Inside Higher Ed identified 35 faculty and staff members who were punished or fired for what they said about Kirk, and at least 12 of those employees have sued.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Nordin Catic/Getty Images for The Cambridge Union | Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
Rima Kapitan is busy. An employment lawyer focused on academia, Kapitan is currently representing more than a dozen faculty members who were terminated or otherwise disciplined for their speech. Her client list includes Savneet Talwar, an art therapy professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who was put on indefinite leave for assigning a case study that featured a woman sympathetic to Palestinians, and Steven Thrasher, who sued Northwestern University earlier this month alleging he was denied tenure because of his pro-Palestinian activism.
“I get way more Palestinian cases than I ever did before,” Kapitan said during a phone call with Inside Higher Ed Tuesday, speaking from the road after presenting oral argument on behalf of one of her professor clients. “It was pretty seldom in the first 10, 15 years of my practicing law that we got a Palestinian case … but now we’re just bombarded.”
