Last week, Luigi Mangione, a University of Pennsylvania alumnus, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder for allegedly killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York earlier this month.

For better or for worse, the murder has polarized public dialogue about it, with some people praising the murder as a justified act of rebellion against the perceived greed of the insurance industry, and others insisting that violence is never the appropriate way to resolve differences in a democratic society.

University of Pennsylvania Cinema & Media Studies professor Julia Alekseyeva is in the former camp, and she expressed her thoughts on Tik Tok and Instagram, where she praised the murder. In one post she referred to the accused as “the icon we all need and deserve.” In another she smiled as the song “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from the musical “Les Misérables” played in a post captioned, “Have never been prouder to be a professor at the University of P3nnsylvania [sic].”

In response to those posts, which Professor Alekseyeva has now apologized for and retracted, Representative Dan Meuser wrote to Penn’s interim president demanding that the institution fire the professor:

The posts by Professor Alekseyeva glorified Mangione’s actions and expressed pride in his association with the University. In two separate posts, she labeled Mangione as the “icon we all need and deserve” as well as stating that she “has never been prouder to be a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” This public pronouncement of support is outrageous and violates the basic ideals of a civilized society. Professor Alekseyeva should be fired for her social media posts, which are harmful, divisive, and inappropriate for an educator. It is evident by her actions that she cannot be entrusted with guiding and mentoring students at any institution of higher education.

The letter asked if the University was initiating a formal review of Professor Alekseyeva and/or a review of the courses she has taught for additional “evidence of blatant violent rhetoric.” And it concluded with the following:

While I am a fan of the University of Pennsylvania, I expect answers as a pattern of radical behavior continues on campus. Your response will dictate how my colleagues and I support allocating future federal funding for research at the University of Pennsylvania. As you are aware, the University received $936 million in federal research grants last year and these funds should only be awarded to institutions of excellence that do not tolerate these types of heinous actions from an assistant professor. This is an outrage and your silence is deafening. I expect decisive action.

Representative Meuser is completely within his rights to criticize Professor Alekseyeva. But he should not be pressuring Penn to fire her.

While Penn is a private institution and not bound by the First Amendment, it promises its students and faculty robust free expression and academic freedom rights. Because private institutions that promise rights are bound by contract law to honor those commitments, Penn must not punish faculty for expressing opinions on matters of public concern unless those expressions constituted some form of unprotected speech. Alekseyeva’s social media posts did not incite imminent acts of violence. Nor did they create a hostile educational environment. Praise for violence does not fall into any free speech exception.

Academic freedom protects the rights of faculty to express controversial opinions on matters of public concern, no matter how offensive those views may be to others. After all, if academic freedom only protected inoffensive ideas, it would hardly be needed at all.

Congress has a legitimate role in evaluating how to allocate federal research funding, but it shouldn't use that process to pressure private institutions to engage in censorship. Restricting these funds would punish researchers with no connection to the tweet or control over how Penn responds to them. But more importantly, institutions aren’t provided these grants for their own benefit; the federal government funds research projects in pursuit of knowledge that it hopes will be for the betterment of the world.

Cutting off funding to important research has potentially far reaching consequences for Penn’s extraordinary researchers and society as a whole, and it’s hard to see how we would benefit from curtailing these and other projects like them whenever lawmakers are dissatisfied by a University's response to faculty speech they disfavor.

Moreover, going down that path will only encourage more government pressure to censor. Those that find Professor Alekseyeva’s posts disturbing should keep in mind that, on a long enough timeline, there could well be a lawmaker who finds their views equally disturbing. Penn needs to get out of the business of sanctioning professors for protected speech. If Penn capitulates to the pressure, it will be setting an awful precedent.