Just at the start of September 2025, two different Texas public universities have fired professors as a result of their speech. Texas State University explicitly fired Professor Thomas Alter because of a speech he gave at a conference of socialists, and Texas A&M University fired Professor Melissa McCoul after a student, in a controversial viral video, confronted her about what she was supposedly teaching about gender in her classroom. While both of these events just happened and it is hard to say what might eventually become of these cases, they each appear to set up a possible confrontation between the universities and their professors’ regarding free speech rights.
And there have been many such confrontations in recent years. In July and August 2025, for instance, the Third Circuit and Seventh Circuit Courts of Appeals each issued decisions addressing whether schools and universities could legally fire some employees over their (politically right wing) speech. The point of this article isn’t to dissect these any of those cases—much less the merits of the underlying speech—but to discuss what legal standard courts in the Fifth Circuit (which includes Texas) might apply should disputes over these sorts of terminations go forward.
The First Amendment prevents federal and state governments from infringing on the rights of people to engage in free speech, but that is not an absolute right. Nonetheless, public employees are protected against termination for engaging in speech protected by the First Amendment. The standard for this has been set out by the U.S. Supreme Court in a number of cases. To prove that their speech was protected, the public employee must show that they spoke (1) as a citizen (2) on a matter of public concern, and that (3) the public employer did not otherwise have an adequate justification for treating the public employee differently than any other member of the public saying the same thing.
Dallas Employment Lawyer Blog
