A Florida English professor is suing her former public college, alleging she was fired after its president objected to an award-winning short story she assigned in a freshman literature course.
Vinita Prabhakar filed a federal lawsuit against South Florida State College President Fred Hawkins and the school’s board of trustees, arguing her dismissal violated her First Amendment rights and academic freedom. The lawsuit seeks reinstatement, damages and a declaration that the college acted unlawfully.
Prabhakar had assigned “Bettering Myself,” a short story by acclaimed author Ottessa Moshfegh, in her Freshman English II course. The award-winning story follows an alcoholic Catholic school teacher whose increasingly self-destructive behavior illustrates themes of addiction, alienation and moral decline through the perspective of an unreliable narrator.
According to the complaint, Prabhakar had taught the story for nearly a decade without incident and used it in a unit on unsympathetic and unreliable narrators alongside works by Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. The story won the Paris Review’s 2013 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and has appeared on syllabuses at other universities.
One student reportedly told Prabhakar that the material made them uncomfortable. Prabhakar discussed the story with the student, who later said they felt better about the assignment, according to the lawsuit.
Hawkins nevertheless summoned Prabhakar to a meeting, called the story “political” and ordered her not to teach it again, the complaint alleges. Prabhakar said her department chair, dean and a college vice president supported her explanation of the story’s academic purpose.
The next day, she was placed on administrative leave and told her contract would end after the semester. Prabhakar alleges she received no formal complaint, hearing or explanation of which college policy she had violated.
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The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which is helping represent Prabhakar, argues that public colleges may establish curriculum requirements but cannot punish professors merely because administrators dislike ideas expressed in relevant course material.
The allegations have not yet been tested in court. The lawsuit places the latest Florida education dispute at the intersection of academic freedom, faculty discretion and the authority public institutions exercise over classroom instruction.
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