Governor targets professor over ‘anti-Trump’ comments in lecture

Louisiana’s Republican governor is publicly targeting a Louisiana State University law professor for allegedly making brief classroom comments about students who voted for president-elect Donald Trump. Governor Jeff Landry shared a video of the professor on social media on 17 November, and then earlier this week he sent LSU a letter calling on officials to punish him.

The day after the election, the professor, Nicholas Bryner, who serves as director of LSU’s climate change law and policy project, allegedly made meandering comments in class directed at students who supported Mr Trump, noting that black students in the law school felt uncomfortable.

On 26 November, Mr Landry posted on X and Instagram again about Professor Bryner, sharing the letter he sent to LSU with the caption: “Our Administration will not stand by silently as this professor defies the voices of 76 million Americans who voted for @realdonaldtrump.”

Mr Landry’s letter says he issued an executive order earlier this autumn “to promote and protect free speech for all higher education institutions across Louisiana”. On X, he shared the letter using his verified government account; he then used a personal account to repost it, adding the caption: “Today’s lesson: teaching college professors what free speech is.”

Academic freedom advocacy organisations quickly pointed out the apparent disconnect between what Mr Landry said he was protecting and what he was doing. “Beware the official who comes calling for censorship under the banner of free speech,” Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Inside Higher Ed.

“It’s ironic that the governor starts out by touting his free speech” executive order “in a letter whose evident purpose is to encourage the administration and board to punish a faculty member for exercising his free speech,” Greg Scholtz, a senior programme officer with the American Association of University Professors, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “Obviously, the effect of this letter will be to chill the academic freedom of professors in Louisiana.”

Neither LSU, Professor Bryner nor Mr Landry returned Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment.

This is not Mr Landry’s first venture into higher education. Earlier this year, he signed legislation requiring a copy of the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every classroom in Louisiana’s public colleges, universities and trade schools, as well as primary and secondary schools. (A federal judge has blocked the law.) Nor is it Mr Landry’s first attempt to involve himself in LSU’s affairs; in September, he began pushing the university to bring its eight-year-old live tiger mascot to football games, The Louisiana Illuminator reported. After LSU refused to do so, Mr Landry brought a rented tiger from Florida.

It is unclear who recorded the alleged video of Professor Bryner’s classroom comments or why, or who gave it to the governor.

Mr Landry first posted the video from his government account on 17 November with the caption: “This professor has defied the 76 million Americans who voted for President @realDonaldTrump—to silence and belittle those in his class who voted for our next president. This is not the kind of behaviour we want at @LSU and our universities.”

In the 90-second clip, someone who is labelled as Professor Bryner tells students: if “your rationale for voting for Trump [is] that you don’t like him personally but that you like his policies, I’ll just say that it’s on you to prove that by the way you conduct yourself and by the way that you treat other people around you. Because I will say that I hear a lot about how groups of people in the law school, particularly Black students, don’t feel comfortable in the law school, don’t feel welcome.

“I want you all to think a little bit about why that is,” Professor Bryner goes on. “And I don’t know if anybody falls in that category, but if you voted for Trump on the idea that you don’t like him personally but that you like his policies, I just want you to think about the message that that sends to other people and how you can prove that by treating other people in a way that matches that sentiment.”

In his original post, Mr Landry did not specifically call for punishing Professor Bryner. But he did in the letter he sent this week to the chair of LSU’s governing board, the Board of Supervisors, which copied in the state attorney general, LSU’s president, the law school dean and other members of the LSU board.

“If the school does not discipline Mr. Bryner for his comments, I hope that the board will look into the matter, as LSU professors are prohibited from utilizing state resources to influence public policy,” Mr Landry wrote.

Although that part of his letter did not cite any state law or specify how Professor Bryner was influencing “public policy,” it did point to Mr Landry’s executive order and a law enacted earlier this year that says, among other things: “No professor or instructor who teaches a class to students at an institution of higher education shall impose the professor’s or instructor’s political views onto students.” But the law does not specifically reference classroom speech; it just notes that professors cannot require students to engage in political activity outside the classroom.

Mr Landry wrote that Professor Bryner “went so far as to question the character of students that voted for a particular candidate”. His letter included a transcript of Professor Bryner’s alleged comments that went beyond the end of the video, in which the professor allegedly says, “I perceive this vote as really like a rejection of the idea that we are governed by a people with expertise…There’s a pretty big rejection of that idea that we should be governed by experts, and so I think it’s worthwhile to consider that and think about that as you…finish your law school career and go into law practice—how you’re going to handle that type of sentiment.”

Mr Landry suggested that Professor Bryner was speaking about topics unrelated to his class. Mr Steinbaugh contested this.

“This is a professor using current events to talk about civility,” Mr Steinbaugh said. In law school, “Civility is hammered into you.”

Mr Steinbaugh said that if Mr Landry’s position is that merely sharing political views in class is the same as imposing them on students, that means professors could never share opinions in class – no matter how relevant.

“That’s censorship that would violate the First Amendment,” Mr Steinbaugh said.

This is an edited version of a story that first appeared on Inside Higher Ed.