A federal judge has dismissed the long-running lawsuit a far-right philosopher filed against a New Jersey university, which had booted him from the classroom after learning he praised Adolf Hitler and made other controversial comments off campus.
U.S. District Court Judge William J. Martini said Jason Reza Jorjani failed to prove his claim that the New Jersey Institute of Technology violated his free-speech rights by refusing to renew his teaching contract in 2018, in retaliation for provocative comments he made at a Manhattan bar in 2017. Jorjani sued the school in July 2018, a federal judge dismissed the case in 2024, Jorjani appealed, and an appellate panel ruled in Jorjani’s favor last September, vacating the dismissal and reviving his claim.
But Martini on Monday dismissed the case with prejudice, a final judgment that means Jorjani cannot proceed any further with his claims, and granted qualified immunity to several school administrators named as defendants. Qualified immunity shields public employees from liability for actions they take as part of their job.
Martini conceded that times have changed since 2018, with courts elsewhere acting to protect professors’ and students’ free-speech rights, even when speech offends.
He pointed to several recent precedential rulings, including one in Ohio where federal judges in 2021 sided with a Christian professor who claimed retaliation after he was disciplined for refusing to refer to students by their preferred pronouns as his university required. In another ruling last year, a federal appeals panel decreed that a Washington professor’s free-speech rights outweighed the offense students felt when he mocked a university’s recommended indigenous land acknowledgment statement.
“Debate and disagreement are hallmarks of higher education,” the panel wrote in the latter case.
But in Jorjani’s case, Martini wrote, the time, place, and content of his comments matter.
“Although these other circuits point in favor of plaintiff, these published decisions came out after the relevant events, underscoring that until recently, the law was unsettled,” he wrote.
While it’s clearly established that a public employer can’t retaliate against an employee for publicly criticizing their workplace, there’s less national consensus on speech that offends, he added.
In the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, where New Jersey is, judges historically have deemed offensive speech to be unprotected, especially when it roils a campus or community, he added.
“This court cannot identify any binding case protecting a public employee’s extramural speech unrelated to the workplace before now, much less speech of a teacher, particularly where there was some evidence of disruption,” Martini wrote.
Had Jorjani made his controversial comments today, the outcome might be different, Martini suggested. That’s because the Third Circuit court in September “concluded for the first time in a precedential opinion that extramural speech unrelated to the workplace was protected in light of the evidence of disruption that defendants presented,” he wrote.
Jorjani, an Iranian-American author and native New Yorker, did not respond to a request for comment. He now writes a Substack, with recent topics including the war in Iran, reincarnation, astrology, and comics and pop culture.
Matthew R. Golden, a university spokesman, said school officials “are pleased that this matter is resolved.”
Jorjani was a non-tenured lecturer at the school in Newark, where more than half of the 13,000 students enrolled are people of color, when a column and video published in The New York Times in 2017 revealed his controversial comments about Hitler, fascism, race, immigration, and the Trump administration. The column also disclosed that he had founded an alt-right corporation and website with white nationalist Richard Spencer.
School officials said the revelations sparked outrage on campus, and they placed Jorjani, who they first hired in 2015, on paid leave. They hired a law firm to investigate and ultimately decided against renewing his contract, court records show.
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