New York Magazine last month:

The trajectory of [Bandy] Lee’s life had indeed taken a strange turn of late. A widely respected scholar who has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles and either written or edited a dozen academic books on violence, Lee was an assistant clinical professor in the law and psychiatry department at Yale for 17 years until the summer of 2020, when Yale declined to renew her contract. The precipitating offense? Tweeting about the retired Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.

Academics aren’t allowed to tweet about Alan Dershowitz?

Lee claims it was all Dershowitz’s doing: “Dershowitz’s pressure seems to be the reason why everything changed.” But Lee had long been one of her department’s most controversial members, thanks to her outspoken, boundary-pushing commentary about Donald Trump. Still, while her department chair, John Krystal, had never liked the public attention her comments attracted, he had tolerated them as long as she made it clear that she was not speaking on behalf of the department.

…

Lee paid little attention to domestic politics until 2016. “The morning after Trump was elected president, I decided to do something because I was convinced that his administration was likely to increase violence,” she said. The following spring, Lee organized a conference at Yale titled “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn?” on the subject of Trump’s mental state and the ethics of psychiatrists diagnosing him from afar. She respected the Goldwater Rule — the ethical guideline designed to prevent psychiatrists from rendering a professional opinion of a public figure without first receiving permission and conducting an examination — but she also worried about “the risk of remaining silent.”

The conference led to a 2017 book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, which argued that Trump’s lack of “mental fitness” made him a threat to the nation. As Lee and Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Judith Herman put it in their introduction: “Delusional levels of grandiosity, impulsivity, and the compulsions of mental impairment, when combined with an authoritarian cult of personality and a contempt for the rule of law, are a toxic mix.” With contributions from 27 mental-health experts, the book, which sold more than 100,000 copies, claims that Trump likely suffers from a grave personality disorder such as malignant narcissism.

Maybe he doesn’t though. He obviously is a malignant narcissist, but maybe that’s not the same as suffering from the grave personality disorder malignant narcissism.

On January 2, 2020, Lee posted a few tweets about a comment that Dershowitz had made in response to an accusation by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims that Epstein had forced her to have sex with Dershowitz. “I have a perfect, perfect sex life,” he had told Fox News.

Lee said some things about that claim, Dershowitz was enraged, and Lee’s contract was not renewed.

Yale’s argument in the case is that, though all its professors have the freedom to express their views, the university also has the academic freedom to decide which professors to retain. Several professors I spoke to seemed skeptical of the school’s claim.

“A university does have the right to fire someone whose work is substandard,” Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law professor and constitutional scholar, told me. “But it is hypocritical for Yale to punish Lee simply for criticizing a couple of powerful people — namely, Trump and Dershowitz. That endangers the whole academic enterprise. Lee has a strong case.”

Lee’s lawyer, Robin Kallor, concedes that private universities, unlike public universities, are not necessarily bound by the First Amendment. “But Lee was protected by a Connecticut statute that prohibits retaliation through discipline or discharge for exercising speech rights protected by the U.S. Constitution and Connecticut Constitution,” shesaid.

Richard Painter of the University of Minnesota, who served as George W. Bush’s ethics counsel, says that non-tenured faculty like Lee are employees at will and can be terminated at any time under contract law, but that “universities do make exceptions and academic freedom is one of those exceptions. And Yale took a very strong stand on academic freedom in its Woodward report, which remains in its faculty handbook.”

It’s complicated, in interesting ways.