CSU-Pueblo professor sues university over censorship allegations

A CSU-Pueblo sociology professor filed a lawsuit against University President Lesley DiMare and the Board of Governors citing that his First Amendment rights were violated.

Tenured professor Tim McGettigan said when he heard the university was considering laying off 50 employees last year, he sent out a mass email.

“My speech was curtailed. My First Amendment rights were curtailed,” said McGettigan, who’s worked at the university since 2000.

McGettigan sent out an email on Jan. 17, 2014 that compared the proposed job cuts to the Ludlow Massacre, when striking coal miners and their families were killed in 1914. In the email sent to students, faculty and staff, McGettigan said that CSU Chancellor Michael Martin “assembled a hit list” and went on to say that Martin was going to “terminate the 50 people who are on his list.”

McGettigan said his email account was then deactivated for several days. He received a letter from Johnna Doyle, deputy general counsel, who said that McGettigan’s “Children of Ludlow” email violated the university’s electronic communications policy that prohibits “use of electronic communications to intimidate, threaten, harass other individuals or to interfere with the activity of others to conduct university business.”

“There’s no policy whatsoever at the university that empowers the administration to restrict my ability to speak in the way that the university has,” he said.

In his federal civil rights suit, it states, “To this day, Defendant DiMare continues to block Professor McGettigan’s ability to send any email to groups of people in the CSU-P community.”

“Freedom of speech is always under siege,” McGettigan said. “It’s not just in places like Paris where Charlie Hebdo gets shot and killed for some satirical comments. Even in the United States, there’s a lot of hostility to free speech.”

In his lawsuit, McGettigan states DiMare defamed him by accusing him of threatening violence in his emails. McGettigan rejects those claims.

“Protecting free speech is not about protecting the things that I want to say. Free speech is about protecting the rights to free speech for people with whom I profoundly disagree,” he said.

University spokesperson Kyle Henley declined to comment on the lawsuit.