UCF prof in tweet scandal was given raise
Negy, accused of racist posts, rewarded last year to keep him at university
A UCF professor who came under fire recently for Twitter posts described as racist by students and alumni received a 12% pay raise a year ago after he received a job offer from a Texas university.
Though university leaders now are condemning the views of Charles Negy, an associate professor in the psychology department, he received an annual pay bump of $11,514 in 2019, raising his salary to $107,000, an incentive intended to keep him at the University of Central Florida.
“We would like to retain you at UCF,” wrote Florian Jentsch, chair of the psychology department, and Michael Johnson, then the dean of the College of Sciences, in a letter addressed to Negy dated May 22, 2019.
UCF does not typically monitor faculty members’ social media accounts, wrote Johnson, who is now the university’s interim provost, in an email Thursday to the Orlando Sentinel. Johnson said when he approved the raise, he didn’t know about the content of Negy’s Twitter account nor that he was soon to publish a book called “White Shaming: Bullying Based on Prejudice, VirtueSignaling, and Ignorance.”
“I strongly condemn the inflammatory racist views expressed in Dr. Negy’s social media account,” Johnson wrote.
Jentsch declined to comment and referred a reporter to Johnson’s statement on the matter.
Negy didn’t respond to an email Thursday from the Orlando Sentinel. Earlier this month, he posted a message to Twitter acknowledging a lot of people disagreed with his views and didn’t think he should express them.
“Apparently, only their ‘voices’ matter and if you don’t agree, you will be vilified,” Negy wrote.
President Alexander Cartwright told faculty members on Thursday the situation is “extremely complicated.” He condemned the tweets and said they “do not reflect UCF’s values” but said the university must uphold Negy’s right to freedom of speech and the principles of academic freedom, which allow faculty members to express unpopular views.
But the university will investigate any complaints about Negy mistreating colleagues or students, Cartwright said.
“I understand why people are
frustrated, but there is this process we follow within the university setting that takes time and I am committed to us getting through that,” he said.
Johnson said he agreed Negy had the right to express his views in his private life, but “actions in the workplace, including in the classroom, are a different matter.”
“Many students say they have complained, but it is not clear to who they complained and what, if anything, was the result,” he said.
The controversy, which has prompted students and alumni to call on UCF to fire Negy, has drawn national attention.
Tensions boiled over last week amid national protests over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died last month after a Minneapolis white police officer pressed his knee on his neck for more than 8 minutes. UCF and free speech advocates have contended Negy’s social media posts are protected by the First Amendment.
But the outcry has led thousands of people to sign online petitions calling for Negy’s firing, including one that has received more than 28,000 signatures, which also notes “perverse transphobia and sexism” on his account, describing the posts as “reprehensible.” The petition suggests Negy’s views have translated to maltreatment of students in his classroom.
Faculty members, particularly those at public universities, are free to speak about matters of public concern in their private lives, including on their social media accounts, because that speech is protected by the First Amendment, said Adam Steinbaugh director of the Individual Rights Defense program at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, often known as FIRE. These types of issues crop up at colleges “every day,” he said, and any action against faculty members’ off-campus speech could deter others from expressing themselves freely, he said.
“Academics can be, to put it mildly, eccentric,” Steinbaugh said. “They are often involved in the exchange of ideas that can be controversial or even deeply offensive to people, but merely holding views that are offensive to others is not evidence of discriminatory conduct.”
Negy’s more recent controversial tweets included one earlier this month that read, “Sincere question: If Afr. Americans as a group, had the same behavioral profile as Asian Americans (on average, performing the best academically, having the highest income, committing the lowest crime, etc.), would we still be proclaiming “systematic racism” exists?”
Twitter users have tabbed some of Negy’s tweets as offensive for months. In March 2019, he responded to a post about another institution ending its requirement that undergraduate applicants submit college entrance exam scores.
“It’s the latest disingenuous ploy to admit more lessprepared African American and Hispanic students into a university for ‘diversity,’” Negy wrote. “Demanding less-prepared students improve their math and reading skills is too much to ask, apparently.”
One user described the message as “hateful” and racist.”
Negy doesn’t identify himself as a UCF faculty member in his profile, but he does in some of his posts. For example, on April 25, 2019, Negy wrote, “At the University of Central Florida (UCF) where I teach, they permit a ‘Hispanics only’ graduation ceremony on their property (it doesn’t matter if it’s paid for by private donors, UCF tacitly approves of this ethnic segregation [as long as it’s for minorities]).”
Last year, Johnson and Jentsch acknowledged Negy had received an offer from The University of Texas Permian Basin and said they valued his contributions to UCF, offering to raise his salary to $107,000, which is based on nine months of work.
“We hope that the commitment described above will allow us to retain you at UCF,” Jentsch and Johnson wrote in the letter dated May 22, 2019.
The Odessa school, a campus that’s part of the University of Texas system and serves roughly 6,000 students, offered Negy a tenured position as a department chair with a salary of $110,000 based on nine months of work per year, plus a $6,000 annual stipend. Michael Zavada, the university’s dean of arts and sciences, wrote in an email he was “quite impressed” with Negy’s credentials.
University spokeswoman Tatum Hubbard declined to comment on the matter Thursday, except to say Negy was never employed there.
UCF hasn’t been able to confirm whether Negy has been the subject of previous complaints or investigations.
The current uproar isn’t the first time Negy has been the source of controversy: In 2012, he made national news after he said students who proclaimed Christianity as the most valid religion had displayed “religious bigotry.”
Steinbaugh said academic institutions should not consider a faculty member’s “extramural” speech when weighing whether to give the academic a raise or employment offer. He warned that those who call for Negy’s firing should realize they might want to protect other kinds of speech that others condemn.
“When we move to restrict the speech that we find offensive, that also means that the same types of rules would apply to the speech that we like,” Steinbaugh said.