Slate: “The morning after Louisiana GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeff Landry claimed victory in a lopsided race where he avoided a runoff, tenured LSU professor Robert Mann knew he had to quit his job. He submitted his resignation to his dean and announced it on social media.
“My reasons are simple: The person who will be governor in January has already asked LSU to fire me,” Mann said Sunday in the four-post thread on X, formerly Twitter. “And I have no confidence the leadership of this university would protect the Manship School against a governor’s efforts to punish me and other faculty members.”
Mann, 65, holds an endowed chair in LSU’s journalism department and has worked at the school since 2006. But he’d been pondering a move for a while, since his 2021 dust-up with Landry over COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
Then Louisiana’s attorney general, Landry had sent an aide to an LSU Faculty Senate meeting discussing vaccines, where she read a letter calling the mandates “problematic” because they violated people’s right to religious freedom. Mann followed up with a tweet, saying Landry had sent “some flunkie … to read a letter attacking covid vaccines.”
Landry responded immediately, announcing a day later that he’d contacted LSU president William F. Tate IV to personally request that Mann be punished. Landry tweeted: “This type of disrespect and dishonesty has no place in our society—especially at our flagship university by a professor. I hope LSU takes appropriate action soon.””