![\"Palm](\"http:\/\/vivianleeposts.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/12\/palm-beach-post.jpg\")
<\/div>\nFAU maintained that Tracy was not fired from his tenured position because of his blog posts, but because he did not follow the \u201crules\u201d set out by \u201chis bosses\u201d at the government-run institution. FAU attorney G. Joseph Curley insisted that Tracy was not denied his First Amendment rights, but that he simply did not follow university procedure. \u201cProfessor Tracy doesn\u2019t follow the rules,\u201d\u00a0Curley told the jury<\/a>. \u201cThey\u2019re rules that everyone else follows. He doesn\u2019t play by the rules.\u201d FAU cast the case as one of a \u201cbelligerent,\u201d rebellious,\u201d and \u201cnonconformist\u201d employee being let go for \u201cinsubordination<\/a>,\u201d instead of that of a tenured professor exercising his right to free speech.[1]<\/p>\n FAU\u2019s current \u201crules\u201d require that faculty submit forms listing \u201coutside activities\u201d to be vetted for administrative approval, whether the activities are compensated or not. Tracy and other professors at FAU had argued that the policy is vague and confusing, constituting a form of prior restraint forbidden by the First Amendment, and leading to a climate of \u201cfear and uncertainty\u201d among the faculty. Aside from the fact that \u201coutside activities\u201d can reach into all aspects of a professor\u2019s life and therefore be difficult if not impossible to list, such activities must not be subject to bureaucratic approval. And certainly, no tenured professor can be fired for not filling out a form, even at Florida Atlantic University.[2] The reason for tenure at academic institutions is precisely to allow professors to research, write, and speak out without fear of reprisal. The road to tenure is long and difficult, embarked upon with the goal of attaining the \u201cacademic freedom\u201d that tenured professors enjoy.[3] According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), as outlined in their\u00a01940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure<\/i><\/a>, \u201cTeachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties.\u201d Regarding \u201coutside activities,\u201d the statement includes the following:<\/p>\n College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline\u2026they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for their institution.<\/p>\n The statement was amended in 1970 to stipulate:<\/p>\n The controlling principle is that a faculty member\u2019s expression of opinion as a citizen cannot constitute grounds for dismissal unless it clearly demonstrates the faculty member\u2019s unfitness for his or her position. Extramural utterances rarely bear upon the faculty member\u2019s fitness for the position.<\/p>\n This is further reinforced by the AAUP in its executive summary of 2011, \u201cEnsuring Academic Freedom in Politically Controversial Academic Personnel Decisions<\/a>.\u201d The AAUP sees a current \u201cpolitical threat\u201d to academic freedom from outside forces, including interest groups, politicians, and members of the media, which can put pressure on the university. All personnel decisions should rest on \u201cacademic fitness\u201d and no institution should discipline academic speech \u201cunless that speech implicates professional fitness.\u201d James Tracy was clearly\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0unfit<\/i>\u00a0for his position, having received evaluations indicating that his teaching, scholarship, service to the institution, and job performance were considered to be \u201cexcellent.\u201d Curley fought to keep these evaluations from the jury; only when he had left the courtroom one afternoon was Tracy\u2019s team able to get them included in the record.\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Tracy filed suit in April 2016, alleging a conspiracy between FAU and the faculty union, which had advised him not to fill out the outside activities forms, discouraged him from initiating a grievance or lawsuit, and even attempted to coerce him into resigning from his position. FAU delayed proceedings by the filing of repeated motions alleging that the suit was \u201cfrivolous,\u201d that there was no conspiracy, and that Tracy\u2019s termination was merely due to his failure to disclose his outside activities in a timely fashion. In February 2017, federal judge\u00a0Robin Rosenberg<\/a>\u00a0ruled that Tracy\u2019s lawsuit could proceed to discovery, with defendants including FAU, the Board of Trustees, President, Dean, Associate Provost, the Florida Education Association, the faculty union (United Faculty of Florida) and the union\u2019s Chapter President and Service Unit Director.[4]<\/p>\n This allowed Tracy\u2019s legal team to obtain thousands of internal emails from FAU, which supported his contention that members of the administration had conspired to discipline and finally fire him. The case proceeded on the basis of the\u00a0Second Amended Complaint<\/a>, which included six individual counts\u00a0as follows<\/a>:<\/p>\n Count I \u2013 Retaliation in Violation of Right to Free Speech, against Defendant FAU and Defendants President John Kelly, Associate Provost Diane Alperin, and College of Arts and Letters Dean Heather Coltman.<\/p>\n Count II \u2013 Conspiracy to Interfere with Plaintiff\u2019s Civil Rights, against Defendants Alperin, Coltman, Kelly, UFF President Robert Zoeller, Jr., UFF Service Unit Director Michael Moats, UFF, Florida Education Association, and FAU.<\/p>\n Count III \u2013 Facial Challenge to FAU\u2019s Conflict of Interest Policy, against Defendant FAU.<\/p>\n Count IV \u2013 As-Applied Challenge to Plaintiff\u2019s Right to Free Speech, against Defendant FAU.<\/p>\n Count V \u2013 Declaratory Judgment and Injunction, against Defendant FAU.<\/p>\n Count VI \u2013 State Law Breach of Contract, against Defendant FAU.<\/p>\n Although the Second Amended Complaint shows clear evidence supporting every count, Judge Rosenberg eliminated all but the first count in her order on pending motions for summary judgment of October 31, 2017.[5] This reduced the case to a matter of why Tracy was fired\u2014whether because of his blog posts or for not submitting his outside activities forms\u2014and the decision was left up to a jury. This arguably suggests that the judge was aiding Defendant FAU in reducing the complaint to one of simple intent without reference to the complexities of the case and the large amount of evidence against the university. All this evidence was disregarded by the jury and ignored by the press.<\/p>\n This had the effect of putting Tracy on trial (although he was the plaintiff and not the defendant), judged not by his actual peers but by a jury composed of members of the public who did not understand the full implications of the case\u2014because much of the evidence was suppressed. Neither did they understand the implications of tenure, as they were not academics themselves. This upended the complaint and trashed many months of hard work by Tracy and his lawyers\u2014work detailed in the 90 legal documents posted at the\u00a0James Tracy Legal Defense Fund<\/a>\u00a0website.\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Much has been written about the massive bad press that James Tracy has received, beginning in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook event. This was instigated by the Florida\u00a0Sun Sentinel<\/i>\u00a0and then taken up by the national mainstream and alternative media. The\u00a0Sun Sentinel<\/i>\u00a0published a letter of December 10, 2015, written by Lenny and Veronique Pozner, publicized as the only Jewish family to have lost a child in the alleged Sandy Hook shooting. The letter, \u201cSandy Hook Massacre 3rd Anniversary: Two Parents Target FAU Conspiracy Theorist<\/a>,\u201d was reprinted in the\u00a0Forward\u00a0<\/i>on December 14. The letter accused Tracy of \u201ctorturing\u201d the victims\u2019 families, and called for his firing:<\/p>\n A plethora of conspiracies arose after Sandy Hook, but none received as much mainstream publicity as Tracy, who suggested that the shooting never occurred and the Obama administration had staged the \u201cevent\u201d to prepare the country for strict gun control measures.<\/p>\n More than 800 news agencies covered the story of his denial. As a result, this professor achieved fame among the morbid and deranged precisely because his theories were attached to his academic credentials and his affiliation with FAU. Tracy has enjoyed tremendous success from this exposure and has since leveraged it into a popular Internet blog and radio program. Worse yet, it has elevated his status and fame among the degenerates that revel in the pleasure of sadistically torturing victims\u2019 families.<\/p>\n The Pozners\u2019 accusations were false, as has been shown, but nonetheless they were picked up by other media outlets and used to bash Tracy in the US press. Strangely, the letter contains information that only an insider would likely have known. And it was this letter that brought on Tracy\u2019s dismissal on January 5, 2016, although FAU insists that there was no connection. \u201cThe timing of it is completely coincidental,\u201d\u00a0said FAU attorney Curley<\/a>. \u201cThe optics of course look like the school is retaliating, when they\u2019re not.\u201d The trial was covered by the local Florida press and kept out of the national media, with the exception of brief, disparaging reports in the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0New York Daily News<\/i><\/a>. The titles of the articles indicate their biased nature:<\/p>\n -\u201cTrial To Begin for Fired FAU Professor, Conspiracy Theorist James Tracy,\u201d\u00a0Sun Sentinel,\u00a0<\/i>November 27, 2017 This last article pushes the idea that Tracy was an ordinary employee who \u201crepeatedly refused to obey reasonable requests from his bosses.\u201d It quotes Curley as saying that FAU officials were glad they got to \u201cset the record straight.\u201d According to the article:<\/p>\n FAU said it was about an employee who didn\u2019t want to listen to his bosses, his peers or his union officials\u2026Tracy used his position as an FAU professor for \u201cself-promotion\u201d and to bolster his blog\u2019s reputation, Curley said. FAU officials testified Tracy lied to them about using university resources to write his blog\u2026Curley listed several examples of Tracy\u2019s failure to follow the rules and comply with reasonable requests from his employers. The school wasn\u2019t his priority.<\/p>\n \u201cThe school was a platform for him\u2014that\u2019s not what it\u2019s supposed to be about,\u201d Curley said. A video in the article features an interview with Curley; watch it and judge for yourself whether this is an honest man.<\/p>\n G. J. \u201cJoe\u201d Curley is a Florida \u201csuper lawyer\u201d and shareholder with\u00a0Gunster<\/a>, \u201cFlorida\u2019s law firm for business.\u201d According to Gunster\u2019s website, \u201cJoe most often represents business clients with complicated employment and commercial matters in court\u201d; his experience includes \u201cthe achievement of zero verdicts for institutional defendants, injunctions involving hundreds of millions in issue, as well as multi-million dollar verdicts in a variety of business related disputes.\u201d On December 11, immediately following the verdict in the trial, attorney G. Joseph Curley became Judge Curley\u2014appointed to the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit Court<\/a>\u00a0by Florida Governor Rick Scott. \u201cCurley\u2019s appointment came just hours after he won a high-profile case involving a professor from Florida Atlantic University.\u201d The \u201ctiming\u201d of this was surely \u201ccompletely coincidental\u201d as Curley might say. [6] Governor Rick Scott will be familiar as the official who dominated the media after the Pulse nightclub event in Orlando.\u00a0<\/b>\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Yet one more \u201ccoincidence\u201d had the trial scheduled to run right up to the fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook \u201cshooting\u201d on December 14, 2017. As expected, the mainstream press featured the \u201cmassacre\u201d once again in major venues including\u00a0The New York Times<\/i><\/a>,\u00a0The Wall Street Journal<\/i><\/a>, and the\u00a0New York Daily News<\/i><\/a>. Yet it has long been known that the official story is far from the truth. Much of the evidence can be found online in\u00a0articles<\/a>,\u00a0lectures<\/a>, and\u00a0films<\/a>\u00a0(although Memory Hole Blog and many important youtube channels have been taken down) as well as in the book,\u00a0Nobody Died at Sandy Hook,\u00a0<\/i>second edition, available from\u00a0Moon Rock Books<\/a>. The book was censored by amazon.com and wiped from the site without a trace, but the first edition can be\u00a0downloaded<\/a>\u00a0for free at several sites.\u00a0New details<\/a>continue to appear, making it ever more certain that this was a staged event. If you don\u2019t believe me, you are not alone\u2014although at least one-fourth of the US public reportedly now thinks they\u2019ve been played.<\/p>\n A poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University<\/a>\u00a0in October 2016 found that 24% of Americans interviewed believed that it was at least possible that the Sandy Hook \u201cshooting\u201d was \u201cfaked in order to increase support for gun control.\u201d It is likely that even more people now hold this opinion. Those who orchestrated the event are desperate to keep the facts from emerging, by banning books, pulling videos off the internet\u2014and firing Professor James Tracy for daring to investigate. Tracy\u2019s legal team is considering an appeal based on Rosenberg\u2019s order on motions for summary judgment, which limited the proceedings to one count only. Tracy has been without a job and an income since he was fired, his scholarly reputation has been ruined, and he remains a subject of ridicule in the press. Not only has he suffered cruelly and unjustly, but academic freedom is now in real danger. In a statement by Tracy to the\u00a0Washington Post<\/i><\/a>:<\/p>\n In my view the Tracy v. FAU decision will embolden university administrators across the US to scrutinize the personal affairs of faculty members with whom they disagree, and they\u2019ll be more inclined to discipline or terminate vulnerable faculty knowing a set of legal precedents are being established in this vein.<\/p>\n One positive outcome of the trial is the classification by Rosenberg of Tracy\u2019s blog posts as private speech on matters of public concern, such as mass shootings, government conspiracies, and the like. With this, she threw out FAU\u2019s repeated assertions that Tracy was conducting academic research on Memory Hole Blog pertinent to his employment. This may help with an appeal. But an appeal will require more resources. If you can support this cause, visit the James Tracy Legal Defense Fund\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0and click on \u201cGive.\u201d\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Vivian Lee\u00a0<\/b>is the nom de plume of a tenured professor at an east coast university.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n Notes<\/b><\/p>\n [1] FAU Defendants\u2019 Answer and Affirmative Defenses to Plaintiff\u2019s Second Amended Complaint, page 74, section 5.\u00a0http:\/\/tracylegaldefense.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/03\/fau-answer.pdf<\/a>;<\/p>\n [2] Collective Bargaining Agreement, 2012-2015, Florida Atlantic University Board of Trustees and the United Faculty of Florida, Articles 15.1 and 16.1. http:\/\/www.fau.edu\/provost\/faculty\/files\/CBA-2012-2015-Oct2015.pdf<\/p>\n [3] Vivian Lee, \u201cAmerican Academic Freedom in Jeopardy: Professor James Tracy vs. Florida Atlantic University (FAU), Global Research, May 7, 2016.\u00a0http:\/\/www.globalresearch.ca\/american-academic-freedom-in-jeopardy\/5523940<\/a>;<\/p>\n [4] Vivian Lee, \u201cAcademic Freedom Lawsuit to Proceed: Judge Affirms First Amendment Rights.\u201d Global Research, March 8, 2017.\u00a0http:\/\/www.globalresearch.ca\/academic-freedom-lawsuit-to-proceed-judge-affirms-first-amendment-rights\/5578399<\/a>;<\/p>\n [5] Omnibus Order on All Pending Motions for Summary Judgment.\u00a0http:\/\/tracylegaldefense.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/11\/summary-judgment-order-11-1-17-1.pdf<\/a>;<\/p>\n [6] The governor of Florida also appoints 14 of the 17 members of the\u00a0Board of Governors<\/a>\u00a0of the state university system of Florida. The governor appoints six of the 13 members of each state university\u2019s\u00a0Board of Trustees<\/a>, and members of the Board of Governors appoint five of the 13. The governor thus controls appointments to the Board of Trustees of FAU.<\/p>\n![\"Atty](\"http:\/\/vivianleeposts.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/12\/atty-g-joseph-curley-palm-beach-post.jpg\")
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\n<\/b><\/b><\/p>\nTenure and academic freedom<\/b><\/h3>\n
FAU conspiracy with the judicial system?<\/b><\/h3>\n
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<\/div>\n![\"LL](\"http:\/\/vivianleeposts.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/12\/ll-tweet-12-12-17.jpg\")
\u00a0Incriminating memo by defendant Dean Heather Coltman of January 2013, part of the evidence discounted by the federal jury.<\/h5>\nFAU conspiracy with the press?<\/b><\/h3>\n
\n<\/a>-\u201cEx FAU Professor, Conspiracy Theorist James Tracy, Testifies about Firing in Free Speech Case,\u201d\u00a0Sun Sentinel,\u00a0<\/i>November 30, 2017
\n<\/a>-\u201cFAU Professor James Tracy Claims School Fired Him for Sandy Hook Rants,\u201d\u00a0Palm Beach Post,\u00a0<\/i>November 30, 2017
\n<\/a>-\u201cEx-FAU Prof on Trial Tries To Downplay Attack on Sandy Hook Parents,\u201d\u00a0Palm Beach Post,\u00a0<\/i>December 1, 2017
\n<\/a>-\u201cFAU Prof Wasn\u2019t Fired Because of Sandy Hook Blog, FAU Official Testifies,\u201d\u00a0Sun Sentinel,<\/i>\u00a0December 4, 2017
\n<\/a>-\u201cChristie: Tracy-vs-FAU More about Arrogance Than Free Speech, Insubordination,\u201d\u00a0PalmBeachPost.com, December 5, 2017
\n<\/a>-\u201cFAU Prof James Tracy\u2019s Firing \u2018Wasn\u2019t a Surprise\u2019 to Him, University Officials Say,\u201d\u00a0Sun Sentinel,\u00a0<\/i>December 5, 2017
\n<\/a>-\u201cWhat It Was Like in the Class of FAU\u2019s Conspiracy-Spinning Professor,\u201d\u00a0Palm Beach Post,\u00a0<\/i>December 8, 2017
\n<\/a>-\u201cClaims against FAU by Sandy Hook Denier Headed To Federal Jury Monday,\u201d\u00a0Palm Beach Post,\u00a0<\/i>December 8, 2017
\n<\/a>and
\n-\u201cJury Rules against Fired FAU Prof James Tracy in Free Speech Case,\u201d\u00a0Sun Sentinel,\u00a0<\/i>December 11, 2017<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Palm](\"http:\/\/vivianleeposts.files.wordpress.com\/2017\/12\/palm-beach-post-4.jpg\")
<\/div>\nThe fifth anniversary of the Sandy Hook incident<\/b><\/h3>\n