‘Antifa’ prof plans on suing community college...still taking a salary
He is now suing his former school, claiming it violated his First Amendment rights.
Former Kirkwood Community College professor Jeff Klinzman resigned after saying "I am Antifa."
While Klinzman said he was forced to resign, the college disagrees....
The former Iowa professor who proclaimed “I affirm that I am Antifa” to a local news outlet is now planning on suing his former employer after allegedly being forced to resign.
Jeff Klinzman told The Cedar Rapids Gazette that he plans on suing Kirkwood Community College, stating that he thinks the school violated his First Amendment rights.
“[Kirkwood Community College] made it clear — you can resign or we’ll terminate you,” Klinzman said, according to the report.
The former adjunct professor said that he chose to resign after Kirkwood agreed to pay him for the semester, which amounts to $3,624 for a 16-week period.
However, Lori Sundberg, president of Kirkwood Community College, said that Klinzman was never asked to quit and referenced an email Klinzman had sent to human resources.
“Due to the controversy surrounding reporting about my activism, and in the interest of preserving the safety of the Kirkwood campus, its students, faculty, and staff, I resign my position as a member of the English faculty effective immediately,” the email from Klinzman said, according to the Gazette.
The Gazette also reported that Sundberg had no regrets of the “decision to remove” Klinzman from teaching.
”Once the news story ran and we had this outcry from the public and what we perceived as threats — at the end of the day for me, if I’m found legally wrong on this, I can live with that,” the president said, according to the Gazette. “But if I make a wrong decision regarding the safety of the students, and he’s harmed, our students are harmed, or other faculty are harmed, I can’t live with that.”
Free speech nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) spokesman Daniel Burnett referred Campus Reform to a letter the group sent to Sundberg supporting Klinzman’s First Amendment right.
“The participants in this exchange of ideas cannot be chosen or removed at the whim of those critics that boo the loudest,” Adam Steinbaugh, director of FIRE’s Individual Rights Defense Program, said in the letter.
Klinzman came under fire after KCRG-TV reported that that the Kirkwood professor admitted to being a member of Antifa. Further investigation of his social media revealed he “liked” a number of local Antifa chapters.
[RELATED: Iowa prof who said ‘I am Antifa’ is now out of a job]
In a 2012 post, Klinzman posted on Facebook that “this is what the country will come to if we don’t stop Evangelical Christians,” quoting a poem reading “Kill them all, and bury them deep into the ground, before millions more are tortured to death.”
He then added: “It’s not pretty, and I’m not proud, but seeing what Evangelical Christians are doing to this country and its people fills me with rage and a desire to exact revenge.”
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