A federal court has granted a preliminary injunction preventing the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion from blocking a professor’s interactions with posts on its official X account.
The ruling states the public university cannot block conservative scholar Bruce Gilley’s interactions with its official X account — even his posts deemed “hateful,” “racist” or “otherwise offensive.”
“It will be interesting to see how much longer UO wants to use tax payer’s money to fight for the right to discriminate based on viewpoint,” Gilley’s attorney Del Kolde, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Institute for Free Speech, wrote on LinkedIn in response to the July 23 ruling. “They have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
The University of Oregon’s Office of the Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, which administers the Division of Equity and Inclusion, did not respond to a request for comment from The College Fix.
Gilley, a professor of political science at Portland State University, in 2022 sued the former communications manager of the @UOEquity X account, Tova Stabin, after she blocked him for responding to her “racism interrupter” prompt with the quote “all men are created equal.”
Stabin, who requested her name not be capitalized in court documents, is described on the website My Jewish Learning as an “Ashkenazi lesbian feminist.”
The U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon previously denied Gilley’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the enforcement of the university’s social media policy that bans users who are “hateful,” “racist,” or “otherwise offensive.”
But in March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated that ruling.
“[A] majority of the three-judge panel held that Gilley’s request for prospective relief was not moot because the University of Oregon failed to show that the challenged conduct of blocking him on Twitter cannot reasonably be expected to recur,” the institute said at the time.
In granting the preliminary injunction last week, the district court agreed with Gilley “that the provisions allowing the Communications Manager to block ‘hateful,’ ‘racist,’ and ‘otherwise offensive’ speech create a risk of viewpoint discrimination because ‘[w]hat is offensive or hateful is often in the eye of the beholder.’”
“If Plaintiff was blocked for posting ‘all men are created equal’ because the post was viewed as hateful, racist, or otherwise offensive, such blocking would violate the Constitution. Deleting or hiding the post for that reason would also violate the Constitution,” the court wrote.
Gilley is known for being denounced by left-wing critics after he published an academic article in the Third World Quarterly in 2017 defending colonialism’s contributions to non-Western developing countries.
Reached by The College Fix, Gilley declined to comment on the case, which is currently stayed for 60 days to allow the parties to explore settlement options.
There has been a flurry of motions filed in this two-year-old case. In January 2023, the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon had initially sided with the University of Oregon.
The court acknowledged that an internal email sent by Stabin stating Gilley had allegedly been “talking something about the oppression of white men” and that “[people like Gilley] are just there to trip you up and make trouble” is “sufficient to raise serious questions on the merits of Plaintiff’s claim that Defendant stabin blocked him on account of his expression of a viewpoint.”
But it held that Gilley was not likely to suffer irreparable future harm, since there is a low risk he would be blocked again, calling his blocking an “anomaly.”
“Defendant stabin testified that she acted alone in blocking Plaintiff and did not consult any other University staff after she blocked him . . . Defendant stabin has since retired from the University, and her successor was still unknown on the date of the hearing on the present motion. In this context, it would be speculative to conclude that this unknown successor is likely to block Plaintiff on Twitter again.”
However, the most recent ruling is not as confident the university had put in place adequate measures to ensure Gilley is not blocked again.
Even though the newly hired communications manager “cannot act alone when determining whether to block users,” which “eliminates the risk of ‘a rogue employee,’” the changes are new and have yet to be implemented, the district court ruled.
“Plaintiff has shown that the two provisions of the social media guidelines he challenges create a risk of censoring speech that is protected by the First Amendment,” the court ruled.
MORE: Professor blocked for tweeting ‘all men are created equal’ files First Amendment lawsuit
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