The Fallout of a Charlie Kirk Campus Scandal
Last September, Ellie Fisher, a third-year law student at Texas Tech, was in her 2 P.M. seminar, Race and Racism, when another student interrupted class to announce that the conservative activist Charlie Kirk had been shot. The student described Kirk as “the guy from Turning Point.” Fisher turned to a classmate and asked, “What’s Turning Point?”
Texas Tech, which is based in Lubbock, ranks among the most politically conservative public campuses in the nation; in 2024, Donald Trump carried Lubbock County by forty points. Fisher, who is originally from San Martin, California, near Santa Cruz, was an outspoken progressive. She is just over five feet tall, with long dark hair and expressive eyes that she accentuates with paste-on lashes. As an undergraduate, she founded an N.A.A.C.P. chapter at the school, led voter-registration drives, and helped get prominent Texas Democrats, including Jasmine Crockett and Beto O’Rourke, to speak on campus. “My white family, they’re, like, ‘Oh, my God, I would’ve never moved to Texas,’ ” Fisher, who was adopted as an infant by white parents, told me. “I’m, like, ‘It’s great! There’s hella Black people out here!’ ”
She was also drawn to the cowboy culture of West Texas. In middle school, she had developed a passion for livestock—when she was seventeen, a steer she raised named Rambo won a top prize at the Santa Cruz County Fair—which ultimately led to a scholarship to study agriculture at Texas Tech. She took a meat-judging course and became a strong supporter of the Second Amendment. (She has tattoos of a handgun and the words “Enemy of the State.”) After her senior year, Fisher passed up several offers to study law on the West Coast. She aspired to be a federal public defender. Texas Tech is in a region of the state—known as the High Plains—with a severe lack of indigent legal services. “There are a million Ellie Fishers right now in San Francisco,” she told her parents. “Where they need me is Lubbock.”
At law school, Fisher, who’s now twenty-six, formed friendships with many of her conservative peers. She was close with members of the campus’s chapter of the Federalist Society, several of whom were invited to her most recent Friendsgiving party, which she called “God, Guns, Gravy, and Gobble Gobble.” (“THIS IS NOT FAKE NEWS!!!” the invitation read. “The patriots are gathering.”) “The conservatives at the law school know I poke fun at them,” she told me. “They let me do it, and they drink with me while it happens.” She added, “The main thing is respect. You’ve got to be able to talk about it. And you’ve got to be friends with people.”
On the day of Kirk’s murder, Fisher was scheduled to work in the school’s criminal-defense clinic, which enlists law students to serve as public defenders in Lubbock County. As she walked into the clinic’s offices, her phone chimed with messages and news alerts. Fisher would later say that she could only recall one Kirk quote at the time, a defense of the Second Amendment in which he said its protections were worth the cost of “some gun deaths every single year.” But, during the conservative activist’s many appearances on podcasts and college campuses, he regularly expressed views designed to offend people with Fisher’s political sensibilities, including that “there’s a war on white people in this country” and that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” As Fisher passed the office of Joe Stephens, who ran the clinic’s program for rural defendants, she called out, “Hey, Joe Lew!” Her voice was full of energy. “Have you heard the news?” she asked. “They shot Charlie Kirk.”
Stephens didn’t immediately recognize the name. “There’s video,” Fisher said. “It looks bad.” The clip was “all over the internet,” she continued, waving her phone. Stephens gently chided her, saying, “Don’t do that.”
Down the hall, her supervisor, a tenured professor named Patrick Metze, was in his office with two students. Metze had taught at Texas Tech for nearly two decades and served as the director of the criminal-defense clinic. That morning, the two students in his office had met with prosecutors at the courthouse for the first time, a rite of passage for any aspiring defense attorney. The mood in the room was jubilant. “I mean, the girls were fired up,” he said. “It’s a big moment.”
After Fisher walked in, the conversation turned to Kirk. Ashanty Wilson, one of the other students, didn’t know who he was. “Oh, he’s a racist,” Metze answered. “A conservative racist, and a misogynist.”
“O.K.,” Wilson said. “So what’s the big deal?” With their permission, Metze began playing a video of Kirk’s shooting on his phone. The room reeled. “Look at his head!” someone exclaimed. Another asked, “Do you think he survived?” Metze cut in. “My daughter’s a nurse,” he said. “There’s no way you could survive that.”
Terri Morgeson, the director of the clinic’s family-law practice, could hear the discussion from her office, next door. “I call myself the noise monitor of the clinic,” she would tell investigators. “Everything echoes down that hallway.” She approached Metze’s door and saw Fisher on a couch, talking animatedly. She later said that Metze apologized for the noise, telling her, “I’m sorry. My students are just in a very good mood.” (Metze does not remember saying this.)
Morgeson briefly addressed the room before returning to her office. “Hey, y’all,” she said. “Just so you know, Trump announced that he’s dead.”
Later, in one of the clinic’s conference rooms, Fisher joined a discussion about Kirk with a group of students. A conservative classmate named Tristan Perez later recalled Fisher saying that she thought Kirk’s death was “a good thing.” (Fisher denies saying this.) Perez reminded her that Kirk had a family. He also noted that political violence was an assault on everyone’s free speech, liberals included. Fisher fell silent. “Yeah, I understand all that—I’m not happy he died,” she finally said. “But I still think he was a Nazi.” The discussion was “respectful,” Perez later said. “Nobody was yelling. Nobody was fighting. It was just a conversation.”
The following week, Fisher received an e-mail from Dwight McDonald, a law professor who served as Metze’s deputy at the clinic. He wanted to discuss “an incident that occurred in the clinic last week.” Later that day, Fisher met with McDonald and the law school’s dean of student life, Sofia Chapman, who informed her that she was facing allegations that she “announced Charlie Kirk’s death” in “a manner that was overexuberant.” Morgeson had reported that Fisher shouted, “They shot that motherfucker,” while marching through the hallway. Chapman later recounted that Morgeson was “visibly upset” that “Fisher was celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death.” Morgeson also said that two of her students had requested to leave early because they were “upset and bothered.”
At the meeting, Fisher suggested that there was a misunderstanding: it was Metze who had played the video in his office, she explained, and Morgeson had announced Kirk’s death. A month passed, and Fisher assumed that the situation had resolved. Then, on October 14th, Kirk’s birthday, Fisher received an e-mail from the law school’s administrators, informing her that she was under investigation for violating the school’s honor code. The notice wasn’t a complete surprise. Earlier that day, Fisher had stopped by Metze’s office. “They’re pushing me into retirement,” he’d told her, adding, “They’re coming for you.”
During Donald Trump’s second term, state legislatures across the country have intensified efforts to wrest control of university systems from what is often deemed “woke ideology.” More than half of American college students, in twenty-three states, are currently attending a school that has been forced to ban certain topics from the classroom, eliminate academic departments, or drastically weaken tenure protections for professors. Barrett Taylor, a scholar of higher education at the University of North Texas, described such measures as the first phase of a wider movement to establish what he calls the “post-liberal university.”
The second phase involves installing political appointees to run universities. In 2022, only three per cent of college presidents came from the public sector. But in Florida a quarter of state schools are now led by former Republican politicians, and many other states, including Ohio, Virginia, and Texas, have increasingly turned to conservative lawmakers to run public colleges and universities in the past two years. As a former trustee at a Florida public college put it, “We are now over the walls and ready to transform higher education from within.”
The results of these efforts were on prominent display in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death. Forty-five academics were fired or punished for Kirk-related speech incidents, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech watchdog group. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott personally intervened in multiple cases. When a student at Texas State mockingly reënacted Kirk’s shooting, Abbott posted on X, “Expel this student immediately”; six hours later, the university released a statement saying that “the individual” was “no longer a student” at the school. At Texas Tech, an undergraduate was arrested after taunting a Kirk mourner. “Thanks Texas Tech,” Abbott posted, below a photo of the student in handcuffs. Cody Campbell, an oil executive who chairs the university’s Board of Regents, replied, “We, @TexasTech, are proud of our values and are not afraid to stand up for them.” The school soon announced that the student was no longer enrolled.
Penalties have also been imposed for campus speech that had nothing to do with Kirk. Last year, after a recording of a Texas A. & M. instructor discussing gender identity was posted online, the instructor was fired, and Mark Welsh, the university’s president and a retired four-star general, was replaced by a former Republican state senator. In January, the University of Arkansas School of Law reversed the hiring of a new dean who had signalled support for transgender students after Republican state legislators threatened to defund the school. The following month, the president of South Florida State College—a former Republican legislator—reportedly ordered the firing of an English instructor for assigning Ottessa Moshfegh’s award-winning short story “Bettering Myself,” which briefly describes anal sex. A law professor at Florida A. & M. described the regime that has taken hold in his state as “an intellectual reign of terror.”
Lee Bollinger, a constitutional-law professor at Columbia, told me that what makes the current moment distinct from other “low points in the history of free speech” is that state governments, which control the leadership and funding of public universities, have imposed some of the most aggressive restrictions. A Presidential Administration inclined to violate the First Amendment may inspire a “national collective resistance,” Bollinger said, and can be voted out in a single election. But, he went on, campaigns of censorship rooted in state politics have often been overlooked and have “taken years for the country to get out of.”
Texas was an early leader in the effort to roll back academic freedoms at public colleges. In 2022, the Republican lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, called for a restructuring of the state’s universities, which he said had been “taken over by tenured, leftist professors” who “poison the minds of our next generation.” The ensuing overhaul was largely led by Brandon Creighton, a state senator from the Houston suburbs who chaired the Texas Senate’s Committee on Higher Education. Creighton wrote legislation that abolished diversity offices at every public college in Texas, made it easier to revoke tenure, and limited students’ ability to protest. Fisher had participated in the legislative debate over one of his bills. During her senior year, she testified at a late-night education-committee hearing, wearing a leather jacket with “#PROTECTDEI” spelled out in rhinestones on the back. “It’s always ‘Don’t California my Texas,’ ” she said. “I’m here at eleven at night asking you not to Jim Crow my school.”
Creighton’s most ambitious piece of legislation, Senate Bill 37, which was passed in 2025, granted sweeping powers to governor-appointed boards of regents, including final say over the hiring of provosts and deans and the authority to review curricula to insure that they promoted the “betterment of society.” That year, three of Texas’s university systems appointed former Republican officeholders as their chancellors. One was Texas Tech, which made Creighton its chancellor.
Since then, according to Jonathan Friedman, who serves as the director of PEN America’s free-expression program, few schools have gone further than Texas Tech in restricting speech and academic freedom on campus. In December, Creighton’s office banned the teaching of certain concepts, including anything that “promotes activism on issues related to race or sex.” Students were similarly prohibited from writing dissertations on such subjects. To enforce the new rules, Creighton launched a comprehensive review of Texas Tech’s fourteen thousand courses. In April, he publicly celebrated the results, announcing that the school had used artificial intelligence to detect offending material in hundreds of classes, a review process that he promised would become “a national model once we’re finished.”
At the same time, Creighton tends to present himself as a champion of the First Amendment. In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, he appeared at a rally for the Texas Tech chapter of Turning Point USA. He was accompanied onstage at the event—which was held at Cooks Garage, a car-themed pub in south Lubbock—by Texas’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, who had launched a campaign for the U.S. Senate. “It’s incredible to see West Texas values, and the Red Raider family as well, speaking out in full force” for “what Turning Point USA stands for,” Creighton told the crowd. Declaring that “free speech is paramount,” he vowed to be “open to every single viewpoint on campus” that “would make our campus, our state, and our nation better.”
By then, Texas Tech had already moved to discipline Patrick Metze and launched its investigation of Ellie Fisher.
Metze was raised in Levelland, Texas, the youngest son of parents “chasing the oil field,” as he put it. The family lived in a company house beside a petroleum plant; Metze recalled waking as a child to the stench of kerosene. After attending Texas Tech and the University of Houston law school, he returned to his home town with a new sense of purpose. He spent three decades in a private practice that offered pro-bono services to poor clients. Compared to the other residents of Levelland, he joked, “I’m Karl Marx.” When he began teaching at Texas Tech, in 2007, he envisioned a criminal-defense clinic that could help train a new generation of High Plains public defenders. Matthew Johnson, a former student who runs a defense practice in Lubbock, described Metze as “the heart of Tech Law.”
Metze learned of Kirk’s assassination from his daughter, who sent him a text message: “Charlie Kirk was assassinated today. Right wing asshole shot in the neck while on campus. The video is brutal!” Metze recalled playing the clip in his office and seeing Morgeson in his doorway. But he didn’t think that she seemed upset. “It was, like, a non-event,” he told me. “It was just another day in the clinic.”
Two days later, Metze received a request to meet with Jack Nowlin, the law school’s dean. Nowlin, a career legal academic, was well liked by faculty and students. His political orientation was not especially conservative. In 2023, he had told faculty that he intended to minimize the impact of Creighton’s first anti-D.E.I. law. But he was also known to be a fierce institutionalist. Nowlin is a “realist” who “is extremely good at managing up,” one professor told me. “What’s good for the law school is good for Jack.”
Almost as soon as Metze arrived at the dean’s office, Nowlin asked him, “Did y’all have a party in your office to celebrate Charlie Kirk’s death?” Metze was taken aback. He’d never seen Nowlin so angry. “It was a horrifying experience,” Metze told me. “You just can’t imagine the emotion.” At one point, he asked if Nowlin wanted him to resign. Nowlin said he would talk to the provost. Until then, he added, Metze should have “no meaningful contact” with any students.
The following Tuesday, when Metze was again summoned to meet with Nowlin and Dwight McDonald, Metze’s deputy, he was given a rehabilitation exercise: he was to read “The Righteous Mind,” a book about political civility by Jonathan Haidt, and write a reflection paper. Contact with students was still forbidden. Metze would later describe his response as the moment he got fired. “You know, Jack, Ellie absolutely had every reason in the world to feel the way she did, and she had every right in the world to express it,” he said. “You wanted the old white guy to tell the young Black girl to shut up, and sit down, and be in her place. And I didn’t do it, and I won’t do it.”
Metze spent the next month in his office, with the blinds drawn and a sign taped to the door that read “Working on a project.” On October 14th, Nowlin and McDonald called him in for a final meeting, where Nowlin laid out what he called “the solution to this problem.” Metze would retire at the end of the school year, and McDonald would be promoted as the clinic’s new director. There was “no room for negotiation,” Nowlin said. When Metze asked what would happen if he refused, Nowlin said that he would convene a committee to strip Metze of his tenure, on the ground that Metze posed “a danger to students.” Then he opened a notebook and handed Metze a piece of paper: a resignation letter. Metze signed his name. “It was certainly the most difficult moment of my professional life,” he later said. “I didn’t feel like I had any choice.”
The next day, Metze was at his desk, transferring the last of his files, when a pair of students stopped by his office. Metze told them that he was being forced into retirement, thus breaking the no-contact order. An hour later, Nowlin and Chapman appeared at his door. “Get your things and leave campus right now,” Nowlin said. The deans stood watch until Metze left the building.
By then, Nowlin had appointed Bill Keffer, an energy-law professor and a former Republican state legislator, to oversee a formal investigation of Fisher for violating the school’s honor code. She was charged with failing to uphold “professional obligations” in “performance related to clinical programs.” On the same day that Metze signed his resignation letter, Keffer e-mailed Fisher to request an interview.
Fisher arrived at the meeting with an attorney; Keffer was joined by Chapman and a lawyer from Creighton’s office. During an hour-long interview, Keffer asked if Fisher had entered the clinic that day announcing, “They got him” and “The motherfucker’s dead,” and whether Stephens had told her to get out of his office. In response to each question, Fisher said no. “Was there any time during the day that you could have felt excited or overjoyed?” Keffer asked. “Is there anything you could have done that could have been interpreted as being gleeful, or happy in any way?”
Fisher later told me that she’d felt “sort of gaslit” during the session, “because what they’ve alleged”—that she thought the country was better off without Kirk—“well, I do think that.” Afterward, friends texted to ask what the school was accusing her of. “Unsure,” Fisher replied. “A few things, no one could decide.”
In January, Keffer filed the academic equivalent of an indictment, finding “probable cause” that Fisher had violated the honor code and referring her to the school’s Honor Council. The report’s central allegations came from Morgeson. But it also flagged testimony from students in the clinic that day, including one who heard Fisher say in the conference room that Kirk “got what he deserved.”
Several students later complained that their statements to Keffer had been misrepresented. (Keffer did not respond to requests for comment.) Tristan Perez, who had mourned Kirk’s killing, told me that, during his interview with Keffer, he’d tried to defend Fisher. “I didn’t see Ellie do anything wrong,” he told him. The investigation, he said, was a discredit to “the one thing that Charlie Kirk stood for—which was free speech.” In Keffer’s indictment, Perez’s testimony was reduced to a single sentence, that “Fisher talked about Kirk like she knew who he was.” In an affidavit, Perez later wrote, “I do not know why my statements to Professor Keffer would be misconstrued in this light, other than to make Fisher somehow look bad.”
On the morning of February 20th, Fisher took a seat at a mahogany table in a charmless conference room in the university’s executive building. She was required to represent herself before the Honor Council. Even if every allegation against her were true, she said in her opening statement, “I believe you all know, as attorneys with decades of experience, that all of the alleged speech is constitutionally protected.”
The first to testify was Joe Stephens, who Morgeson had claimed “shut down” Fisher for making inappropriate comments. Stephens, however, testified that Fisher’s behavior wasn’t disruptive, or even unusual. “Ellie’s demeanor to me was no different that day than when she comes down and she’s talking about ‘What’s happening to my client is not right,’ ” he said. “I don’t remember having a memory of being, like, ‘That was weird’ or ‘That was wrong.’ ”
Then Morgeson took her seat at the witness table. She is of slender build, with an angular face framed by a shoulder-length sweep of auburn hair. Fisher was “standing in the doorway of Professor Metze’s office,” Morgeson testified. “And I can hear her say, ‘They shot that motherfucker!’ That’s what I remember.”
A hearing participant asked Morgeson whether she was “certain” about what Fisher had said. “I know she made a statement that she was happy,” Morgeson responded. “I don’t know if she said ‘motherfucker.’ That could have been Professor Metze.” Pressed again, Morgeson answered, “I don’t remember who said it.” She later added that she had told Keffer “it was the one thing I was iffy about.”
Still, Morgeson maintained that Fisher had disrupted two of her students’ clinical work. “They were shocked and offended,” Morgeson told the council. Keffer’s report also said that one of them became “upset” after witnessing Fisher “celebrating” Kirk’s death. At the hearing, the student testified that she had heard Fisher say outside of Stephens’s door that she was “in a good mood because Charlie Kirk was shot.” But the student rejected Keffer’s portrayal of her statements. “I don’t think I’d call it celebrating,” she said. “I just thought the statement was a little bit inappropriate,” adding, “I wasn’t upset about it.”
The other student testified that she had passed Metze’s office during the discussion of Kirk’s death. “It seemed to me like they were excited looking at the video, maybe laughing,” she testified. She recalled thinking, “That’s a weird energy in the room for having found out somebody died.” But if she had trouble concentrating afterward, she went on, it was in part because she was “processing what I had heard from Professor Morgeson.” The student testified that she was working in a clinic office when Morgeson and the other student entered the room and Morgeson told them, “Ellie said, ‘They got the motherfucker!’ ” During the Honor Council meeting, the student said, “I wasn’t going to turn around and write a client letter after that. My brain was kind of distracted.”
According to the student, it was Morgeson who then suggested that she and the other student could leave the clinic early. The student recalled Morgeson telling her, “If you can’t focus for the rest of the day, that’s O.K. You can go home.” At the hearing, the student also made a personal statement. She didn’t want to be seen as “ultra conservative” for testifying against a classmate who was “being charged with something for expressing her feelings in the moment,” she said. “As I told Professor Morgeson, this is not something I wanted to be involved in.”
In March, the four-member Honor Council published its decision. It acquitted Fisher of misconduct in Metze’s office and in the conference room. But it found “clear and convincing evidence” that, in Stephens’s doorway, “Fisher was loud, happy and celebratory,” and had conveyed “that she was in a good mood” because of Kirk’s death. The council concluded that “the operations of the Clinical Program were adversely affected” by Fisher’s actions, which “made some individuals uncomfortable.” The sole dissenting council member issued a one-page opinion, which raised concerns about Morgeson’s credibility and noted that several core elements of her account had been contradicted or undermined, both by Stephens and by Morgeson’s own students.
As punishment, Nowlin placed a “Letter of Reprimand” in Fisher’s permanent record. Her attorney responded by filing a First Amendment lawsuit in Lubbock’s federal district court, arguing that the investigation amounted to illegal retaliation for political speech. Fisher’s attorney also requested an injunction to temporarily prevent Nowlin from sending the reprimand to the Texas Board of Law Examiners, the entity that would decide if Fisher became an attorney in the state. Nowlin didn’t wait for the court’s decision. Less than twenty-four hours after Fisher’s lawsuit was filed, he sent the board not only Fisher’s reprimand but also Texas Tech’s finalized character review, which laid out the school’s official position that Fisher should be rejected from the state bar. In an accompanying letter, Nowlin stated that she had “disrupted our clinical spaces with a celebration of a political assassination” and had refused to “show any remorse.”
But Nowlin didn’t stop there. He overruled the part of the Honor Council’s decision that exonerated Fisher of misconduct in Metze’s office. “The Council reached the wrong result on the question of the disruptive office murder celebration,” he wrote. As evidence, Nowlin attached witness statements from Morgeson, McDonald, and Chapman. He also introduced a new and improbable witness against Fisher: Patrick Metze, who, Nowlin said, had “freely admitted” during their initial meeting in the dean’s office that “Fisher celebrated a murder.” Nowlin’s memo also issued a new charge against Fisher: “dishonesty,” for “denying that the disruptive conduct” had taken place.
Several law-school faculty members told me that they believed Nowlin’s punitive actions had largely been directed by the chancellor’s office. According to Vaughn James, who had taught Fisher in a tax-law course, McDonald had told him that Creighton ordered Nowlin to fire Metze; Creighton had allegedly said that, if Nowlin didn’t do it, he’d “find someone else who will.” Nowlin refused, pledging to resign before carrying out the order, but he agreed to work with the university’s general counsel to devise a strategy to pressure Metze to resign. (Creighton, Nowlin, and McDonald did not respond to requests for comment.)
James and the other faculty members I spoke with suspected that the school’s investigation wasn’t entirely about Fisher—it was also about Metze. Nowlin had cited Metze’s “failure to discipline Fisher” as the basis for his forced resignation, but the Honor Council had cleared her of wrongdoing in Metze’s office. By acquitting Fisher, the council members had inadvertently exonerated Metze. As a result, the law school might have seen Fisher’s character review as a way to insulate itself from a lawsuit by Metze for wrongful termination. “The only way to get to Metze is through Ellie,” James told me. “So they had to hang Ellie first.”
On the Tuesday before commencement, Fisher and two classmates gathered around a high-top table at the Lone Star Oyster Bar, a popular spot south of campus. They had just finished their last exam of law school. Fisher wore a neon-pink trucker hat with “#NOT GUILTY” printed across the front. That morning, a federal judge had denied her injunction—allowing Nowlin’s memo to remain with the Board of Examiners. “I’m not really tripping on this,” she said, scrolling through the opinion on her iPhone. “They’re literally telling me to appeal!”
Texas Tech was now being defended by Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, who was seeking to dismiss Fisher’s lawsuit. Paxton had argued that the law-school clinic was not a classroom but a workplace, and that Fisher was punished not for expressing political views but because her cursing and volume had disrupted clinic business. I asked Fisher how she was feeling about the developments in her case. “What do you want me to do?” she replied. “Be a sick bitch and cry?”
One of Fisher’s classmates at the table, who asked not to be named, said, “That’s Ellie. She does not give off the vibe of ‘I’m a super hard-core snowflake liberal.’ Yeah, she’s liberal. But snowflake? Not even close.”
The student is one of several conservatives who count themselves among Fisher’s friends. “You have to step on campus to understand,” he told me. “There’s none of those issues that come about, in terms of politics, or persecuting a viewpoint, or whatnot.” And yet, he continued, gesturing to Fisher, “it’s happened to her.”
In July, a First Amendment lawsuit against Texas Tech challenged the constitutionality of Creighton’s review process, calling it “an extraordinary system of censorship.” Every professor had been required to upload their course materials into a university web portal for screening. The final evaluation of those materials was left to the Board of Regents, whose eight members include seven executives from the private-equity, construction, and oil-and-gas industries; only one regent has a background in education. Works that were ultimately struck from Texas Tech’s courses included Plato’s Republic, “The Silence of the Lambs,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me,” and “factual information” related to the Supreme Court’s pro-slavery Dred Scott decision. Professors were provided explanations for why materials were flagged, which the lawsuit claims were written by A.I. A French-literature professor received a notice that “instructional goals for studying deep time can be met using neutral alternative materials.”
Creighton defended the screening, saying that the regents had revised less than three per cent of Texas Tech’s courses, and that the audit had been “a deliberate, disciplined process—not a sweeping overhaul.” But that percentage was true only of the entire course catalogue, which includes classes like Golf and Introductory Horse Management. Among courses that were flagged for review—fourteen hundred in total—twenty-eight per cent of them had been “proactively modified” or subjected to further scrutiny and changes. And that didn’t include acts of self-censorship. One internal survey of three hundred and sixty-seven professors found that half had preëmptively altered their courses.
The chill affected faculty in other ways, too. For years, James, a self-described liberal, co-taught a course called Law and Religion with Cole Shooter, a former chair of the Lubbock County Republican Party. They had agreed to write a casebook on religious law together. At one point, Shooter suggested that Creighton should review a chapter that dealt with L.G.B.T.Q. themes. James refused to allow it. “Why should the chancellor of Texas Tech, who is not a legal scholar, decide what I put in my book?” James told me. Creighton had come to Lubbock “with a mission to straighten us up because we are too liberal,” he continued. “Texas Tech? Liberal? It makes me laugh. We do have a big problem now. But it’s not the students causing the problem.”
James, who is sixty-six, grew up on the French Caribbean island of Dominica, where he became a calypso star, performing music protesting the post-colonial regime with his group, King Shakey and the Banned. In 1983, after being blacklisted from radio and threatened with imprisonment, he fled to the U.S. Virgin Islands before moving to New York, where he earned a law degree. Shortly after he became a law professor at Texas Tech, in 2002, a donor threatened to withhold a gift because James’s course on religious liberty included a speaker who was a Scientologist. The dean at the time, a retired Army official, told the donor, “Keep your money.” James recalled the dean telling him, “At Texas Tech, the professor is king of the classroom.” Today, “it’s no longer so,” James said. “Academic freedom has gone down the tubes.”
The day before commencement, Metze spent the afternoon watching Texas Tech softball on TV. For seventeen years, graduation season had carried a liturgical cadence for him. It began with a “Burgers and Beer” party—a sendoff he threw for his graduates, “where I always cry,” he said—and closed with commencement. This year, he hoped to finish some gardening in his yard. In the weeks after he was forced to resign, Metze, who lives alone, had stayed in his house for days at a time. “Tech was his life—truly his life,” one clinic professor told me. “And then it was just gone.”
Friends and family had urged Metze to sue Texas Tech on First Amendment grounds. But Metze said that the prospect of reliving the ordeal in a courtroom inspired “just dread.” After seven months, he’d finished “divorcing” himself, as he called it, from the institution “that I have revered since I was twelve years old.” He viewed a lawsuit as doomed, anyway: “I have no faith in federal judges to do the right thing. Not in Texas.”
Events this summer seem to confirm Metze’s grim prognostication. In August, the federal court in Lubbock, where Fisher’s case was being heard, granted Paxton’s request to dismiss Fisher’s First Amendment claims. Judge Brantley Starr ruled that Nowlin, Creighton, and the Board of Regents, who were named as defendants in the suit, were granted qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that commonly protects police officers and other government officials accused of civil-rights abuses. It was “possible” that Texas Tech had violated the First Amendment, Starr wrote, but the defendants, as public employees, were allowed “breathing room to make reasonable but mistaken judgments.”
The legal scholar Eugene Volokh has argued that courts should avoid allowing students or professors to cite discomfort or anxiety about political ideas as reasons to trigger administrative reprisals—a practice that’s sometimes called a “snowflake veto.” Paxton appeared to have adopted elements of the snowflake veto in his argument, submitting as an exhibit Morgeson’s statement to the bar examiners, in which she described sheltering in her office on the day of Kirk’s assassination. “I could still hear laughter, giggling, and comments that I considered inappropriate,” she wrote. “I was scared to call anyone.”
The court’s decision came down while Fisher was studying for the bar. She’d wallpapered a library carrel with hundreds of color-coded rule statements, along with get-tough images of cowboys and Black female lawyers. But the Board of Examiners could reject her even before she learns the results of her exam, which are expected to be released in mid-October. Legal scholars believe the board’s decision will likely come down to whether it accepts the dishonesty charge against her. Nowlin’s memo provided no specific examples to support the sanction. But, among friends, Fisher is known to embellish—one described assessing her stories by running them through “the Ellie filter.” In an early version of her account, she told others that Stephens had called Kirk a “piece of shit,” but the detail was notably absent from her later testimony. One clinical professor described it as “the kind of thing you say when you think a problem is just going to go away.”
But, if Fisher exhibited dishonesty, it didn’t appear to affect the clinic’s opinion of her legal work. She was awarded A’s for both semesters, and a commendation for “exemplary participation.” “She was a gunner with her clients—she would absolutely do everything possible,” one classmate recalled. Students were required to visit clients in the county jail once a week; Fisher “was at the jail every day,” a peer recalled—so frequently that “she actually got fan letters” from inmates. As another student put it, “Ellie spent an entire year getting poor people out of jail, and now she’s not ethical enough to be a lawyer?”
There were also apparent inconsistencies in Morgeson’s accounts. In her letter to the Board of Examiners, she was not required to swear to the veracity of her statement. But, when she later submitted a declaration to be used against Fisher in federal court—where perjury is a criminal offense—her statement was significantly altered. Assertions that were dropped included that Morgeson could “clearly hear the conversation” and “distinguish the speakers”; that the group had been “laughing” while watching video of Kirk’s shooting; and that Morgeson had closed all the doors in the clinic to minimize the disruption. (Morgeson did not respond to requests for comment.) Robert Shibley, a campus-advocacy attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, described the omissions as “not a smoking gun, but a very hot gun.” “The more material you see from this case,” he said, “the more you come around to the idea that the only explanation is that it is entirely political.”
On the afternoon of commencement, in May, about a thousand people filed into the United Supermarkets Arena, the basketball coliseum where Texas Tech confers its law degrees. McDonald and Morgeson sat together near the half-court line, robed in regalia. When Fisher’s name was called, a cheer went up from friends and family. Her parents, Vicki and Reid, watched with stone-faced apprehension. “I did not trust them,” Reid later told me. “Even at the ceremony, I thought there might be some twist.”
After commencement, Fisher and her family celebrated at an Airbnb they’d rented. On the patio, Fisher told me that she’d opted to study for the bar in Lubbock, despite her parents’ urging that she return to California. “I don’t run scared,” she said. “It’s a complete failure if I say I’m an advocate for other people and I can’t even advocate for myself.” But Fisher was not invulnerable. During a low point over the winter, the whole process “was making her throw up,” Vicki said. “Sometimes she would call, and she’d say, ‘I don’t care anymore. I just want to come home. I don’t even want to be a lawyer anymore.’ ”
As I was leaving the party, Fisher stopped me. She was holding a green-and-blue lei that she had worn at graduation, which she asked me to deliver to Metze. “He saved my ass—a thousand per cent,” she said. “I think he tried to push everything off me.” Her voice dropped. “Tell him I’m so sorry,” she said. “Just say that.” ♦