UNC professor suspended for anti-fascist activism returns to class

UNC Chapel Hill professor Dwayne Dixon returned to campus Wednesday to teach his first class after a suspension for alleged ties to an anti-racist, anti-fascist group was lifted last week.

In a news conference on campus, Dixon condemned the university’s actions as “glaring violations on my constitutional rights,” criticizing UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts for placing him on leave and barring him from university grounds.

“Chancellor Roberts, rather than pausing to reflect, think deeply — all the things we want our students to do in classrooms — was easily led through the nose through foolish online conjecture and inference into a very regrettable, embarrassing decision,” he said. “The actions by the chancellor against me reveal again just how imperiled our right to free and unfettered speech is.”

A spokesperson for the university declined to comment on Dixon’s remarks or on the remarks of others who spoke at the event.

Dixon’s suspension came after Fox News published a story alleging he was a member of a group related to another organization that posted fliers on Georgetown University’s campus making light of the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. That story prompted a Turning Point USA spokesperson to demand Dixon be “immediately fired.”

He was reinstated five days later after student and faculty protests, petitions, and a letter threatening legal action from the ACLU of North Carolina. A UNC spokesperson wrote that a threat assessment “found no basis to conclude that he poses a threat to University students, staff, and faculty, or has engaged in conduct that violates University policy.”

Roberts said in a faculty council meeting on Friday that he was also motivated by a 2018 video of Dixon that came to his attention over the weekend where he was “loading a semiautomatic weapon and then firing that weapon” while “talking about the need for confrontation.”

A former member of Redneck Revolt, an anti-fascist “community defense formation” that encouraged bearing arms for self-defense, Dixon was arrested in 2017 for bringing a rifle to an anti-Ku Klux Klan rally in Durham. The charges were dismissed, as was a 2018 assault charge from a protest where UNC’s confederate statue was taken down.

“What I’m doing in that video is something that millions of Americans do every day, which is plinking targets, plinking cans, right?” Dixon said Wednesday. “The use of my Second Amendment [rights] is hardly reason or justification for such a severe draconian action on his part.”

Dixon added that at the Durham protest, he carried his rifle at “the very early stages” of the protest to deter violence in case KKK members showed up for a confrontation. “Once there was enough people to ensure wider safety, I unloaded and put away my rifle.”

Dixon and his supporters warned Wednesday that his swift removal from the campus is part of a larger troubling crackdown on speech on university campuses.

“This is not an isolated incident, but a pattern of misconduct by our administration,” said Pragya Upreti, a public policy student who helps lead TransparUNCy, a student accountability initiative. “We have watched the administration relentlessly intimidate faculty, students, surveil classrooms, monitor syllabi and emails and brutally crack down on student protest.”

Cultural studies professor Michael Palm, president of the UNC Chapel Hill chapter of the American Association of University Professors, praised student groups and civil rights organizations that stood up for Dixon for “fighting to retain our basic rights to free speech, to free assembly, and to academic freedom.”

“All of these groups have also been working to keep nonresident students, faculty, and staff safe and to ensure their same rights in the face of ICE raids on campus and the threat of being deported for speaking in support of Palestinians,” Palm said. “All UNC administrators have said is that they’ll follow the law.”

Dan Siegel, deputy legal director of the NC ACLU, said the tactics used against Dixon are the same that have deprived students demonstrating against the war in Gaza of their rights.

“Last year, right here in Polk Place, there was a peaceful demonstration where people were demonstrating about the war in Gaza. In response, the university indefinitely banned many of these peaceful demonstrators,” he said. “Even though the university has never even suggested they posed some kind of threat to campus safety, they remain banned today.”

Dixon made the same comparison, concluding his remarks by exclaiming, “Free Palestine!” He said that right now, it just feels “amazing” to be back in the classroom.

“I’m so excited to see them. I’ve graded a bunch of papers that I wasn’t able to access last week, so I feel finally caught up on work, and we have really important things to cover this week in both of my classes,” he said. “I’m just going to be overjoyed to see them.”