In recent weeks, FAU has placed three professors on paid administrative leave. One of them is art history professor Karen Leader, since she has faced doxxing and death threats.

FAU officials notified Leader on Sept. 13 that she was being placed on leave as the university investigated her social media. After her comment on someone else’s post went viral online, she learned the leave was related to those comments about the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot at the University of Utah on Sept. 10. Over two weeks later, Leader spoke to the University Press in an interview on Sept. 26 to share her side of the story while still on leave. Leader said she will continue to stand on the front lines to defend her tenure and First Amendment rights, such as the freedom of speech, not only for herself but also for others.

“I’m speaking on behalf of Americans and people who admire our Constitution, weighing that against whether you liked what I said or whether you even want to argue that what I said was damaging to the university,” said Leader in the Sept. 26 interview. 

The others on leave are English professor Kate Polak and finance professor Rebel Cole, all of whom are waiting as the university investigates each case. University officials have not commented on the timeline for the investigations. For Leader’s case, University President Adam Hasner announced on Sept. 13 that an unidentified tenured faculty member had made repeated social media comments referencing Kirk’s assassination. Leader confirmed to the University Press that she was the individual referenced in the announcement. 

Leader stated that Hasner’s statement was inaccurate, explaining that she had never specifically posted about Kirk’s assassination and had only reposted some of his public statements on social media, such as X formerly known as Twitter. She described the announcement as “disturbing” and said that the university president categorized her as someone who was somehow celebrating the killing. She also criticized Hasner for contributing to a narrative instead of stating facts: “I don’t believe anyone who supports First Amendment rights should get shot for standing up for their ideas. That is completely illogical.”

According to a recent Sun Sentinel report, Leader reposted content from other users on her X page that described Kirk’s statements as racist, anti-gay, and anti-woman. Her X account was private at the time of publication, with “opinions mine” in her bio. After Hasner’s announcement, Leader shared that she had been doxxed, with her personal information posted online, and had received death threats. Once that happened, she contacted her department chair about who would be taking over the three courses she was teaching, and requested that they be moved online. She described the changes as “very disruptive” to students, but said they were necessary for their safety after she received threats that seeped into her personal life.

Since the announcement of administrative leave for all three professors was made public, sightings of a heightened police presence have surfaced across the Boca Raton campus, including observation towers monitoring various areas. University officials have not confirmed the reason for the observation towers or the recent increase in security. FAU Police Department Chief Sean Brammer told the University Press in a Sept. 23 email: “No issue is more paramount than the safety of the Florida Atlantic students, faculty, staff, and community. FAUPD continues to work to keep all our campuses safe.”

Professor Leader said she believes she may be on the university’s radar not because of proven misconduct, but because she is outspoken and advocates for what she believes in, both within and outside higher education. On Sept. 5, a protest primarily organized by FAU’s College Democrats, along with dozens of community members, marched through the Boca Raton campus Breezeway to oppose the university’s recent partnership with Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the 287(g) immigration enforcement program. Leader, who serves as faculty adviser for the College Democrats, spoke publicly in front of the protesters, calling out the ICE agreement. She said she would not be surprised if upper administration took notice, but added that it was her right to free speech to stand on the steps of the Kenneth R. Williams Administration Building and declare, “This is not normal.”

She mentioned that as a tenured faculty member, she has certain protections while the university conducts its investigation. But she recognized that it is not the case for everyone in these situations. Leader described tenure as something worth defending in higher education, much like the First Amendment. She added that, as a state employee, she has defined rights outlined in documents such as the collective bargaining agreement with the FAU chapter of the United Faculty of Florida. She stated that the collective bargaining agreement legally governs the terms and conditions of employment between a labor union and an employer.

According to Article 19, “Conflict of Interest and Outside Activity,” of the Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees and the United Faculty of Florida 2022–2025 collective bargaining agreement, “Nothing in this article is intended to interfere with an employee’s exercise of their conscience, academic freedom, and free speech.”

Leader continued, saying the university ‘s decision to place all three professors on administrative leave can damage the university’s reputation and affect students. Here is the rest of her conversation with the University Press.

This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Q: Right in this moment, how are you feeling about the leave?

A: I’m pretty calm about it. I think there are certain things that are within my control and certain things that are not. I’m going to fight with everything I have on the First Amendment issues. But there are things I can’t control. It’s not only me; there are several of us, and I can’t control how far they’re willing to go to fight. They have circumstances in their lives that are different from mine.

So I’m thinking less about that right now and letting the process play itself out, knowing that the other side, the university administration, is meeting and figuring out their strategy. I’m thinking more about what’s really at stake: the First Amendment, the reputation of our university, and the value of a degree for my students and every alumni’s degree. If they have a diploma from a university that won’t protect our right to free speech, what is that degree from a world-class public university really worth?

Q: How did you find out about being put on administrative leave?

A: Two things happened in the same 12 hours. The first thing was that I went viral and I got doxxed. Tweets I had made about Charlie Kirk, including information about who he was, his statements, and quotes attributed to him, went viral. I woke up on Saturday morning and realized that someone from the state, who was part of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ circle, had taken screenshots of some of my tweets, compiled them together in a post, and tagged Florida Atlantic University. That tweet by Jordan Chamberlain had already gone viral by the time I saw it. It had thousands of retweets and hundreds of comments. That’s when I realized, now I’m in someone’s crosshairs. I, along with a whole bunch of other people, as this is happening all over the nation.

So my day started with that realization: this is getting attention. And what do I do? I don’t have a big account, and I don’t have a lot of followers. Going viral was never something I expected, and it’s not something I ever wanted to happen. Being famous is not part of my plan. By 5 p.m. that afternoon, I had received the letter about my administrative leave and also learned that it had been posted on Twitter. Adam Hasner, or whoever their social media manager was, posted publicly that an employee had been put on administrative leave. What he said was not accurate.

So I had this double hit: I went viral, so it could happen to anyone, and I was definitely tweeting a lot, so I had things to say that some people didn’t like. But to me, posting that announcement publicly with inaccurate information just escalated things instead of handling an administrative matter the way it should have been. I had not been fired, suspended, or disciplined. It was an administrative matter between the administration and our union. That was what worried me more, why it would be escalated in that way. And that is what I remember feeling first: this is something to deal with.

(…) I know pretty much what I’ve been accused of because Jordan Chamberlain screenshot some of my posts, mischaracterized them, and misstated something about one of them, tagged FAU, and it went viral. And you know I’ve corrected what was in those posts in every interview that I’ve given, but there are screenshots, so they’re frozen evidence. So, one has a community note attached to it, and you can see the community note. And the assumption is that I posted it even though it had a community note, and that’s not true. I reposted it before it got community-noted. And then I discovered that what the poster had interpreted was wrong. And I deleted it. But not before Jordan Chamberlain saw it and screenshot it with the community note, making it appear as though I had left it up, which I hadn’t; I had deleted it.

Q: Can you explain the situation surrounding being doxxed?

A: From that morning that I woke up, I had death threats on my voicemail and in my email. From the viral post by Jordan Chamberlain, she stated that I worked at Florida Atlantic University. Someone decided to go find my home address, apartment number, work phone number, work email, and post them on that thread. Now, I recognize that you can find that stuff. So, it’s not that you could find my address; it’s that someone chose to do that and post it. That wasn’t transparency; that was “let’s get her.” My home address, why does anyone on Twitter need my home address? That’s the thing that’s changed everything. So the first thing I did, because I had been doxed, was I told my chair. You need to move my classes online because if someone comes looking for me on campus, it’ll be my students who are in danger. 

Q: After all of this passes, do you plan on staying with the university?

A: That really depends on how it plays out. Right now, I can’t imagine going back in a real classroom. And that’s not because of me; that’s because of the danger to my students. And just to be clear about this, I am not a violent person. I don’t own a weapon. I’ve never got into a fight. I’m being met with violence, from violent rhetoric to violent threats, because I said things that were against what they believed. And that’s unconscionable to me, that I’m the one getting the violence thrown at me. But now my students, my colleagues, are the potential recipients of that same violence. And so if the university really wants to do the right thing for everyone, it should just stop taking sides.

Q: How does freedom of speech play into this case?

A: Every U.S. citizen and person in the United States in any way, shape, or form is covered under the Constitution. But there are two different things at stake here. One is freedom of speech, and one is academic freedom, and they’re not exactly the same. We enjoy both. Freedom of speech is protected by the First Amendment; it’s the right to speak freely without sanction to express opinions without threatening our job, anything like that. That’s basic free speech. And we enjoy it. We don’t have to have a collective bargaining agreement that says we enjoy it, but the collective bargaining agreement does have language about the fact that we’re state employees. And so, if I were speaking as Dr. Karen Leader, associate professor of art history, then I have to recognize that I’m speaking to some degree as FAU. But when I’m on Twitter, I’m not speaking for FAU. I don’t have FAU anywhere on my page. Academic freedom is something else, which is the principle that academia provides a place for us to freely investigate, research, write about, and speak publicly about controversial things.

Q: What is your message to the university? 

A: This is harming the entire FAU community. It’s harming the Florida State University system, which is a world-class institution. And in more general terms, this kind of meeting speech, which you don’t like with violent rhetoric, is harming our country. And there’s not enough pushback. There’s not enough resistance to it, and it’s one thing to speak critically. It’s an entirely other thing to attack someone. for speaking in a way you don’t like. And I’ve been targeted and threatened because of speech that was true. What I posted, except for that one thing, was true and was straight out of Charlie Kirk’s mouth, including racial slurs, racist, and sexist opinions. And that’s my right. You can disagree with me, and people did. They said, “Oh, you took it out of context. No, he just wanted to debate.” You can do that all day, I don’t care.

But if I do that and you don’t like it and you threaten my life, you’re going exactly against what Charlie Kirk supposedly agreed with, which was civil debate. Let’s sit down. Let’s talk these things through. That’s what people think he stands for. And what’s happening is that the president of the university posted inaccurately about me, and at a moment when I had gone viral, and all he had to do was look at the comments on the viral thread to see that I was already getting threats publicly on this viral thread before they started dropping into my inbox. He posts this thing inaccurately, expressing what I was doing, escalating it, calling more attention, giving people some sense that, “oh, now she’s getting punished.” And that creates more negativity in that environment. That harms all of us. And I want to stop that. It feels like vigilanteism.

Michael Cook is the Editor-in-Chief for the University Press. For information regarding this or other stories, email michael17cook@gmail.com.