Felicia Branch #

Introduction #

Felicia Branch is a legal educator who served as an assistant professor of clinical education and director of the Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock William H. Bowen School of Law, joining the faculty in July 2025. Two months into the job, after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed during a public question-and-answer event at a Utah college on September 10, 2025, Branch called him “an evil man” on Facebook and wrote that she would not “pull back from celebrating” his death. The posts drew calls for her firing from Arkansas’s governor, attorney general, and lieutenant governor, and what her dean described as a “torrent of complaints” from students, parents, and alumni. Suspended with pay and then fired despite a faculty appeals council’s recommendation that she receive only a warning, Branch is now suing the university and Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, alleging she was punished for protected political speech.

Background Information #

Branch joined the Bowen School of Law in July 2025 as an assistant professor of clinical education, directing and teaching in the law school’s Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic. She had been on the faculty roughly two months when Kirk, a conservative activist and podcaster, was shot on September 10, 2025, at a public question-and-answer event at a Utah college and pronounced dead later that day. Screenshots of her now-deleted Facebook posts circulated, and Arkansas’s most powerful elected officials publicly demanded that the university discipline her.

The Controversy or Incident That Led to Their Cancellation #

In one of several now-deleted Facebook posts after Kirk’s shooting death, Branch wrote that “it never fails” and that she would not “pull back from celebrating that an evil man died by the method he chose to embrace.” “Don’t tell people who have been targeted by someone like him how to feel, how not to post, how not to celebrate that he can no longer inflict his brand of evil,” she continued. Another post referenced Psalm 109, a Bible passage she described as calling for justice in the face of evil.

Per the September 24 letter in which Dean Colin Crawford informed Branch he was firing her for cause, her posts “celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk, equated people mourning his death to members of the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses, stated that you hoped Mr. Kirk was ‘restless in hell,’ and used a vulgar acronym to imply that Mr. Kirk had ‘f- - -ed around and found out’ by being shot — a crime that, according to you, made the world ‘a little more balanced.’” She also shared a meme showing Ku Klux Klan members at a cross burning captioned “People mourning Charlie Kirk”; in another, she appeared to compare Kirk’s mourners to the Klan under the caption “we certainly see you.”

Her posts also pointed to Kirk’s own words on guns: at a 2023 event he said it was worth it “to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” Branch’s post responded: “after all - a few deaths a year due to gun violence is the price we have to pay to have our other right. His. Words.”

Public Reaction and Consequences #

The reaction was immediate and political. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin posted screenshots of the posts, calling them “appalling” and arguing that “protections for scholarship offer no reason for an employer to tolerate an employee unabashedly celebrating political assassination”; in a press release, he called for her termination. Lt. Gov. Leslie Rutledge asked Dean Colin Crawford for “appropriate disciplinary action,” calling the statements “incompatible with the values of higher education, the legal profession, and the rule of law.” Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders called for Branch’s firing on X: “Her comments are vile, disgusting, and unacceptable.”

UA Little Rock Chancellor Christina Drale announced that Branch was suspended with pay pending an investigation requested by UA System President Jay Silveria, saying that as an educator she opposed “such violent rhetoric in the strongest of terms.” On September 24, Dean Crawford informed Branch in a letter that he was firing her for cause. Branch appealed to the university’s faculty appeals council, which recommended that she receive only a warning and keep her job. Chancellor Drale overruled the panel, dismissing her in an October 13 letter that said the posts had been “disruptive to the operation and effectiveness” of the law school, the university, and the clinic Branch directed. “I cannot see a pathway where you could remain in your position at the Bowen Law School without compromising the trust and confidence of your students and colleagues,” Drale wrote.

Current Status #

On May 26, 2026, Branch filed a lawsuit against the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, naming Dean Colin Crawford, Chancellor Christina Drale, and Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin as defendants. The suit alleges she was “denied the benefits of her employment contract [by the Bowen School of Law] based on the expression of protected political speech” and argues that “the First Amendment does not permit public university officials to punish a faculty member for such speech merely because it provoked public outrage, political condemnation, or reputational discomfort.” She is seeking $850,000 in damages. It claims university officials violated her First Amendment rights by suspending and terminating her over off-duty speech, and that Griffin — not her employer, but a public official demanding her firing — “materially intensified the retaliatory environment in which the university acted.” Branch remains dismissed from the law school, and no outcome in the litigation has been reported.

Impact on Their Career/Life #

In roughly three months, Branch went from newly hired clinical professor and tax clinic director to the center of a nationally covered free-speech fight and out of a job — dismissed by a chancellor who overruled her own faculty appeals council’s recommendation of a warning, in a firing covered by Reuters, THV 11, the Arkansas Times, and KATV. Her case has moved from the court of public opinion, where Arkansas’s top officials uniformly condemned her, to a courtroom, where she seeks $850,000 and a ruling that a public university cannot punish a faculty member for off-duty political speech. Whatever the lawsuit’s outcome, the Facebook posts ended her tenure at Bowen within a single semester of her July 2025 arrival.