Suzanne Swierc at her home in Muncie, Indiana, on September 22. Swierc was fired from her job as the director of health and advocacy at Ball State University. Photo / Kaiti Sullivan, The New York Times
Two days after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was killed, Suzanne Swierc, an employee at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, woke up to a cascade of missed calls, texts and voicemail messages from numbers she did not know.
“They were calling me all kinds of names, threatening my job,” Swierc said. “It was every awful curse word under the sun.”
“I immediately texted my supervisor, and I said, ‘I think I have a situation.’”
Swierc discovered that the barrage stemmed from something she had posted on Facebook the day before: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends”.
Her Facebook settings were private, but one of her followers must have taken a screen shot and sent it on without her knowledge.
Within hours, Libs of TikTok, a social media account known for transphobic content and smear campaigns against schools, hospitals and libraries, posted it publicly on its popular X account.
Swierc got her first message 19 minutes later.
Elon Musk posted about it. So did Rudy Giuliani. Indiana’s Attorney-General, Todd Rokita, also mentioned it on X, calling her comments “vile”, and saying that they “should make people question someone’s ability to be in a leadership position”.
When someone from a Buffalo, New York, area code left a voicemail message stating Swierc’s home address and saying maybe she “should get the same treatment as Charlie”, Swierc called the police.
Eventually, the post would get 6.9 million views.
The experience, Swierc said, affected her physically.
“I had the hardest time moving around my house that morning,” she said.
“My brain was not processing things. Space and time became kind of their own thing. I wanted to vomit.”
She added: “September 12th was one of the worst days of my life”.
Five days later, Swierc was fired from her job as the director of health and advocacy at Ball State, one of more than 145 people around the United States who’ve lost their jobs for posting negatively about Kirk.
Rokita noted the firing approvingly.
“Ball State’s legal analysis was also 100% correct here,” he said on X on September 17, the day she was fired.
He then listed other institutions of higher and lower education in the state and said they “should take notice”, and added, “We are waiting”.
The rash of firings, which is raising questions about the limits of free speech, has been supercharged in Indiana, where top officials have been channelling public anger about posts that criticise Kirk into a kind of internet hotline.
There, submissions — that can include someone’s name, social-media posts and employer’s contact information — are displayed publicly on a government website.
The portal, called Eyes on Education, was started early last year as a way for parents of school children to submit examples of “inappropriate materials”.
The concept spread to public universities later that year, after the passage of a law intended to take on perceived liberal bias in higher education. Ball State University has its own portal, EthicsPoint, where students can anonymously report professors for biased behaviour.
Swierc’s was the first submission in the Charlie Kirk section of Eyes on Education. As of Saturday, 32 others in education were listed as targets for firing. Rokita declined to be interviewed for this article.
The firing compelled Sarah Vitale to get involved. An associate professor of philosophy at Ball State, Vitale is part of a local progressive political group called Muncie Resists and is the secretary of the American Association of University Professors at Ball State, an advocacy group for university employees.
University faculty in Indiana were already on edge after last year’s law exposed them to anonymous complaints. They have started to accompany one another to meetings with human resources, in a sort of buddy system.
Vitale went with Swierc to hers. While she knew people were nervous, she was unprepared for what came next. When she and her colleagues began to circulate a petition opposing the firing, many were too afraid to put their names on it.
Some gave only their first names. Others said they’d agree only if others in their department did.
“People are afraid,” Vitale said in an interview last week. “They’re afraid for their jobs.”
The fear is a measure of how much pressure higher education is under in Indiana.
Another set of changes, which drew little notice because it was tucked into this year’s budget bill, eliminates programmes that draw fewer than 15 graduates in a major.
One colleague, a chair of a department that is close to the 15-student threshold, messaged Vitale to say that he was concerned that signing would lead to retaliation, and his first responsibility was to his faculty and their livelihoods.
A colleague in a different state who serves with Vitale in the leadership of the Radical Philosophy Association took their name off its website, as did several people in the AAUP at Ball State because they were worried about doxing by outside groups.
Vitale said she was fine with keeping her name public, but in the end all of their names came down.
As of this week, the petition against her firing had 83 signatures, out of about 3000 fulltime faculty and staff.
In interviews, faculty members said they opposed the firing, even if they didn’t want to be on the record saying it. The reaction among the broader public was mixed. The Ball State announcement, which was viewed millions of times on X, got 25,000 likes.
A number of conservatives in Indiana made the argument that the left had been cancelling people for years, so in some ways, they created the norm — and the right is merely using it.
They also said it’s not so unusual for political leaders to involve themselves in cancellations. Democratic political leaders called for Donald Trump to be cut off from Twitter, and celebrated when he was.
“I do not see this as Republicans going after the left,” said Charlie Mandziara, the president of the College Republicans at Ball State.
He said the calls for the firings were an effort to tamp down political violence, which inflammatory social media posts, he said, only encourage.
Mandziara, 19, a sophomore, said that most of his friends who are not conservative had been respectful about Kirk’s death, including a fraternity brother who is the head of the College Democrats.
He did see people on campus laughing about Kirk after the killing and saw comments on social media that implied he deserved it.
“That encouragement, if left rhetorically unopposed, can devolve into further violence,” he said, adding, of Swierc, “the university made the correct decision in letting her go”.
But others disagreed with the firing, including Michael Hicks, a former Army officer and veteran who is a prominent Indiana conservative.
Hicks, an economics professor at Ball State, said he broke down for the first time in 35 years of teaching while talking to students in class the day after Kirk was killed.
The moment was a shock for students too. Some on campus compared it to this generation’s 9/11.
But in the days since, what could have been a chance to teach students about the First Amendment, why it is essential to honour it, and how to fight against the undertow of anger and revenge, turned into something else.
“We chose to indulge the most base motivations of those who just want to see people fired,” he said, “because we lacked the courage to say that we defend speech with which we disagree.”
He said a student asked him to mentor a chapter of Turning Point USA, which was led by Kirk, at Ball State back when it was first starting.
Initially, he was pleased, but when he visited Turning Point’s webpage, he recoiled. He found a “watch list” of liberal professors.
“I told the student that I thought conservative voices on campus needed a bit of boosting, but that I didn’t work with people who made enemies lists,” he said. “It’s just a different version of cancel culture.”
Swierc is still struggling to understand the reaction to her post.
She had said she could not be friends with someone who thought Kirk was wonderful, but her post also said she believed in the Resurrection and was praying for his soul.
She said she was trying to say that two things could be true: His death was a tragedy, and he was more conflict-entrepreneur than peacemaker.
On September 22, the American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on her behalf against the university president, Geoffrey Mearns, on the grounds that her firing violated her First Amendment rights.
Her last full pay came on Friday, and her health insurance ends on September 30.
A university spokesperson declined to comment.
Asked if she regretted what she said, after all that had happened, Swierc said no.
“I am trying to start talking about what is good and right and what is not,” she said. “I feel that we’re reaching a point in the timeline of affairs in the US where it’s time to say something.”
That night, a vigil for Kirk was held on campus. A crowd of about 100 young men and women filed into John J. Pruis Hall. A few held signs that read “I am Charlie”.
Several College Republicans were there. They had been working on a joint statement with the College Democrats that had hit a snag over whether it should support freedom of speech in addition to opposing political violence. They eventually all agreed that it should.
Mandziara was there. He strode across the stage to the lectern.
“I only feel anger, a righteous, focused anger, not towards people I disagree with or any political party but toward lying hypocrites who think that past a certain threshold of disagreement, you deserve to die,” he said.
“People who encourage and justify political violence while screaming from the hilltops that people that they disagree with are evil, are wrong and should be condemned.”
He added that conservatives do not have to “tolerate calls to kill us”, or “let any of the people who have encouraged this violence to hold power over us, whether it be in office, in education, or in any other field”.
He ended by asking for a moment of silence “for the state of this nation”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Sabrina Tavernise
Photographs by: Kaiti Sullivan
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