Professors Fired for COVID Concerns
cross-posted from Afflict the Comfortable
President Neil Matkin doesn’t care about health, safety, or free speech at Collin College
*****
Audra Heaslip and Suzanne Jones are well-established and highly-regarded professors at Collin College…..for the time being. Both were fired this past week by Collin’s President, Neil Matkin, for expressing their concerns about the college’s (non)response to COVID, as well as for their union activities. It’s a textbook case of retaliation and Matkin and the College administrators aren’t really trying to hide it. If Heaslip and Jones can be terminated and possibly lose their jobs, their careers, their security, paychecks, healthcare, then everyone in the academic world is at risk—a tenured professor at celebrity university, or an instructor at a community college, or a K-12 teacher anywhere in America……..
In our latest episode, we talk with two professors with exemplary records at Collin College, outside Dallas, who were recently fired for criticizing the school’s COVID policies.
In this episode, we’re excited to talk to author, activist and historian Dr. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (@rdunbaro) about the Indigenous history of the U.S. We discuss her journey from activist and organizer to historian of the vast and complex subject of Indigenous people’s history. We also discuss settler colonialism and today’s protest movements for Indigenous rights.
Sign up to get updates on scrappy politics, scrappy history and our scrappy podcast.