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Speaking Out Does Pay
Last fall a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled that state agencies can be held liable for job-related actions taken against employees who speak out on public issues. The ruling came in a suit brought by three professors at Vincennes University, a public, two-year institution in Indiana. They claimed that Vincennes awarded them unusually small raises in 1995 because they had criticized the university for paying poorly and for failing to protect tenured faculty from layoffs.
The Vincennes administration argued that the plaintiffs could not allege retaliation because they did not suffer adverse effects on the job, even though they received lower-than-average raises. In a 1997 ruling, a federal district court judge largely agreed with the university. But in the current ruling, the appeals court said that under federal civil rights laws, any action that is likely to deter free speech can be considered retaliation. It opined that "Vincennes University . . . pays low salaries to its faculty, and we certainly cannot say as a matter of law that denying a raise of several hundred dollars as punishment for speaking out is unlikely to deter the exercise of free speech: a tenure system does not select for boldness." The Seventh Circuit sent the case back to the lower-court judge for a trial consistent with the appeals court’s decision
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