Professors are being squeezed on all sides. The GUARD Act can protect them.

From 2000 through 2024, FIRE recorded 102 cases of politicians trying to silence faculty. That’s four cases a year on average. Then, in 2025 alone, we recorded 114. That extraordinary spike comes as federal efforts to reform higher education have too often crossed constitutional lines.

At the same time, the old threat of censorship by school administrators never faded. This year, South Florida State College fired professor Vinita Prabhakar after its president called a celebrated short story she assigned about an alcoholic teacher “political.” Now Prabhakar, represented by FIRE and FIRE Legal Network member Gary Edinger, is suing the school. In 2019, the University of North Texas decided not to renew professor Nathaniel Hiers after he called flyers about microaggressions “garbage.” He sued, and the university settled for $165,000. Nearly a decade prior, UCLA refused to reappoint professor James Enstrom after his research questioned state environmental standards. After he sued, UCLA settled for $140,000.

These and cases like them span the ideological spectrum. They involve different subjects, contexts, and sources of pressure. But they share a pattern: Professors do their job, schools buckle under pressure and violate their rights, and taxpayers literally pay the consequences. 

It’s time for a change.

To help state leaders enact that change, FIRE has drafted a new model bill — the Guaranteeing University Academic Rights and Discourse Act, or GUARD Act. 

The GUARD Act draws on decades of First Amendment case law to ensure faculty at public colleges and universities can exercise their academic freedom and private speech rights without fear of state discipline. The bill takes constitutional protections that can be costly and time-consuming to vindicate in court and puts them directly into state law, with clear standards for universities and meaningful remedies for faculty.

Protecting teachers and their work

The GUARD Act protects professors by codifying an exception to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, which said public employees generally have no First Amendment protection for speech they make as part of their jobs.

Recognizing that their decision could threaten academic freedom, the Court chose not to decide whether it would apply to teaching or scholarship. Since then, however, every federal appeals court to squarely consider the issue has held that the First Amendment does protect faculty teaching and scholarship. The Supreme Court has yet to settle the question nationwide, but the GUARD Act provides an answer:

No public institution of higher education shall take adverse personnel action, or maintain a policy that allows it to take adverse personnel action, against a faculty member for expression related to their teaching or academic work, or for the dissemination of their academic work…

This recognizes that professors have the academic freedom to teach pedagogically relevant material and follow their research where it leads. And the exceptions to this broad protection are exactly the same commonsense rules faculty themselves have recognized for decades — institutions can discipline faculty for classroom expression that’s unrelated to the course but constitutes a substantial part of classroom time, for example, or for violations of basic, constitutionally permissible professional standards laid out in school policies. 

Importantly, the GUARD Act makes clear those standards cannot be used as a backdoor to punish a professor because administrators dislike a viewpoint in their scholarship or because their work deviates from a majority view. And institutions remain free to address unlawful conduct, discriminatory harassment, unlawful discrimination, and expression that falls into one of the Supreme Court’s categories of unprotected speech.

Making universities find the balance

The GUARD Act also sets clear rules and procedures for deciding when the First Amendment protects public employees’ speech, based on Supreme Court doctrine.

That doctrine comes from Pickering v. Board of Education, which said public employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights just because they work for the government. When a public employee speaks as a citizen on a matter of public concern, the government cannot fire that person unless their speech seriously interferes with the government’s ability to do its job. This prevents public employers from treating controversy as grounds for termination. But universities often do exactly that.

That can be an expensive mistake. In just the past several months, public institutions have agreed to some hefty settlements after punishing employees for off-duty political speech, including a $1.9 million settlement by the University of Tennessee system and a $225,000 settlement by Ball State University.

To help ensure universities perform the Pickering balancing test, the GUARD Act prohibits schools from disciplining faculty for speaking as private citizens on matters of public concern unless a neutral decision-making body with at least one faculty member reviews the case. The school has to explain, in writing, how the speech interfered with the professor’s duties or the university’s operations. Specifically, the school has to answer how the speech:

(a) Severely impairs discipline by superiors or close working relationships between co-workers for which personal loyalty and confidence are necessary; 

(b) Directly and substantially impairs the faculty member’s ability to perform essential job responsibilities; or 

(c) Severely disrupts the institution’s regular operations.

The institution also has to account for the unique nature of the academic environment, including by giving significant weight to the chilling effect that disciplining faculty speech can have on other professors.

Most importantly, officials cannot use mere disagreement by politicians, administrators, employees, students, or members of the public to justify punishing a professor.

Giving the protections teeth

Of course, rights mean very little if nobody can enforce them.

The GUARD Act authorizes the person whose rights under the law have been violated to sue the institution or its agents to stop the violation. (The state attorney general can also file if needed.) And plaintiffs can seek compensatory damages.

That changes the incentive structure. Instead of asking professors to gamble their careers on whether administrators will remember, or respect, decades of First Amendment doctrine when controversy erupts, the GUARD Act tells universities the rules in advance and gives faculty a practical way to enforce them. The First Amendment already supplies the principle. The GUARD Act simply ensures public universities live by it.

FIRE stands ready to work with legislators interested in sponsoring the GUARD Act. Our team can tailor the model to each state’s needs and provide support throughout the legislative process. Interested legislators can contact us by emailing campus.legislative@fire.org or calling 215-717-FIRE (3473).