Petition Calling for Professor Randa Jarrar’s Termination from Fresno State Has Nearly 30,000 Signatures

A petition calling for the firing of Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar has garnered nearly 30,000 signatures this week.

“Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F**k outta here with your nice words,” Jarrar tweeted last week following First Lady Barbara Bush’s death. In another tweet, Jarrar said that the news made her “happy” because Barbara Bush’s death likely made George W. Bush upset.

Additionally, Jarrar clogged a mental health crisis hotline when she jokingly tweeted the hotline’s number out to her critics, pretending that it was her personal number.

Now, a petition that calls for her termination has garnered almost 30,000 signatures. The petition calls for the “immediate termination of professor Randa Jarrar” over her “racism and inflammatory comments regarding a former First Lady of the United States, Barbara Bush.”

As Breitbart News has reported, it would be unconstitutional for Fresno State to penalize Jarrar for her tweets about the former first lady. According to an analysis by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a government employee like Jarrar may not be penalized for expression, no matter how disrespectful.

The law is well-established that employees of government institutions like [a public university] retain a First Amendment right to speak as private citizens on matters of public concern and may not be disciplined or retaliated against for their constitutionally protected expression unless the government employer demonstrates that the expression hindered “the effective and efficient fulfillment of its responsibilities to the public.”