Ruling Reinstating Professor Accused of Bigotry Set Aside : Supreme Court: Justices cite decision giving broader power to fire employees whose comments prove damaging.

The Supreme Court, sending a signal Monday that the First Amendment does not shield public officials who make bigoted comments, overturned a ruling that reinstated a black studies professor who in a speech denounced “rich Jews” who “planned and plotted . . . the destruction of black people.”

In a one-line order, the justices threw out a federal appeals court decision that required City College of New York to keep Prof. Leonard Jeffries as chairman of its black studies department.

Instead, they told a lower court to reconsider the Jeffries case under a high court ruling in May that gave public officials broader power to dismiss employees whose comments damage morale or disrupt the workplace.

In the case last May, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote that under the First Amendment, “the government cannot restrict the speech of the public at large,” but it can restrict the speech of its own employees.

“When someone who is paid a salary so that she will contribute to an agency’s effective operation . . . says things that detract from the agency’s effective operation, the government employer must have some power to restrain her,” O’Connor said in a ruling that upheld the firing of a nurse who griped about her supervisor.

New York Atty. Gen. Oliver Koppell praised the Supreme Court for recognizing “that universities should be permitted to weigh the impact of offensive and bigoted conduct of high-level administrators . . . and that they are not impotent in face of racism and anti-Semitism.”

Monday’s ruling is the latest in a three-decade court struggle to define the First Amendment rights of public employees.

In the 1960s, the justices gave strong protection to free speech on “matters of public concern.” For example, they ordered an Illinois school board in 1968 to reinstate a teacher who had been fired for writing a letter to a newspaper that criticized the school board.

But more recently, a more conservative court has stressed that the free-speech rights of public employees must be balanced against the welfare of an agency or a school system.

If a public employee’s speech causes “disruption,” he or she can be dismissed, “even when the speech involved is on a matter of public concern,” the justices said on May 31, ruling in Waters vs. Churchill.

Jeffries gained attention for theorizing on the differences between “sun people” from Africa and “ice people” from Europe. According to Jeffries, blacks are superior physically and intellectually because they have more melanin pigment in their skin.

On July 20, 1991, he spoke at a black cultural festival in Albany, N.Y., in defense of a much-criticized “multicultural curriculum” for the New York public schools. He said the curriculum had suffered from an orchestrated attack by Jews such as “(Arthur) Schlesinger and (Albert) Shanker” and Columbia University professor Diane Ravitch, whom he called “a sophisticated Texas Jew.”

Jeffries also said the negative images of Africans were the result of “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood. . . . Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a system of destruction of black people.”

When his speech was broadcast on a state-run cable television network, it prompted a sharp reaction, including a demand from Gov. Mario M. Cuomo that university officials “take action or explain why they don’t.”

Under mounting pressure, college officials announced that Jeffries’ contract to chair the black studies department would not be renewed, although he retained his position as full professor.

Jeffries then filed a lawsuit contending that the college’s action had violated his First Amendment rights, and a jury agreed. It awarded him $360,000 in punitive damages and a judge ordered his reinstatement as department chairman.

In April, the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision, although it ordered a new trial on the damages. Though his speech was “hateful and poisonous,” the First Amendment’s protection “extends to all speech on public matters, no matter how vulgar or misguided,” the appeals court said.

Koppell’s plea to the Supreme Court in Harleston vs. Jeffries, 94-112, questioned “whether the First Amendment compels a university to retain, in a position of leadership, a person who has engaged in hate speech.”