An outspoken professor received a disciplinary warning on Tuesday for, according to her college, tweeting information “that is not accurate” regarding another scholar’s death. The professor described the admonition as retaliatory.
On January 13, L.D. Burnett, a professor of history at Collin College, in Wylie, Tex., shared an obituary for Ralph Gregory Hendrickson on Twitter. According to the obituary, Hendrickson, who died at age 60, “worked for various colleges,” including Collin College. (Burnett is a Chronicle contributor.)
The obit does not specify how he died. But a friend had sent Burnett a post from the Twitter account @FacesOfCOVID, which circulates stories and remembrances of those who have died after contracting the coronavirus. The account shared a picture of Hendrickson and the tweet read, “A professor of government, a brother, a son, always a friend to the forgotten and a protector of all. A gentle giant. Our hearts are shattered.”
In a reply to that tweet, an account that appears to belong to one of Hendrickson’s siblings wrote: “This is my brother. I submitted to @FacesOfCOVID because I’ll be damned if I let him be forgotten. I’m so, so angry and so, so heartbroken.”
Burnett then searched Hendrickson’s name on Google and found his Rate My Professor page, which says he works at Collin College. There was at least one student rating for the fall of 2020, and more entries for 2018. So she shared the obituary on Twitter and wrote, “Another @collincollege professor has died of COVID.”
“My tweet didn’t claim that Collin College killed him, or anything like that,” Burnett said. “I just was noting that another professor had died.” A couple months earlier, Iris Meda, a nurse who came out of her recent retirement to train aspiring nurses for Collin College, died after contracting Covid-19.
On Tuesday, six days after her tweet about Hendrickson, Burnett received a “Level 1 Warning,” signed by her immediate and next-level supervisors and a human-resources employee.
Institutional policy requires faculty and staff members “to strive for accuracy when speaking or writing as private citizens,” the warning, which Burnett shared with The Chronicle, says. The obituary “did not indicate that he was, in fact, a current professor at the college or that he died as a result of COVID,” the document says.
It continues: “Had you first verified the accuracy of the information, you would have learned that Mr. Hendrickson is not a Collin College professor and, in fact, has not taught at the college for several years.”
To avoid a policy violation, Burnett was instructed to not identify Hendrickson as a Collin professor and to “verify objective facts included in your publicly posted statements.”
Burnett announced the disciplinary warning on Twitter, calling it a way for her employer to “harass me with unnecessary paperwork as a way of punishing me for protected speech.”
The college has not responded to a Tuesday-afternoon request for comment.
Burnett has previously sparred with her institution over free speech. During the October 7 vice-presidential debate, she tweeted that the moderator needed to talk over Vice President Mike Pence “until he shuts his little demon mouth up.” Several of her tweets referencing Pence were included in a roundup on Campus Reform the next day, and it spread.
She expected an administrator to check in with her. Instead, the college called her tweets “hateful, vile, and ill-considered.”
She was then “inundated by scores of obscene, vulgar, sexually explicit expressions of puerile rage,” she wrote in an essay for The Chronicle Review. She replied to a few of the emails and copied H. Neil Matkin, president of Collin College, so he could see the “bilious vitriol” flowing her way, she wrote.
She expected Matkin or an administrator to check in with her, she wrote. Instead, the college called her tweets “hateful, vile, and ill-considered” and said such comments are “a setback to the hard work and dedication of our campus community.” The free-speech group FIRE got involved on Burnett’s behalf. That case is ongoing.
On Twitter, Burnett called on Matkin to resign. Other faculty members at Collin have criticized Matkin for neglecting faculty concerns throughout the pandemic, The Chronicle previously reported.
After the debate-tweet incident in October, Burnett was also sent an “employee coaching” form with “constructive feedback,” signed by her supervisor and a human-resources employee. That document acknowledged that while Burnett may freely post her views on her personal social media, she is not to engage in “private or personal conversations” through the college’s email system. She is also to refrain from copying what appear to be “private or personal communications to others” via their collin.edu email address.
After Tuesday’s warning, Burnett thinks the college is looking for a pretext to not renew her contract. “It seems like they’re playing chicken, in a way,” Burnett told The Chronicle. “They’re doubling down on behavior that violates my civil rights.”
But she has no plans to stop publicly criticizing the institution.
“I’m not sure Collin College has grasped how little control they legally have over faculty speech of private citizens,” she tweeted. “They will learn.”
