Professor Loses Free Speech Appeal Over ‘Woke Joke’ Blog Post

North Carolina State University and five officials defeated a professor’s bid to revive his First Amendment lawsuit alleging he was removed from a key program in retaliation for his “unpopular protected speech.”

The ruling Thursday by a divided US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit turned in part on a recurring issue in employment retaliation cases: whether a worker’s protected activity or speech was connected to the employer’s subsequent adverse job action. Stephen Porter failed to link the university’s decision to take him off a program area to a blog post in which he said a conference sponsor had ...