An adjunct professor who posted a poem about killing Christians plans to sue his former college after being forced to resign.
Jeff Klinzman who resigned last month from Kirkwood Community College says his First Amendment rights were violated when he was asked to either resign or be terminated after telling a local news outlet: “I affirm that I am Antifa.”
It had been discovered that Klinzman had a post on his 2012 Facebook account that said, “this is what the country will come to if we don’t stop Evangelical Christians.”
He followed that statement by quoting a poem reading, “Kill them all, and bury them deep into the ground, before millions more are tortured to death.”
“It’s not pretty,” he then wrote, “and I’m not proud, but seeing what Evangelical Christians are doing to this country and its people fills me with rage and a desire to exact revenge.”
Lori Sundberg, president of the college, said Klinzman was never asked to quit. She provided The Cedar Rapids Gazette an email the professor had sent to human resources.
“Due to the controversy surrounding reporting about my activism, and in the interest of preserving the safety of the Kirkwood campus, its students, faculty, and staff, I resign my position as a member of the English faculty effective immediately,” the email from Klinzman said.
The controversy surrounding Klinzman, who resigned from the college on August 23, began when a local TV station asked him questions about his social media activity, which included comments he had made on an “Iowa Antifa” Facebook page.
Sunberg told the Gazette she had no regrets with the “decision to remove” Klinzman.
“Once the news story ran and we had this outcry from the public and what we perceived as threats — at the end of the day for me, if I’m found legally wrong on this, I can live with that. But if I make a wrong decision regarding the safety of the students, and he’s harmed, our students are harmed, or other faculty are harmed, I can’t live with that.”
