Vinita Prabhakar, an instructor at South Florida State College, was suspended from her post when admin got wind she was teaching an Ottessa Moshfegh short story in her intro to fiction course. (This Moshfegh short story, to be precise.)
Prabhakar has worked for the college since 2023, and told the New York Times that the voice-driven 2013 short about a chaotic teacher had lived on her syllabus “for nearly a decade without incident.”
But this February, a student expressed “mild discomfort” about the story’s contents to the college president, a one Fred Hawkins. And Hawkins took immediate action, relieving Prabhakar of her post and terminating her contract.
Now Prabhakar is suing the college, with support from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (a free speech advocacy group). According to her suit, Hawkins, an ally of Florida governor Ron DeSantis—i.e., the dangerous doofus who recently signed the “Stop WOKE Act” into law—bypassed procedure by acting before a formal complaint was even issued.
The president also violated protocol by making no attempt at lesser discipline. And he failed to account for the fact that the student who initially expressed concern about the story “ultimately completed the assignment and participated in class discussions without any incident,” per Prabhakar’s suit.
No harm, no harm, say the reasonable. But this is all before we get into the more infuriating implications, re: free speech.
Despite DeSantis’ best efforts with recent legislation to fast track censorship in his state, the Stop WOKE Act does not unilaterally apply to collegiate level instruction in Florida. Meaning Prabhakar is (still, vaguely) protected by the Constitution.
“President Hawkins firing a professor for teaching a work of literature isn’t just a betrayal of every principle that a university is supposed to embrace,” said Gary Edinger, Prabhakar’s lawyer, in a statement. “As a state employee, he also trampled over our client’s constitutional rights. The First Amendment doesn’t let public officials suppress ideas by firing the people who teach them.”
So what is the idea to dislike here, exactly? Or: what made Moshfegh such a bee in the president’s bonnet?
Prabhakar assigned “Bettering Myself” as part of a lesson on “unlikable narrators.” Per her suit, she presented the story alongside others like Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” to get students “to contrast narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary and style.”
The narrator of “Bettering Myself” is a caustic, jaded, teacher who feels she “got stuck with the dummies.” She lives in a bored, drunken torpor. And uses the nuns’ lounge at her Catholic school to puke in the mornings.
Here’s some more of that objectionable narrative voice:
I’d buy two or three forties and a pack of cigarettes on my way home from school each afternoon and go to bed and watch Married… with Children and Sally Jessy Raphael on my small black-and-white television, drink and smoke and snooze.
When it got dark I’d go out again for more forties and, on occasion, food. Around ten P. M. I’d switch to vodka and would pretend to better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up on me.
If one was born without a sense of humor or irony, it’s possible to see how you’d dislike this emblem of an educator. But more mystifying here is the president’s rationale. Per the lawsuit docs, Hawkins called the story’s contents “political.” Which, hmm!
It’s not great news for us Little Brothers in the academy. Just today in The New Republic, Aaron R. Hanlon mourned the revelation of widespread censorship of course content at Texas A&M, “one of many public universities where MAGA politicians—not faculty and department heads—now determine what can and can’t be taught.”
Still, Prabhakar’s suit indicates a hopeful rebellion. She and her team aim to set a precedent for other educators who have come under state censor fire.
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