From the Chronicle:
A federal court has rejected a claim that the University of North Carolina at Wilmington committed viewpoint discrimination against Michael S. Adams, a prominent conservative commentator and associate professor of criminology, by denying him a promotion based partly on its review of online columns and other expressions of opinion that he included in his application to move up the ranks.
In granting the university’s motion to dismiss Mr. Adams’s lawsuit against it, Judge Malcolm J. Howard of the U.S. District Court in Greenville, N.C., held that Mr. Adams had failed to prove his allegation that the university denied him a promotion to full professor based on his Christian beliefs and conservative views, which he has expressed in a substantial body of published opinion columns that emulate the style of Ann Coulter and often have taken aim at the university’s administration, faculty members, and staff.
More significantly as a matter of broader legal interpretation, the ruling that Judge Howard issued on Monday said Mr. Adams himself had caused his columns to be considered as work-related speech — rather than as outside speech clearly protected under the First Amendment — by including them in the package of materials he submitted in applying for promotion.
The judge said that to have ruled otherwise — and held that the opinion columns contained in the application were not work-related speech — would have opened the door for people in Mr. Adams’s position “to place employers in a double bind” by submitting such material. The employers’ choice would be to either “neglect employee requests and refuse to look at the material, fueling allegations of free-speech violations grounded in the refusal,” or consider the material with the knowledge that, if they decide against the applicant, they will be open to claims they violated the applicant’s First Amendment rights by basing their denial on protected speech.
This is the first I’m hearing about the case, but that sounds about right to me.