Vinita Prabhakar, an instructor at South Florida State College, was suspended from her post when admin got wind she was teaching an Ottessa Moshfegh short story in her intro to fiction course. (This Moshfegh short story, to be precise.)
Vinita Prabhakar has been on the college’s payroll since 2023, and she told the New York Times that the voice-driven 2013 piece about a troubled educator had lingered on her syllabus “for nearly a decade without incident.”
But this February, a student voiced “mild discomfort” about the work to the college president, Fred Hawkins. Hawkins acted without delay, removing Prabhakar from her role and ending her contract.
Now Prabhakar is pursuing a suit against the college, with backing from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (a group that advocates for free speech). According to the complaint, Hawkins—a political ally of Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who recently signed the Stop WOKE Act—sidestepped established procedures by acting before a formal complaint was issued.
The president also breached protocol by not considering any lesser form of discipline. And the suit notes that the student who first raised concerns about the story “ultimately completed the assignment and participated in class discussions without any incident.”
Some would dismiss these concerns as no big deal, but the implications for academic freedom are more troubling, the filing implies.
Even as DeSantis has pushed legislation to accelerate censorship within the state, the Stop WOKE Act does not automatically govern college-level instruction in Florida. In other words, Prabhakar remains—at least for the moment—protected by the U.S. Constitution.
“President Hawkins firing a professor for teaching a work of literature isn’t just a betrayal of every principle that a university is supposed to embrace,” said Gary Edinger, Prabhakar’s lawyer, in a statement. “As a state employee, he also trampled over our client’s constitutional rights. The First Amendment doesn’t let public officials suppress ideas by firing the people who teach them.”
So what exactly is the objection here? Or rather, what about Moshfegh provoked the president to take issue?
Prabhakar had assigned “Bettering Myself” as part of a unit on “unlikable narrators.” Her lawsuit contends she paired the story with others like Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” to help students compare narrative voice, perspective, vocabulary, and style.
The narrator in “Bettering Myself” is a sharp, disillusioned teacher who feels she has “got stuck with the dummies.” She lives in a dull, alcohol-fueled stupor and even uses the nuns’ lounge at her Catholic school to vomit in the mornings.
Here is more of that controversial voice in the piece:
I’d buy two or three forties and a pack of cigarettes on my way home from school each afternoon and go to bed and watch Married… with Children and Sally Jessy Raphael on my small black-and-white television, drink and smoke and snooze.
When it got dark I’d go out again for more forties and, on occasion, food. Around ten P. M. I’d switch to vodka and would pretend to better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up on me.
If someone lacks a sense of humor or irony, it’s easy to understand why this character might be off-putting. But the president’s justification is even more perplexing. According to the lawsuit documents, Hawkins labeled the story’s content “political.”
That stance isn’t great news for defenders of academic autonomy. Just today in The New Republic, Aaron R. Hanlon lamented the spread of censorship in course content at Texas A&M, describing it as “one of many public universities where MAGA politicians—not faculty and department heads—now determine what can and can’t be taught.”
Nonetheless, Prabhakar’s suit signals a hopeful challenge. She and her colleagues intend to carve out a legal path for other educators who have faced state-backed censorship campaigns.
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