Kevin Hagen/AP Photo
The entrance to the NYU-Langone Hospital is seen on December 14, 2020, in New York City.
The Israel-Palestine conflict and its painful reverberations on American campuses has provoked debate about free speech versus student safety. What has gotten less publicity is free speech at work, where the boss under American law has the absolute right to fire an employee for any reason or no reason at all. With some narrow exceptions, only unionized workers and those in the civil service have some protection of their constitutional rights of speech.
In October, NYU Langone Health, a major New York hospital, summarily fired a medical resident, Dr. Zaki Masoud, at NYU Langone’s affiliate Winthrop Hospital in Mineola, Long Island, after Masoud posted a message on Instagram defending the Hamas attack of October 7. An online petition calling on the hospital to reverse course and reinstate Dr. Masoud has collected over 90,000 signatures, to no avail.
Then, to be evenhanded, Langone Health in late November fired a distinguished senior cancer researcher, Dr. Benjamin Neel, who had posted pro-Israel items on social media, including anti-Hamas political cartoons. Dr. Neel was removed from his post as director of the Perlmutter Cancer Center, which accounts for about two-thirds of his salary. He continues to be a tenured professor at NYU Langone and to oversee a research lab.
According to a lawsuit filed by Dr. Neel, his dismissal was an “ill-considered plan to feign the appearance of even-handedness” after Langone faced criticism for firing Dr. Masoud. The longtime CEO of NYU Langone, Robert Grossman, is far from shy about expressing his views. In a message to Dr. Neel in October, he wrote that NYU students who protested against Israel should face punishment. “They should take away their scholarships,” Grossman wrote.
Dr. Grossman is so potent at NYU that the university’s medical school is named after him. And he is all too characteristic of CEOs who like to throw their weight around. New York state law is ambiguous on whether actions such as those of Drs. Masoud and Neel are protected.
This research piece by our friends at the Economic Policy Institute explains just when employee free speech is protected and when it is not. As EPI explains, workers have suffered retaliation for failing to support the boss’s preferred political candidate, for refusing to attend mandatory Bible study, and for speaking out during COVID against unsafe working conditions.
Ironically, the right wing, which has never been solicitous of worker rights of free expression, has backed into greater support of individual liberties via its claims, partly upheld by the Supreme Court in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, that an individual may refuse service to a gay couple based on religious beliefs. That logic is dubious because it could override all of the protections of the great civil rights cases of the 1960s, by allowing explicit discrimination against Blacks, Jews, gays, and anyone else.
Surely the more basic civil right of expressing views without fearing for your job is more fundamental.
