If you ask Brian Salvatore why Louisiana State University at Shreveport revoked his tenure and fired him, he’ll tell you it’s a classic case of an outspoken professor being punished for his views. It’s retaliation, he says, that chips away at the promise of academic freedom. It’s “the most significant and consequential faculty free-speech case in the history of our nation.”
That story is timely, coming amid widespread fear about attacks on faculty rights and a perceived erosion of tenure. It has garnered Salvatore support from professors at other universities, faculty advocates, and members of the community surrounding the fast-growing satellite campus in northwestern Louisiana.
But at Shreveport, where Salvatore spent the past 21 years, the university’s administrators and many of his colleagues say the full story doesn’t fit the well-worn narrative. They argue that years of clashes with the chemistry professor — featuring feuds over photos of a dead department chair, moldy vents, and dueling sexual-harassment complaints between his wife and the previous chancellor — wasted limited resources and disrupted shared governance.
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If you ask Brian Salvatore why Louisiana State University at Shreveport revoked his tenure and fired him, he’ll tell you it’s a classic case of an outspoken professor being punished for his views. It’s retaliation, he says, that chips away at the promise of academic freedom. It’s “the most significant and consequential faculty free-speech case in the history of our nation.”
That story is timely, coming amid widespread fear about attacks on faculty rights and a perceived erosion of tenure. It has garnered Salvatore support from professors at other universities, faculty advocates, and members of the community surrounding the fast-growing satellite campus in northwestern Louisiana.
But at Shreveport, where Salvatore spent the past 21 years, the university’s administrators and many of his colleagues say the full story doesn’t fit the well-worn narrative. They argue that years of clashes with the chemistry professor — featuring feuds over photos of a dead department chair, moldy vents, and dueling sexual-harassment complaints between his wife and the previous chancellor — wasted limited resources and disrupted shared governance.
Sometimes there are clear-cut reasons for terminating a tenured faculty member — a professor stops coming to work, for instance, or commits sexual misconduct. Salvatore’s case, however, is anything but simple, forcing his university to answer unusual questions like whether the classroom is a “place to advertise that faculty members are contemplating suicide” or whether a professor can call a colleague “incompetent” and “corrupt” if he believes it’s true.
Salvatore insists that he has a right to call out wrongdoing when he suspects it — whether subsequent university audits confirm his theories or not. But Shreveport’s administration has argued that the years of squabbles can be pieced together to make a damning whole: Salvatore impeded the university’s ability to function.
In the eyes of his supporters, that makes Salvatore’s firing another unjust, politically motivated termination that endangers academic freedom in Louisiana and beyond. Meanwhile, some higher-ed experts who reviewed the charges against Salvatore are conflicted: There’s real concern about attacks on faculty rights, but Salvatore’s conduct arguably crossed a line. His case could even embolden claims that tenure does too much to protect professors.
“Being kind of a jerk is not necessarily a basis for dismissing a tenured faculty member,” said Neal Hutchens, a professor at the University of Kentucky who specializes in law and policy in higher education. On the other hand, Hutchens said: “Could a university function if everyone behaved like this faculty member does?”
The administration has tried to handle the matter quietly. LSU system spokespeople did not respond to numerous emails and calls from The Chronicle. LSUS (the common abbreviation for the Shreveport campus) declined repeated requests for interviews and information and did not respond to a list of written questions. No one on the faculty panel that recommended firing Salvatore, the committees he allegedly threatened and bullied, or anyone from the Faculty Senate that condemned him agreed to an interview.
Salvatore, meanwhile, has been anything but quiet, hoping he will be exonerated in the court of public opinion. He’s waging multiple legal fights against the university, one of which argues that his termination hearing should have been open to the public. Salvatore also provided The Chronicle with hundreds of pages of documents, scores of university emails, and hours of audio recordings.
“I honestly don’t know what the legal consequences will be for being so open,” he said. “But I’m following my heart, my conviction, and telling the truth in every respect.”
Salvatore, 59, is an undisputedly accomplished chemist. After getting his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and receiving a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health, he started at LSUS in 2003, was tenured by 2007, and became chair of the chemistry and physics department in 2016. His CV is stacked with publications of his research on cancer-fighting compounds, including some in prestigious journals.
To understand where his troubles began, Salvatore says one has to look back to a massive explosion in 2012 at Camp Minden, a Louisiana National Guard site about 30 miles northeast of the university that was eventually deemed the nation’s largest-ever illegal dumping ground for military explosives.
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After the blast, Salvatore became an outspoken member of a committee tasked with evaluating the environmental effects of various cleanup proposals. His advocacy garnered localmediaattention and respect from community members who feared pollution or public-health consequences. He boasted about the saga in an unsuccessful run for the state legislature. A local activist recently called Salvatore “one of our superheroes.”
He also won admiration from his supervisors on campus. Larry Clark, who had just started as LSUS’s chancellor, called him a “thought leader” during glowing remarks at a Faculty Senate meeting.
I spoke out against bad ideas, that was all. I was railroaded because I was right.
Brian Salvatore
Salvatore claims everything changed in early 2017, when he believes his activism upset a “circle of wealthy businessmen” vying for the contracts to destroy the remaining explosives at Camp Minden. In an affidavit attached to one of his lawsuits, he claims Clark told him that one of the contractors emailed LSU’s system president demanding Salvatore’s termination. The mood on campus shifted, he told The Chronicle, with rampant gossip about supposed powerful actors seeking his ouster. “Suddenly I was controversial,” he said. In Salvatore’s view, that ignited a yearslong campaign to manufacture a reason to fire him.
The story about the email, however, is disputed. The contractor in question recently told the Webster Parish Journal that he “has no idea who the professor is.” Clark told The Chronicle he had never seen such an email or told Salvatore that a contractor wanted him fired. “That’s part of his imagination — that people are against him and he’s rising above it,” Clark said.
LSUS’s administration has now argued that Salvatore’s imagination should cost him his job. They say his years of raising weighty allegations against colleagues and the university — followed by more quarrels as those allegations came crashing down — is a pattern of harassment and defamation that impaired university business.
Salvatore disagrees. “I spoke out against bad ideas, that was all,” he said. “I was railroaded because I was right. … They’ve turned everything on its head, all to continue the violation of laws and policies.”
The university’s administration has assembled a long list of incidents they say supports their characterization. One episode began on a Sunday night in March 2019, when Salvatore discovered the body of LSUS’s computer-science chair.
After hours of unanswered calls about a planned dinner with candidates for an open professorship, Salvatore went to the department chair’s house, where he found his colleague dead of an apparent heart attack. The sight of the man, crumpled on the floor with his face smashed into the side of his bed, was “one of the most disturbing things I’d ever seen,” Salvatore recalled.
He snapped photos of the body, which he later showed to another colleague. Looking at the pictures, they talked about “how much stress we were under serving as department chairs,” Salvatore said. Nearly two years later, in the spring of 2021, Salvatore said the photos disappeared, and he began alleging that the LSUS administration had broken into his iCloud account and deleted them. He said they must have heard about the discussions of inordinate stress and acted to stop them.
LSUS’s campus police investigated the claim, but ultimately closed their investigation without a finding, according to a report. Salvatore told The Chronicle he still believes LSUS was behind the deletions. The university has argued that the deleted-photos investigation — one of several internal audits and investigations triggered by Salvatore’s claims — was a needless expense and contributed to the “impairment” of university affairs.
At the same time, Salvatore had been for months pressing the administration to acknowledge a mold problem he believed was spreading in the science building. He took photos of collapsing ceiling tiles, circulated a faculty petition, pointed out discrepancies in LSUS’s claims suggesting there wasn’t an issue, and alleged that staff working in the building were experiencing skin irritation, coughing, and headaches. Finally, he contacted an investigative reporter at KTBS, a local TV station, which aired a story.
After months of pushback, the scathing story triggered a “flurry of action” from the administration, Salvatore said. Audits later revealed that, during the Covid-19 pandemic, climate-control systems weren’t running as usual, creating condensation and eventually mold in the vents.
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Salvatore then raised further concerns, alleging that contractors hired to resolve the situation had misreported the amount of mold and materials removed. An LSUS audit found his claims unsubstantiated, though Salvatore refused to accept the results, which the university listed as a reason for termination.
Later in 2021, Salvatore began sounding the alarm about what he called a “toxic work environment” at LSUS. He again talked to KTBS, which ran a story about his claims.
The day after it aired, LSUS Provost Helen Taylor sent an email to the campus attempting to refute Salvatore’s claims. “I regret that the LSUS community is once again put on the defensive by the very public actions of [Salvatore],” she wrote.
The university was able to get the stories wiped from the KTBS website. The station’s general manager, George Sirven, told The Chronicle that it stands by the facts in the stories, but took them down after Clark reached out to the station and “brought to our attention that the professor we interviewed for much of the content was a disgruntled employee.” The station told the university it would be willing to “highlight some of the positive developments occurring on campus,” Sirven said. KTBS followed through, airing multipleglowingstories about LSUS programs in the months after the dispute.
After another media appearance during which Salvatore told a local radio station about “incompetence and corruption in the administration,” LSUS’s director of media and public relations, Erin Smith, took to Facebook to address concerns. “Believe nothing you heard,” the text above her seething emoji avatar said. “If you want verified FACTS about LSUS and anything discussed, I’m your girl.”
Salvatore and several colleagues also sent a letter to the LSU system president about “bullying” and “abuse of power” by senior administrators. The president never agreed to a meeting, Salvatore said.
In two other incidents cited during his termination, Salvatore’s general disdain for the LSUS administration distilled into a more targeted rage aimed at just one man: Clark, the chancellor. Amid the mold disputes in 2021, Salvatore filed a complaint with human resources alleging that Clark had sexually harassed his wife, who was also an LSUS professor.
The subsequent investigation found that claims that Clark had stared at her in an “intimidating” way and repeatedly complimented her Tesla were not only unsubstantiated, but wouldn’t qualify as harassment as defined by LSU even if they were true.
In fact, LSU had actually found it was the other way around: Years earlier, Salvatore’s wife had harassed Clark. In 2018, Clark began informing LSUS officials that Salvatore’s wife had been sending him unsolicited messages and making visits to his home, according to documents Clark shared with The Chronicle. “I will come by to leave a note for you in your mail-box tomorrow night ~9 pm,” one message she sent says. “I will text you when I get there. Hope to see you soon.”
Screenshots show Clark sent the same response each time: “???”
That’s part of his imagination — that people are against him and he’s rising above it.
Larry Clark, former LSUS chancellor
In emails, he told her to stop. “I do NOT want to receive personal text messages from you,” he wrote. “We are NOT social friends.” After she ignored his messages, Clark filed a formal complaint in 2019. She ultimately signed a letter taking responsibility and acknowledging that she could be fired if she didn’t cease all contact with Clark.
Still, Salvatore and his wife continued to repeat the allegation that Clark was the perpetrator of harassment, saying she was coerced into the earlier confession. Clark told The Chronicle he feels partially responsible for letting their claims spread freely, because he never told the campus what happened with the text messages. He feared that a public declaration about a chancellor in his 70s being harassed by a younger female subordinate would be disbelieved and would distract from the rapid enrollment growth he spearheaded. “It would have taken away from what we were doing,” he said. “I didn’t need the jokes.”
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In March 2023, Salvatore came after Clark again, claiming the chancellor was sending the campus’s hazardous waste to a controversial open-burning facility. Residents of the predominantly Black community surrounding the facility had raised concerns for years about an alleged increase in cancer rates and painful skin irritations. When Salvatore saw trucks bearing the facility’s name picking up trash on campus, he believed his university was part of the problem.
So he took his claims to Facebook. “Look what LSUS Chancellor Larry Clark and his administration are doing to the people in Grant Parish,” said the caption. LSUS said it investigated his allegations and found that while the university did work with the company, the lab-waste materials it collected from campus were actually disposed of at company facilities in other states.
Salvatore conceded to The Chronicle that he may have been wrong, but that “with the information I had at the time, I believed I was correct.” Clark told The Chronicle the allegations had a real impact on LSUS’s relationship with the local Black community. People would ask Clark, “Why are you doing this?” at public events, he said.
Even if LSUS did not send any waste to the open-burning facility in Grant Parish, Salvatore said it would still be unethical to have a contract with the company behind it. “The fact that we were doing business with them at all is bad,” he said.
Eventually, Clark gave Salvatore a formal letter of reprimand over the waste-burning claims. It was his third. The first was for refusing to comply with a pay cut for adjunct instructors during the pandemic; the second was for failing to submit a professor’s tenure-application documents on time. (Salvatore told The Chronicle that he was “overwhelmed” at the time and “very sick from all the mold.”)
As Salvatore became increasingly concerned about what he saw as a toxic work environment at LSUS, he sought the backing of his colleagues. What he got was further isolation.
In May 2021, Salvatore raised claims through the faculty-grievance process. A faculty committee — chaired by LSUS history professor Alexander Mikaberidze — evaluated his allegations and sided against him. Their report called Salvatore’s claims “contradictory” and said he was “oblivious of deadlines and policies.”
About a year later, Mikaberidze got an email from the publisher of his forthcoming book, Oxford University Press. “I assume you know someone named Brian Salvatore?” the executive editor wrote. “He’s been sending very odd emails to me and a colleague and wondered if there was anything we should know. He seems a little unhinged, frankly.”
Salvatore had contacted the press, saying he had proof that Mikaberidze had plagiarized much of the material in his weekly historical radio spots on a local NPR affiliate. Salvatore told The Chronicle that he often listened to the segments while working in his lab. One day, he said, he heard something he knew to be inaccurate and began scouring the internet for Mikaberidze’s sources. Salvatore alleges he discovered that much of the radio show was plagiarized.
The radio station removed the show from its online archives. The publisher, however, seemed to brush off his concerns, with an editor writing an email to Mikaberidze saying they were “really hoping someone [at LSUS] can read [Salvatore] the riot act and keep him off OUP and its staff.”
In emails, LSUS’s top administrators also minimized the accusations, arguing that a history radio show doesn’t require references to the historical documents supporting it. Salvatore, though, stressed that what he alleged was more serious, pointing to evidence he says proves that portions of the show were copied verbatim from Amazon book reviews and magazine articles.
If I disrupted anything, it was lawlessness and corruption.
Brian Salvatore
Mikaberidze did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment. In emails sent to colleagues at the time of the accusations, he suggested Salvatore was only coming after him because of the unfavorable grievance-committee report.
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LSUS leaders later argued the radio-show spat was the beginning of a new front in Salvatore’s contentious campaign. They said he demonstrated a vindictive streak, ruthlessly coming after colleagues who wouldn’t do his bidding. Salvatore said he was just keeping a close eye on policy adherence and being direct with colleagues when he suspected violations. “I tell it like it is,” he said.
Another such dispute came in November 2022, when a faculty panel denied Salvatore’s request to take a sabbatical in Taiwan, home to a species of mushroom containing rare natural compounds important to his cancer research. He called the process “corrupt,” alleged interference by the administration, and told the chair he should step down due to his “incompetence” in a flurry of emails sent after the decision. In a special session days later, the Faculty Senate passed a resolution condemning Salvatore and demanding he apologize to the panel.
Salvatore defended the emails to The Chronicle, saying, “If I called people incompetent, I had a reason.”
The feuds with peers grew increasingly heated last fall, when the university said Salvatore “bullied” the presidents of both the Faculty Senate and Staff Senate over allegations that they had repeatedly broken the Louisiana Open Meetings Law. He said the organizations’ executive committees were a “little cabal,” meeting in secret, sometimes with the administration, and flouting requirements for posting agendas and soliciting public engagement.
LSUS’s human-resources department would later call Salvatore’s communications about open-meetings issues “increasingly accusatory and hostile.” The Staff Senate president told human resources that he might quit his job. The Faculty Senate president, meanwhile, believed that Salvatore had threatened to derail her application for tenure.
Salvatore said he stands by his communications and is particularly offended by the university’s finding that he was threatening someone’s tenure. He is in a different college than the professor in question and thus had “no control over that.”
“They broke open-meetings laws time after time,” he said. “Somehow by informing them, I intimidated them? No I did not.”
A month later, Salvatore sought to become secretary of the Faculty Senate. At a meeting, he put forward his name and sought a second, which would enable a vote. No one would second him, minutes show.
Following the meeting, the chairs of the English, history, and media departments emailed the Faculty Senate president and LSUS chancellor saying their representatives wanted to quit the governing body over the “toxic nature of the Senate’s proceedings, characterized by escalating disagreements and a lack of constructive dialogue.” The chairs said they were also going to stop encouraging faculty to join.
The email doesn’t mention Salvatore. But one of the signatories, LSUS history and social sciences chair Gary Joiner, told The Chronicle it was written because “the proceedings were constantly hijacked” by him.
The disputes with administrators and faculty alone were not enough to warrant terminating Salvatore, the provost said at his eventual disciplinary hearing. The “final straw” was when he brought his claims into the classroom.
It first happened in November 2022. Salvatore said the university only learned of the incident because of a camera system initially installed to record classes for sick students during the pandemic. It’s “now just used to spy on us,” he said.
In the brief rant, Salvatore said he would be quitting LSUS because Clark, still the chancellor then, was “acting like a tyrant,” according to a transcription included in termination letters. He said that two faculty members had filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because they were “at the point of suicide from the treatment from Clark.”
“I have more dignity than to teach for people like this,” he told the class. (Salvatore ultimately decided not to quit because it was too soon for him to access his full retirement benefits, he told The Chronicle.)
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More than a year later, after Clark had left LSUS and just as the Faculty Senate fractures swelled, he did it again. This rant was documented in a letter to administrators from a concerned student, and it was included as an exhibit at his termination hearing. The student wrote that Salvatore arrived to class about five minutes late, “very flustered,” and announced that “something unfortunate had happened that would not only hurt him, but also us students.”
“He stated someone at LSU or LSUS had hacked into his computer and deleted his last 20 years of life’s work,” the student wrote. Salvatore told the class he believed it was retaliation for his Open Meetings Law concerns.
“He told us we were attending a corrupt school, and that LSU-Baton Rouge was corrupt too,” the student wrote. “He stated that the former chancellor was a horrible person and that this one didn’t seem to be too much better.”
Later, Salvatore was repeatedly unavailable for office hours “because he was working with state police” to investigate the missing files, the student wrote. That investigation didn’t substantiate his claims, a police report shows.
With the letter saying Faculty Senate members would quit and the student raising concerns about his classroom conduct, the university had what it needed to fire Salvatore at last. The new chancellor, Robert T. Smith, sent Salvatore a letter saying he intended to revoke his tenure and terminate him. The email from the department chairs, Smith argued, was proof Salvatore had obstructed shared governance. His rants to students that “spread his claims against the administration” was an inappropriate use of class time.
Salvatore brushed off that interpretation, saying that if the administration “truly believed in the critical role of shared governance,” they would have taken action over his concerns rather than fire him for the way he voiced them.
At a six-hour termination hearing in April, the administration and Salvatore finally had a chance to litigate their claims — to have a discussion about who he truly was and whether he deserved to be punished for it.
The university painted a picture of a disgruntled professor with a growing disdain for his colleagues. They argued his anger had affected the ability of administrators, faculty members, and students to go about their business, forcing the university to seek his removal. Salvatore, for his part, said the administration was simply seeking to silence its most vocal critic.
But before that debate could happen inside the hearing room, the administration had to fight with Salvatore’s supporters outside of it.
A news release, disseminated by Salvatore’s attorney days before the April hearing, urged the public to attend and support a professor being fired “because the university apparently disagrees with the content of his free speech.” More than a dozen people turned out, photos posted online show, but they were largely barred from entering the room. “This is not an open meeting,” someone can be heard shouting on the university’s official recording, which Salvatore shared with The Chronicle.
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Some of Salvatore’s supporters later sued LSUS for barring them from the hearing. A local judge ruled last month that the university had indeed violated the Louisiana Open Meetings Law by shutting the public out. In a YouTube video called “Salvatore Defeats LSUS in the Court of Public Opinion,” a supporter standing outside the hearing room said termination would “put a black eye on LSU,” but “it’s even more hideous to lock out all his people and control the support he would have had.”
The proceedings began with the administration laying out their case in a two-hour presentation delivered by Helen Taylor, the provost, and Helen Wise, the assistant academic provost. Rather than starting the story as Salvatore does, with a tale about environmental disasters and vengeful businessmen in 2017, they said the fractures were ignited by a quintessentially academic dispute: Salvatore’s failed attempt to become dean. “Salvatore’s animus against the LSUS administration seemed to have begun there,” Wise said, arguing he was enraged when the provost and chancellor refused to overrule a faculty committee that did not include his name in a list of finalists for a 2018 opening.
Salvatore objected to that framing, telling The Chronicle he didn’t “want the stress of being dean,” and only applied after pressure from his supervisor that “bordered on harassing.” He was upset to be excluded from the finalist list, he said, but only because he suspected administrative interference against him. The truth of the deanship allegation, however, wasn’t essential to the university’s case, which centered around the allegation that the years of disputes that followed amounted to an impairment of the university’s core functions.
They said the investigations triggered by his claims had wasted university resources. They said the email from the department chairs about faculty members wanting to quit the senate proved he interfered with shared governance. They said his inability to secure a second for his secretary bid proved he’d lost the respect of all of his colleagues. They said his use of classroom time to spread his claims against the administration disrupted learning.
“Our students pay tuition to hear [Salvatore] talk about chemistry, not air his grievances with the administration,” Wise said. “The classroom is not the place to advertise that faculty members are contemplating suicide.”
They told the panel they wanted to be clear that Salvatore’s speech itself wasn’t at issue; the problem was the consequences of that speech.
In his 15-minute opening statement, Salvatore told the panel that his termination actually was about his speech. Everything he had said was protected by the First Amendment, he argued, talking the panel through about a dozen legal cases he said bolstered his point.
Salvatore allotted the remainder of his time to witnesses supportive of his cause. First, he called upon Russel L. Honoré, a retired Army general who led Joint Task Force Katrina and the review of the U.S. Capitol’s security following the January 6 insurrection. The general framed Salvatore as a victim of retaliation and sinister political influence. “Are we going to bring every professor that complains before this board?” he asked.
Honoré then said he feared the administration was being coerced into firing Salvatore by “the long arm of the petrochemical industry.” When the panel asked if he had evidence to support the claim, he said he did not, but “that’s the type of stuff that can happen.”
The panel pressed further, asking if he had “any specific knowledge” of the charges against Salvatore.
“No ma’am, I don’t,” Honoré replied.
Salvatore then called Daryl Purpera, the longtime Louisiana legislative auditor who recently resigned to become the full-time pastor at a Baton Rouge church. He said that, in his view, Salvatore’s worst offense seemed to be hurting feelings. “You’re looking at taking personnel action against a man because of what another man felt,” Purpera said. “Not performance, not research, not service.”
Toward the end of the hearing, one of the panelists pressed the administration on their thorniest charge: that Salvatore’s complaints and false statements had actually stopped the university from doing business. “Issues like about the files being stolen, those don’t seem to have any real impact on how the university is being run,” the panelist said. “I’m trying to figure out if it’s a matter of people just not liking the activity and not liking what he says.”
Taylor replied: “It’s not about what he said. It’s about what he did.” She said the individual examples were selected to “indicate a narrative, a story that brings us to the point where shared governance was unsustainable.”
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In a written decision, released about three weeks after the hearing, the panel unanimously agreed. They wrote that Salvatore forced the university to unnecessarily “divert resources to answer his disproven claims.” They also argued that his behavior was “significantly lacking in collegiality and professionalism” and impeding shared governance.
Academic freedom doesn’t mean anything goes.
Timothy R. Cain, professor at the University of Georgia
Following that decision, Smith, the chancellor, made a final recommendation to the system president, incorporating the feedback from the committee. The system’s president, William F. Tate IV, affirmed that recommendation in late June, officially revoking Salvatore’s tenure and firing him.
“My decision is not directed to your exercise of free speech,” Tate wrote in a brief letter. “Instead, it is based on your own disruptive behavior on the LSUS campus and the reported impact on faculty, staff, administration, and, most importantly, students.”
Salvatore told The Chronicle he was offended by the assertion. “If I disrupted anything, it was lawlessness and corruption,” he said.
In Salvatore’s framing, his case is all about free speech. It can be placed among recent high-profile disputes over faculty rights that generated outrage, including professors punished for allegedly criticizing politicians in Texas and Florida or professors at Harvard facing a dean who wants to punish those who publicly “excoriate university leadership.”
But experts on academic freedom who read the underlying documents in Salvatore’s case said it actually doesn’t seem to be about protected public speech. They said his firing instead falls into the murkier waters of intramural speech — that is, speech within an institution. “This faculty member is trying to hang their legal hat largely on the First Amendment as a private citizen,” said Hutchens, the University of Kentucky researcher who studies higher-education law. “But it does look like there are multiple problematic instances that go beyond being concerned about, for instance, pollution.”
Hutchens said he’s “worried about the fallout of this case” as Salvatore’s profile rises and more people jump to his defense. While many of his colleagues on campus appear to support his firing, Salvatore has mustered significant support from people outside the university. A GoFundMe campaign titled “Help Dr. Salvatore Defend Our Right to Free Speech” has raised over $21,000. Many of the named contributors are professors at other universities across the country. There are also the community members who attended his hearing and are now waging the open-meetings lawsuit against LSUS.
In intramural-speech disputes, it’s hard to know if academic freedom is truly being violated. “Academic freedom doesn’t mean anything goes,” said Timothy R. Cain, a professor at the University of Georgia’s Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education who studies the history of academic freedom. “But at the same time, there are some real concerns about punishing faculty based on claims of incivility.”
There are also concerns about the process by which Salvatore was fired. On LSUS’s small satellite campus, a contentious tenure-revocation fight is largely unprecedented, said Kevin Cope, a longtime professor at LSU’s flagship campus in Baton Rouge who served for ten years as president of the Faculty Senate and has held various roles in the state chapter of the American Association of University Professors. The process for Salvatore’s termination appeared “impromptu and ad hoc,” said Cope, who has been an ardent supporter of Salvatore. “It seemed like the folks in Shreveport were making it up as they went along.”
Smith, the chancellor, played three roles in Salvatore’s termination: He brought the charges, selected the panel evaluating them, then weighed that panel’s feedback and made a final recommendation to the system president.
It’s best practice for faculty disciplinary-hearing committees to be elected by the faculty, said Henry Reichman, a professor emeritus at California State University-East Bay and author of the books The Future of Academic Freedom and Understanding Academic Freedom. Failing to do so creates an “appearance of unfairness if the body making the charges is also the one appointing the jury,” he said. The AAUP also criticized LSUS’s process. “A hearing panel selected by the chancellor in a case of dismissal is wholly at odds with AAUP standards,” said Kelly Benjamin, a spokesman for the organization. “We would obviously be opposed to a panel that could be stacked that way.”
Salvatore said he believes Smith “handpicked” the panelists to slant the process against him. One of those panelists, LSUS history professor Cheryl White, was on the executive committee that Salvatore called a “little cabal” routinely violating the Open Meetings Law and was involved in the plagiarism dispute. He asked to have her removed over perceived conflicts of interest, according to letters he shared with The Chronicle. The panel’s chair, LSUS economics professor Timothy Shaughnessy, was on the committee Salvatore called “corrupt” and “incompetent” after it denied his sabbatical request. In emails to colleagues at the time, Shaughnessy called Salvatore “unnecessarily rude” and “illogical.” (Shaughnessy declined The Chronicle’s requests for comment. The four other committee members did not respond.)
An LSUS spokesperson defended the panel, saying the termination process “satisfies federal law” and that the chancellor was advised by the Faculty Senate’s executive committee before selecting the professors who would hear Salvatore’s case. Salvatore argued that doesn’t resolve the conflict-of-interest concerns, because his repeated criticism of that very committee was one of the reasons he was being terminated in the first place.
Salvatore has now set his sights on the courts to continue his fight. He’s currently involved in three lawsuits against LSUS: The state case filed by his supporters alleging that his termination hearing violated the Open Meetings Law, another state case he filed alleging LSUS violated public-records laws by taking too long to provide him with certain documents related to his case, and a federal lawsuit disputing his termination altogether.
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Though a judge has ruled that Salvatore’s hearing violated the Louisiana Open Meetings Law, that decision did not nullify the results of the meeting. J. Arthur Smith III, Salvatore’s attorney, said he hopes that on appeal, a higher court will nullify the disciplinary hearing altogether.
In a separate federal lawsuit, Salvatore sought a temporary restraining order that would compel LSUS to halt the termination process. A judge denied that request in April, arguing it was too soon for the courts to weigh in.
With the university termination process complete, Salvatore said he now plans to amend his complaint and refile the lawsuit. In that litigation, Smith said he’s hoping to substantiate his belief that LSUS fired Salvatore because of conservative political interference spurred by his environmental activism. “I really feel that way, but I can’t prove it just yet,” he said.
That kind of allegation could be explored in discovery, the evidence-gathering phase of a lawsuit during which parties could subpoena text messages or depositions from those involved, said Samantha Harris, a lawyer who represents faculty in tenure disputes. “If this really was pretextual, if all the other reasons really weren’t true, (Salvatore’s) still gonna have to prove that with the documents,” she said. If a court allows those proceedings to move forward, it could take years to resolve, Harris said.
Fueling Salvatore’s seemingly endless fight is a belief that some day, possibly years away, the facts will vindicate him. For weeks, he sent hundreds of text messages, voice memos, and emails to The Chronicle at all hours of the day and night, insisting that his evidence will prove that he only “spoke out against corruption of the principles of shared governance.”
Salvatore says LSUS is heading down a dark path without him around. To hear him tell it, the administration has eliminated the lone bastion of integrity on a lawless campus. Even if there were others like him, he said, they were surely scared into silence by his firing. “If you ever speak out against anything, you’re gonna become the next Salvatore, you’ll be the next Navalny,” he said, comparing himself to the outspoken Russian opposition leader who recently died in an Arctic prison.
“I see a lot of parallels between Navalny and me, except I’m not dead yet,” he said. “That’s the kind of environment we have here.”
Without his watchful eyes, Salvatore foresees LSUS devolving into anarchy. He predicts more secret meetings, more cut corners, a slow erosion of faculty power.
As always, he’s clutching a scrap of proof to support his claims. This time, it’s an email exchange from before his firing, which he obtained and shared with The Chronicle. In it, a Staff Senate leader asks about holding an “informal discussion,” the sort of off-the-books gathering Salvatore said violated open-meetings laws. An administrator discouraged the idea.
“I would postpone just to be safe,” he wrote. “Salvatore is lurking ...”
Correction (July 9, 2024, 3:38 p.m.): A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that Brian Salvatore repeated disproven claims about LSUS's involvement with a controversial waste-burning facility at a government meeting months after the university investigated the matter. A copy of Salvatore's speech from the meeting, which he shared with The Chronicle, includes a number of disparaging comments about Larry Clark, LSUS's former chancellor, but does not mention waste burning. The article has been updated.