AU Perspective: Under Color of State Law

Abuse of Purse Strings - Part II]

Last month I laid down the AU money 'stem to Stern' so to speak. Trustees' wealth buys access to the seat through corrupt governors who appoint them; the same wealth funds Tiger Paw PAC, the PAC pays budget chairs who ramrodded HB 580. The Board executed this ill-advised

Second of two parts.

legislation on June 5 by dissolving the faculty Senate in 15 scheduled minutes. I ask readers to(re)visit Part 1: https://www.alabamagazette.com/story/2026/06/24/opinion/au-perspective-we-do-hold-the-purse-strings/11523.html. Following the money explains how June 5 'came to pass.' It does not answer the question some faculty and students keep asking. Was any of it legal? ...some of it was. The US Constitution does not guarantee professors a senate as the SCotUS determined in Minnesota State Board v. Knight (1984). A board which created this senate by enabling act in 1968 may also dissolve it in 2026. The act is not the question. The motive is and 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the statute enabling a citizen to sue officials who deprive one of federal rights under color of State law is where motive gets its day in court.

Rehearsal in Mobile

Three months before the AU vote, the same budget (mis)use of power was aimed at a single campus in Mobile. On WVNN's Dale Jackson Show [3-20-26] discussing a University of South Alabama professor recorded berating a Turning Point USA chapter, Sen. Arthur Orr said, "you better get a handle on this professor." The man "has got a right to have an opinion for sure, but if he's out there harassing students, now that changes the equation." Then the campus heard it. In audio published by 1819 News, a South Alabama dean warned the student chapter releasing more video could mean "funding is going to be jeopardized," citing "the chair of Ways and Means" who "made some comment on the radio about 'this is going to show up on their budget.'" Orr chairs the Senate's education budget, not the House Ways and Means Committee the dean named, so tying the dean's reference to Orr is an inference, not a quote. A public university dean, on tape, turned an education budget chairman's on-air displeasure into a funding threat against his own school, to make a twenty-year-old think twice about publishing a truthful recording. A former AU student group faculty advisor said, "this isn't like Senator Bill Armistead, before he became another corrupt Montgomery authoritarian, threatening to withhold AU funding because the university was failing to follow State law's statute on flying the State flag."

SCotUS specifically ruled [2024] on this unanimously. NRA v. Vullo (re)affirmed an official may not use the threat of financial power to coerce others into suppressing speech the government dislikes citing Bantam Books v. Sullivan (1963). Students at a public university hold full First Amendment rights and Healy v. James (1972) puts retaliation against a recognized student group squarely off limits. The professor's conduct toward students is a separate matter the university may lawfully address and even Orr himself drew that line on air. The constitutional violation in Mobile lives in the dean's recorded warning, a State official transmitting a funding threat to stop young citizens from publishing the truth. March was the rehearsal. June was the performance.

The Man a Jury Already Believed

USA [Mobile] was 'improvised' Kabuki Theatre in March; AU has habitually done this for years. A federal jury loudly determined AU's wrongdoing years before, widely known throughout the University's rank and file as well as administrators and board members. Start with that jury's decision on how AU treats protected speech, the orange and blue pattern and practice of retaliation [https://www.alabamagazette.com/story/2026/04/12/opinion/au-perspective-orange-and-blue-pattern-and-practice-of-retaliation/10749.html] laid out step by step. Professor Michael Stern spent years documenting the clustering of Auburn athletes in the public administration major. Reported in the Wall Street Journal and Chronicle of Higher Education he addressed it on the University Senate floor. In May 2018 Dean Aistrup removed Prof. Stern as Chair of the Econ Department. Stern sued under § 1983. In Stern v. Roberts [No. 3:18-cv-807] an Opelika federal jury found [11-17-22] AU removed him in retaliation for speech the court held was citizen speech on matters of public concern. The jury awarded $645,837 including $500,000 in punitive damages entered against Dean Joseph Aistrup individually, for acting with malice or reckless indifference to Stern's constitutional rights. The court later trimmed the compensatory portion and left the half-million punitive damages against the dean untouched. AU indemnified Aistrup, the way it indemnifies every official, so the bill for this dean's malice was paid by those who fund Auburn. That verdict is the baseline every AU administrator now acts against. Qualified immunity protects officials who could not have known better. AU officials work at an institution that's already paid for this exact violation.

Three Dates

Now run the calendar through § 1983 scrutiny, which also reaches conspiracies among officials acting under color of State law. February 13, the Board adopts a "Governance and Authority Policy," buried on page 80 of a 164-page packet, revoking the personnel authority it had delegated to the faculty and waiving "any and all applicable notice and timing requirements" for its own adoption. April 1, Provost Vini Nathan opens dismissal proceedings against the professor who holds a retaliation verdict against Auburn. June 5, the Board dissolves the forum where Stern spoke (by name) down to the "faculty officers" and gags its successor. Retaliation law asks whether protected speech was a motivating factor in an adverse action (Mt. Healthy v. Doyle, 1977) and timing is evidence. Three moves in four months, aimed in turn at the faculty's personnel authority, at his employment and at this forum - i.e., the kind of dynamic juries are allowed to consider.

Note how little the Board was threatened by the body it killed. The old Senate was advisory to the President by its own constitution. The Provost and the Dean of Libraries sat in it ex officio, and its design seated presidential appointees throughout. In March 2024 that Senate voted down Stern's proclamation questioning Nathan's legitimacy. Even a body that kowtowed (seeded with administrators) unashamedly loyal when it counted, could not be borne. The dissolution removed no power. The Senate had none to lose. It removed the last venue on campus where a professor could say an inconvenient thing on the record.

Due Process

Tenure is a property right under Perry v. Sindermann (1972). Cleveland Board of Education v. Loudermill (1985) settled that property cannot be defined by the procedures a State provides for taking it away. The process a tenured professor is due comes from the Constitution, not from whatever the handbook says this month. Take back the faculty's authority in February, prosecute the dismissal in April and you have not 'streamlined' anything... you've built the plaintiff's exhibit list. Streamline is the same rhetoric Lee County's corrupt commissioners used to block Peter Byrd's speech from being placed in the record/broadcasted addressing trash pick-up monopoly about to harm 4 local, competitive businesses.

July 1 added the installed Provost's own signature to the record. In a message to the faculty, Vini Nathan confirmed governing documents of the University Faculty and the University Senate in Chapter 2 of the Faculty Handbook are revoked. Consider what Nathan kept and what she threw out. Chapter 3, the personnel machinery asserted to dismiss Stern remains in effect. Chapter 2, the faculty's constitution and its one section on selection and evaluation of administrators like Nathan is gone. The Provost kept the chapter used to prosecute a professor and jettisoned the chapter enabling the faculty to judge the Provost. Nathan then called it orderly. On the contrary, property does not shrink because an officer edits a handbook; every student's tuition and every taxpayer's dollar pays the bill when the next jury reads the calendar.

When the dismissal reaches a hearing, look at who remains to advise on it. The new Council's written portfolio includes "tenure, promotion, and related academic personnel matters." Its chair is the provost who initiated the dismissal. Its members give advice "at the President's request and direction," confidentially by default where any of them "may be removed by the President" for "conduct inconsistent with the purposes and principles set forth in this policy." The gag clause is narrower than the coverage suggests, barring statements "on behalf of the University," which no one has a First Amendment right to make anyway. The chill lives in the removal clause. The first Council member removed for criticizing the administration in his personal capacity hands a federal judge a clean and unambiguous retaliation case on day one. A competent federal judge will ask the obvious question regardless. Where's the neutral decisionmaker?

Imposing The Creed

The same trustees who erased the faculty's voice found one document they wanted to elevate. On February 13 the Board's Governance and Authority Policy raised the Auburn Creed to a governing text. Read the fifth line. "I believe in obedience to law because it protects the rights of all." The men who wrote this into their own policy spent the next four months acting under color of State law to take rights away. A creed is easy to hang on a wall; harder to obey when it impedes the men who hung it.

The Creed also asks the Auburn family to serve the country by "doing justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly with my God." It does not name the God. A Muslim student who walks humbly with his God and obeys the law of Alabama is keeping the Creed word for word. The staff attorney for Council of American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] Alabama put the theology plainly. A central principle of Sharia is the faithful follow 'the law of the land' where they live. So the observant Muslim at AU already lives the Creed the Board just made sacred.

Address that to the man scheming to be installed next governor of Alabama to aid and abet appointment of these very trustees. Auburn knows him well. Tommy Tuberville coached its football team for a decade and now as an Alabama Senator from Florida, he's spent his campaign crusading against Sharia law. Coach doesn't appear to have the capacity to formulate what he's crusading against. In February he told a Senate caucus, "radical Islam is not a religion. It is a political organization run by terrorists." A sitting senator can indeed spot a political organization. Comrade TuberGrubber has spent his whole second career inside a political organization to advance desired wealth transfers. In the same breath Coach called radical Islam "this cult" and quoted its scripture. Can something be a (non)religion, a cult and a political party all at once? AU's parasitic Coach manages to call it all three and never blinks. In December he wrote, "Islam is not a religion. It's a cult," earning AU's 'Five Million Dollar Man' the distinction of our first sitting US senator CAIR has ever labeled an anti-Muslim extremist... glad we don't observe Christians behaving this unGodly.

Coach is also wrong about the law he claims to defend. On television last November he said Alabama has "already banned Sharia." It has not. The 2014 amendment he seems to be 'thinking' of never named Sharia and changed nothing, because Alabama courts already can not enforce any rule violating the Constitution when challenged and put before a competent jurist(s). TuberGrubber explained the point with a football metaphor about a team where "half the team going one way, half the other," which is what AU 'Five Million Dollar Man' failed coaches grasp for when parasitic educrats of this sort run out of arguments. When a small Islamic school near Birmingham asked to expand (a school teaching Alabama children since 1996) Coach said on a podcast it wanted to "infiltrate." Its assistant principal responded most of her students "would not even know the word 'infidel'" but for hearing it in the news that week and the school "did not have to hire security after 9/11" but had to after the senator's comments.

Strip the campaign rhetoric and the objection isn't Sharia is too harsh. The objection is a citizen believes something Senator TuberGrubber dislikes and Alabama's senator (from Florida who votes in Ft. Walton) would run him off for it. Coach would deport individuals for unfounded conviction(s) and silence them for a sermon... the same banal instinct the rest of this column has been tracking. Punishment of belief and speech by people who hold power does not improve by being shouted from campaign Kabuki stages instead of quietly buried on page 80 of a Board packet. Trustees imposed a creed which commands obedience to law. The politburo member who would appoint their successors, one AU once paid to coach (and not coach) cannot say what the law is and would break the First Amendment to prove he 'loves' the country. Walk humbly, the Creed says... nobody on this political stage appears walking humbly.

The disclaimer

Documentary precision cuts both ways. Trustees who merely voted on June 5 are likely shielded from personal damages by legislative immunity under Bogan v. Scott-Harris (1998). A verdict names the administrator who executes (as Dean Aistrup learned) wrongdoing and the university then indemnifies him, so yet again the cost lands on tuition and tax payers, not on the guilty official. Campaign contributions are protected speech; after McDonnell v. United States (2016) the federal bribery laws read "official act" narrowly. The dates and the dollar amounts provided last month are revealing. I'll not print the word some readers may be thinking, but got a tickle out of AU contacts using the 'Arthur Whore' nomenclature. Again, 18 U.S.C. § 242, which makes the willful deprivation of rights under color of law a federal crime, remains on the books. Whether it is ever applied is the Justice Department's discretion... witnessing justice from Lee County up to Moscow on the Potomac, I predict no action.

In Closing

This State has been here before. Alabama once tried to shut down an organization whose speech it disliked where NAACP v. Alabama (1958) ended with the State losing 9 to 0 in the SCotUS. The Senate was the Board's own creature - i.e., the holding differs... the coach's playbook remains the same. A federal jury priced that play at half a million dollars in punitive damages against the corrupt dean and AU paid it, because the university always indemnifies its officials who advance the desired largess. Apparatchiks who run Auburn billed their malice to the people who pay for Auburn and the politburo members who arranged June 5 are pleased with themselves. The faculty can no longer convene to answer. I pray Professor Stern prevails again. I also pray the students and faculty of this State notice who holds the purse strings and what's bought with them. I further pray the next jury gets the whole calendar laid in front of it with the sagacity to once again discipline this once noble university.

Deo Volente.

John Sophocleus is a retired Ford Motor Company Warranty & Policy Administrator and a retired Auburn University Instructor of Economics. A former Libertarian candidate for Alabama House and Governor, U.S. House District 3 and U.S. Senate candidate, he's also a monthly Alabama Gazette columnist since 2009.

Opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Alabama Gazette staff or publishers.