The letter, dated February 12, on South Florida State College letterhead and hand delivered by the Director of Human Resources, contained four sentences.
I would be placed on administrative leave with pay till the end of my contract. The contract would not be renewed. I would be relieved of all teaching duties immediately. A concluding sentence offered contact information if I had any questions.
I had many.
My dean, chair, the HR director, and I were in the dean’s office that afternoon. My chair and dean—who had vouched for me in the preceding days—seemed in a state of shock. I repeatedly asked the HR director for the complaint. There was none. A staff member, I was told, had made a “verbal complaint.” When I pressed further, demanded to know what I had done wrong, the HR director said: “You taught a story that wasn’t in the textbook.” My chair immediately pointed out that instructors are permitted to use outside resources. The response: “The president has the final say.”
The HR director told me he would need my office keys. My email accounts would be locked.
When he escorted me to collect my belongings, he seemed unexpectedly emotional. I had taught his daughter. Watched her beam across the stage at commencement.
Somehow I drove home.
My parents were arriving the next day, and I wasn’t sure I could manage a brave face for them. Earlier that year, I had been asked by the vice president of the college to serve as Faculty Council President for the upcoming academic year. They were so proud.
I’ve spent most of my career teaching at small, private liberal arts schools in Upstate New York. I made the decision to move to South Florida in 2023, to be closer to my parents who are now in their eighties. I left a secure position at Ithaca College—my contract had just been renewed for five more years—to come and work at a public college whose stated values I shared: “the free exchange of ideas in an environment that embraces honesty, fairness, personal responsibility, and ethical leadership.”
I moved here in good faith, with an open heart and mind, and the hope for better things. My interview process was memorably warm, without the guile and pretension that can sometimes typify academia. Fred Hawkins had not yet arrived as president. So, in my final interview, when the vice president told me, “We’re a community; we’re a family and we take care of each other,” I believed it.
Perhaps that is why the wound feels so deep.
My present and future had been summarily snatched. In four sentences. By one college president with no professional experience in education, who had never set foot in my classroom. Over one story.
The triggering story was “Bettering Myself” by award-winning writer Ottessa Moshfegh, a story I have taught for over a decade, including the six semesters at SFSC leading up to my removal in February 2026. The protagonist is the epically dysfunctional Ms. Mooney. The narrative—with its unwholesome references to sex, drugs, and alcohol—is a kind of Picasso-esque portrait that asks the reader if there is any story value to be found in the unvarnished descent of a character to even further disrepair than the opening sequences suggest.
Class discussions about the story are always lively. We start with a list of students’ unprocessed limbic brain reactions (“Crazy,” “Real,” “Vulgar,” “TMI,” “Icky,” “Why? Why?”) and then tunnel to deeper truths: Will the story ultimately deliver on the promise of its title? How does the wayward first-person voice compare with morally compromised male narrators in more canonical examples? Can literature ask challenging questions without yielding comfortable answers?
I have great respect for my students as a whole and, in particular, their proven abilities to rise to the occasion of learning from stories that may challenge them beyond the scope of their own experience. My students at South Florida State College consistently did so with curiosity, openness, and laughter and were—without parallel—the best part of my job. Having difficult conversations in the classroom is one way not to be undone by them outside those walls.
I was not asking my students to like the story. Only to reckon with it. Literature that never unsettles us may be comfortable, but incomplete—antiseptically free of debate, friction, and discovery.
But I found not everyone agrees.
On February 6, I was told by my chair via text that a staff member or administrator had forwarded the story to President Hawkins and “that didn’t go over very well.” She added: “No one is in trouble, but it’s gotta get dealt with.” I do not know who sent the story. In conversation with my chair, I learned only that the individual found the story both offensive and inappropriate.
The callipers on curriculum control in the State of Florida had been steadily closing. While we were told we had to be careful about language concerning race, gender, or diversity within our syllabi, there was also the sense that we could maintain some autonomy with our content as long as we were delivering the course goals and student learning outcomes with curricular fealty.
What happened to me seems wedged somewhere between Good Night, and Good Luck and Footloose. Yes, it occurred within Florida’s larger political campaign over what can be taught in college classrooms. But there was also something reminiscent of puritanical creep in the reaction itself and in the way these two impulses converged: a political climate in which administrators are increasingly attuned to ideological controversy, and an almost gasping panic about what students should be permitted to encounter.
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On February 9, at the request of my chair and the vice president, I submitted a rationale for the use of “Bettering Myself” in my class and received positive responses from both my chair and dean. By February 10, I was told the president had involved state officials and seemed intent on letting me go. My chair, dean, and vice president told me they had countered by defending my teaching record, performance reviews, service to the college and commitment to students, emphasizing that I was not “some political actor.”
On the morning of February 11, I had my meeting with President Hawkins, a man I had never formally interacted with. I knew that my chair, dean, and the vice president would be in attendance. At its onset, I was still unclear on what I had done “wrong,” but the hope that this would be a collegial meeting was quickly dispelled by the added presence of the HR director.
President Hawkins avoided eye contact and offered what I have since learned is called a Girl Scout handshake. His small talk about his dog, his wife, and Valentine’s Day contrasted sharply with his opening salvo: “I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to do about your position.”
When invited to speak, I described my twenty years of teaching, my focus on ideas over ideology, and my commitment to helping students develop their thinking. I explained my decision to leave a secure position in Upstate New York to be closer to my parents and teach at a public college.
He mostly ignored this. Instead, he demanded to know why I had assigned the story and why it was on the reading list for only my in-person classes and not my online classes. I explained that difficult material deserves live discussion and referred also to my submitted rationale. He replied, “I don’t ever want to see this story again, I wouldn’t want my daughter reading this,” adding that “this is political” and that “Florida has restrictions too.”
The meeting ended shortly thereafter and my chair and I left, both of us near tears. The very next day, February 12, I received my dismissal letter with its flashing neons: Administrative leave with pay till the end of my contract. The contract would not be renewed. Relieved of all teaching duties immediately.
I know all about restrictions. I’ve been a U.S. citizen for 18 years. But where I grew up in the Middle East, I witnessed a different intrusion of politics in the classroom. This was Dubai in the early 80s. Before the ski resorts and island hotels and excess.
Once every school year, a representative from the Ministry of Education would come to class, distribute black markers, and ask us to open our atlases. We were shown where, on the map, to locate Israel. We were to use the markers to strike out the word. Next, the same directive for the dictionary. In our history book, pages covering parts of WWII were pasted together. The chronology went from Mein Kampf to reparations. A bunch of us attempted to “steam” the pages open over a saucepan of simmering water and made a pulpy, scalding mess. Someone needed ointment.
When we asked our teacher about the missing content, she quietly said, “I will lose my job if I speak about it.” Decades later, I would lose mine for making a different choice.
Those experiences had largely faded into the embers of memory. But after February this year, they rekindled.
I know what it looks like when politics enters the classroom. I have lived and worked at both ends of the spectrum of this tussle. But the irony is that I’ve never been the source. I have no real social media presence and have never posted in my life. It was President Hawkins, after all, who stated, “This is political.” The classroom is about my students, not me.
And that’s why, with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, I filed a First Amendment lawsuit on July 29 in federal court. I hope my story will reach across ideological divides. As a state college, SFSC and its leaders are supposed to follow the Constitution, and that includes not censoring literature simply because the president doesn’t like the themes or content. And if Hawkins’ actions go unchallenged, there is no telling how many other educators could be summarily fired simply for asking their students to reckon with difficult ideas.
Vinita Prabhakar has taught at Hobart & William Smith Colleges, Ithaca College and, more recently, South Florida State College. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University where she completed The Half Light Dwellers, a collection of short stories. She lives in Avon Park, Florida.
South Florida State College did not reply to a request for comment.
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I read this about your firing a few weeks ago and I found the short story online. I understand why it received the acclaim it did when it was published. It is a great ‘point of view/ narrator’ story. FWIW, I am definitely “culturally conservative” — 70 years old, Ivy League English major, active reader (50% “the canon” and 50% modern fiction). You are clearly a first-rate teacher and I am confident your firing will be found to be illegal. Good luck.
It's hard to imagine anyone handling the incredibly disturbing events that unfolded at your college any better than you did. Your reasoned, thoughtful, and open approach should have been met in kind. I applaud your decision to sue under the first amendment. The more people who challenge these assaults on our freedoms, the more likely it is that we will keep them. Thank you.