Professor Jack Lipton scored a victory for free speech last week after a federal court allowed his lawsuit to move forward against two Michigan State University trustees who he claims not only urged students to call him racist, but told them how to phrase it.
In his lawsuit, Lipton alleged that two trustees, Rema Vassar and Dennis Denno, met with MSU students, encouraged them to file complaints against Lipton with MSU’s internal civil rights office, and asked students to condemn Lipton as racist in public statements, op-eds, and on social media. MSU hired the law firm Miller & Chevalier to conduct an independent investigation, producing a report you can read online. According to Lipton, it found that Vassar and Denno planned the attacks and even provided others with specific language to paint Lipton as racist, anti-Palestinian, and anti-Muslim.
For example, in one recorded conversation, Denno told students, “The other thing you can do to help us is attack Jack Lipton, the Chair of the Faculty Senate . . . call him out, call him a racist.”
What was Lipton’s “racist” crime?
In October 2023, at a public Board of Trustees meeting that followed an open letter accusing then-BOT Chair Vassar of ethics violations, Lipton read a resolution on behalf of faculty calling for Vassar’s resignation. The meeting erupted in chaos, marked by jeers from Vassar’s supporters.
The Constitution doesn’t cease to exist just because someone’s feelings got hurt at a trustee meeting.
The next day, while making clear he was speaking in his personal capacity and not as a faculty representative, Lipton told a reporter that Vassar could have stopped the chaos of the meeting with “a single statement … yet she elected to let the mob rule the room.”
That single word — mob — triggered what Lipton describes as a coordinated retaliation campaign by Vassar and Denno.
Lipton apologized for using the word “mob,” as well as for any unintended racial undertones, but did not stop calling for accountability over Vassar’s alleged ethics violations — and he says Vassar and Denno’s harassment of him continued.
In November 2023, the NAACP Michigan State Conference Youth & College Division released a statement accusing Lipton of “racial terrorism.” Also that month, the organization Diverse: Issues In Higher Education published an op-ed arguing that Lipton had used the word “mob” because he wanted to traumatize black and Palestinian students. At a BOT meeting that December, Denno read a statement accusing Lipton of “criminalizing students” and described his use of the word “mob” as “racism and violent language.”
What’s more, even though the board eventually voted to censure both Vassar and Denno, as advised by investigators for a range of misconduct including their attacks on Lipton, Vassar didn’t stop there. At a meeting in September 2024, she mocked Lipton and questioned his right to speak on matters of civil discourse, which he cites as yet another effort to chill his speech.
In language as dry as it was devastating, the court summarized the allegations that these trustees abused their power to carry out what amounts to a smear campaign. Lipton claims that Vassar and Denno “used their positions as BOT members to attack Lipton for the comment he made as a private citizen” and “used their BOT pulpit to funnel adverse action towards Lipton via proxies, leveraging their BOT membership to speak through students, supporters, and members of the public.”
The court also noted that Lipton’s original “mob” comment was “speech regarding matters of public concern,” as it critiqued the behavior of a public official at a public meeting, and Lipton made the remark as a private citizen. The First Amendment protects faculty when they speak as private citizens on matters of public concern, such as raising state university ethics violations to the media, as Lipton did.
UPDATE: Another federal appeals court backs academic free speech for public employees
After FIRE secured a lawyer for a law professor at the University of Illinois Chicago, the school reached a resolution but later reneged on the deal. That’s when the professor sued.
While the court dismissed MSU and its Board of Trustees as defendants, Lipton is now free to pursue his claims against Vassar and Denno themselves — and they have not exactly covered themselves in glory. The university investigation that recommended their censure found that Vassar had taken courtside tickets and free flights while Denno had pressured consultants reviewing MSU’s response to the 2023 mass shooting on campus to tone down any criticism of the trustees. In fact, just this week, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declined the MSU board’s official request to remove Vassar and Denno, though the governor’s counsel said this “by no means indicates a condoning of the conduct alleged in the referral.” Vassar and Denno may have retained their seats on the board, but they are hardly out of the woods.
Now, Lipton’s case moves to discovery, where we’ll get a closer look at how MSU’s top brass reacted when a faculty member stepped out of line by doing his civic duty, and potentially to trial. While this week’s court decision is far from a final ruling, it shows the court believes Lipton’s allegations deserve to be heard, and it’s a reminder that the Constitution doesn’t cease to exist just because someone’s feelings got hurt at a trustee meeting.
