On South Florida State College letterhead, there is a letter dated February 12 that says everything without providing any explanation. Four phrases. leave for administration. The contract was not extended. No official grievance. No policy violations have been reported. Simply put, the president has the last word.
After teaching a short story in her classes for almost ten years, Vinita Prabhakar, an English professor with nearly twenty years of classroom experience, received that letter. Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2013 Plimpton Prize-winning story “Bettering Myself” is about a self-destructing Catholic school teacher whose voice is uncomfortable, purposefully so, in the way that sometimes the best literary fiction is. It was assigned by Prabhakar as part of a unit on untrustworthy and callous narrators, along with Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. By most accounts, standard literary coursework.
An email was sent by a student who said the story made her “a bit uncomfortable.” The student finished the assignment and engaged in class without any problems after Prabhakar acknowledged that and encouraged more discussion. By any reasonable academic standard, that ought to have been the end of it.
It wasn’t. The issue escalated throughout the administration until it reached South Florida State College President Fred Hawkins, a prominent DeSantis ally and former Republican state legislator who had assumed the role in 2023.
Prabhakar was drawn into a meeting by Hawkins. He informed her that he would not want the story to be read by his own college-age daughter. He referred to it as “political.” He would only say that he didn’t want to see it again, without going into detail about what bothered him. The vise president of the college, the dean, and the chair of her department had all supported her curriculum selections. Hawkins seemed uninterested in their evaluation.
She vanished the following day. Prabhakar is now suing Hawkins and the SFSC board of trustees in federal court on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and lawyer Gary Edinger. According to Vinita Prabhakar, an English professor, her First Amendment rights, Florida’s Campus Free Expression Act, and basic due process have all been violated. She is requesting damages, reinstatement, and a ruling that public college administrators cannot fire instructors just because they disagree with the curriculum.
It’s difficult to avoid feeling a little chilled when considering the particulars of this case. In order to be nearer to her aging parents, Prabhakar left a stable job at Ithaca College, where her contract had recently been extended for an additional five years, to relocate to Florida.
She applied for the position at SFSC’s Avon Park campus in good faith, drawn in part by the college’s declared values of free inquiry and what she described as a friendly interview process. She was asked to take on the role of President of the Faculty Council for the next academic year. She appeared to be respected by her coworkers. She later wrote that the HR director who gave her the letter of termination appeared “unexpectedly emotional” because his daughter had attended her class.
In the end, none of that mattered. One president decided that one story was too many despite having no prior professional experience in education.
The lawsuit comes at a specific time in Florida’s history of higher education. Governor DeSantis has spent years promoting laws that limit what can be taught in public schools and universities, such as the Stop WOKE Act, parts of which were overturned by a federal appeals court, and restrictions on conversations about gender and sexuality.
The environment in which Hawkins operates makes it extremely difficult to distinguish between political censorship and administrative discretion, regardless of whether he was directly responding to political pressure. There are unanswered questions when a president informs a professor that he has communicated “with Tallahassee” regarding an English assignment.
The Vinita Prabhakar case is about more than just one awkward tale. It concerns who has the authority to determine what books belong in a public college classroom and whether a single administrator’s personal preferences can take precedence over the Constitution, a professor’s academic judgment, and her department’s approval. Although the legal landscape isn’t totally uniform, courts have generally protected professors who teach approved material as part of their official duties.
There’s a feeling that the solution to all of this should be clear. A short story that won a prize is assigned by a professor. Pupils read it. For some, it’s difficult. That is essentially the purpose of a college English course.
It is unclear if the courts will concur and whether Prabhakar will be able to reclaim her classroom.
