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A tenured math professor was back in court Monday, seeking to revive a First Amendment case that a U.S. District Court dismissed last year.
In 2021, Truckee Meadows Community College in Nevada moved to fire Lars Jensen, citing two consecutive unsatisfactory performance reviews that accused him of “insubordination,” among other things.
One of the insubordination allegations concerned Jensen handing out fliers at a state math summit that criticized the college’s math standards—a move Truckee Meadows administrators said disrupted the meeting. Jensen said the college was watering down its math curriculum while rolling out a corequisite support program for students.
In November 2021, college president Karin Hilgerson said she’d accepted the recommendation of a special faculty hearing committee to retain Jensen. Nonetheless, Jensen sued college officials in January 2022, alleging, among other things, retaliation for First Amendment–protected speech on matters of public concern. Among his demands was that the college remove the negative information from his personnel file.
A U.S. District Court judge for Nevada dismissed his case in September 2023. Now Jensen is appealing to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to revive it; oral arguments took place yesterday, and a ruling is forthcoming.
“Distributing that document was sort of a public service,” Jensen said after the hearing. The college wants to graduate more students, he said, and if “the administration gets a say on what’s going on in the classroom, what the curriculum is, how you grade, then that balance is removed—the faculty balancing force is removed, you could say—and the college is going to be driven towards corruption.”
Jensen is represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “Merely passing out material when your superior, your dean, doesn’t want you to is not insubordination under this court’s precedent,” Daniel Ortner, a FIRE attorney, told the Ninth Circuit judges Monday.
A spokesperson for the college said in an email that “our standard protocol is that TMCC does not comment on ongoing legal matters.”
