a legal argument. It is a moral and ethical one. And it cuts to the heart of the issue.

What the Courts May Say

My prediction: the majority of these firings will not hold up in court. Judges are likely to take a dim view of punishing speech, however revolting, when it is made on matters of public concern by private citizens outside the classroom. Those demanding these teachers’ heads are no more justified than the activists on the left who sought to ruin careers over objectionable speech.

But there will be exceptions. Speech that crosses into true threats, that credibly reveals sufficient incompetence or meets one of a small number of other narrowly defined exceptions to free speech, is not protected. Nor is speech that can be demonstrated to have caused a substantial disruption (the Pickering standard) to the educational process or the other work of the school. Speech that reasonably causes parents to fear for their children’s safety may very well clear that bar.

The cases that yield court opinions will help clarify where such lines are drawn. The incidents now in motion will cause courts, communities, and schools to wrestle with hard questions both about the law and about judgment, competence, and the moral example set by the adults who shape our children.

It may be that most ugly comments on Facebook are not firing offenses. But another legacy of Charlie Kirk’s murder may well be redrawing the lines over what teachers can and can’t say in public if they want to be considered competent enough to be employed.