Freedom of Speech

I carefully read the Garcetti opinion and things are worse than I anticipated. The supreme court has separated out our role as "citizen" and our role as "employee," stating that as an employee, we have no first amendment protection in speech that's part of our job duties.

The problem is, for example, in our faculty contract, it was beneficial to have an extremely broad scope on what is considered our duties, because then it becomes clear we are always working. Since we have a number calculations for hours per week, it was to our benefit to negotiate for a broad job description. Paradoxically, because of this case holding, which came down after our contract was sealed, items in your job description are not protected by the first amendment, i.e. conference presentations, articles, community service! The opinion states that teachers are a special case, and the court won't speak on applicability of its holding to teachers. Yet, it appears in the lower court interpretations, teachers are getting caught up in this.

This is really serious.

This is the *most* troubling supreme court I've read in a long, long time. And no one seems to know about it around here . . .