PHILADELPHIA (CN) - A New Jersey university must face trial for declining to review a lecturer's contract after he made comments reportedly praising Adolf Hitler and white supremacy, an appeals court panel ruled on Monday.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology first hired Jason Jorjani, a philosopher and occultist with ties to the alt-right and neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, in 2015 to teach philosophy, and renewed his contract in both 2016 and 2017.

The hire drew little notice until September 2017, when the New York Times published an op-ed by an anti-racist activist who had secretly recorded a conversation with Jorjani. In the conversation, he suggested Europe would build concentration camps by 2050 "at the cost of a few hundred million people" and that Adolf Hitler would be "seen as a great European leader."

Following the op-ed's release, the university uncovered a 2016 article in which Jorjani wrote that "Asians, Arabs, Africans and other non-Aryan peoples" are genetically and intellectually inferior, and urged Iran to adopt eugenics to "restore the pre-Arab and pre-Mongol genetic character" of the nation.

Six days after the op-ed ran, the university put Jorjani on paid leave, citing the article "caused significant disruption at the university" and highlighted Jorjani's "association with organization," which Jorjani did not disclose to the university. The university later chose not to renew his contract.

Jorjani promptly sued the university for defamation and First Amendment violations, although U.S. District Judge William J. Martini dismissed Jorjani's former claims in 2019.

Regarding the First Amendment claims, Martini granted summary judgment for the university in 2024, ruling that Jorjani's speech negatively impacted the school's educational mission enough to outweigh Jorjani's interest in expression.

"Contrary to his assertions, Plaintiff's speech did not merely cause offense - it disrupted (and was likely to further disrupt) NJIT's administration, interfered with NJIT's mission to efficiently provide a hostile-free learning environment for its students, and impeded Plaintiff's ability to effectively perform his teaching duties," Martini wrote in his lower court opinion.

On appeal, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit sided with Jorjani Monday, vacating the lower court's summary judgment.

"On balance, the disruption NJIT described does not outweigh even minimal interest in Jorjani's speech, so the District Court erred in concluding Jorjani's speech was not protected by the First Amendment," wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Paul Matey, a first-term Donald Trump appointee, in the Third Circuit panel's opinion.

The panel - including U.S. Circuit Judges Peter J. Phipps, a first-term Donald Trump appointee, and Cheryl Ann Krause, a Barack Obama appointee - said the university's examples of "disruption" were limited to complaints from students, faculty and administrators.

Those "disruptions," the judges ruled, were not enough to outweigh Jorjani's speech.

"Entirely absent is any evidence of specific student protests, upheaval, or unwillingness to abide by university policies," Matey wrote. "NJIT's theory that student dissent rose to the level of disruption is simply speculative."

Regarding faculty disagreements over Jorjani's comments, Matey wrote that concerns over employee harmony "is irrelevant inside the university where professors serve the needs of their students, not fellow academics."

And regarding administrators fielding complaints, Matey noted that the university's record only showed approximately 50 emails and limited phone calls received about Jorjani - "all a most minor uptick in communications, if at all, and one that required no additional staffing to support the single administrator who handled these inquiries."

As such, the panel ruled, summary judgment was ultimately improper.

The case is now set to return to the lower court for Martini to determine whether Jorjani's speech was a substantial or motivating factor in the purported retaliatory actions against him, and whether Jorjani would have been terminated even if his speech had not occurred.

Representatives for Jason Jorjani and the New Jersey Institute of Technology could not be immediately reached for comment.

Source: Courthouse News Service