Florida school seeks to fire Newtown conspiracy theorist

A professor in southern Florida who has aggressively promoted false theories surrounding the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School is facing termination after the parents of a victim publicly accused him of harassment.

Florida Atlantic University, a public institution in Boca Raton, said in a statement Wednesday that it had moved to fire the professor, James Tracy, and that he would have 10 days to dispute the reasons. The university declined to provide further details.

Tracy, who teaches in the school of communication and media studies, said in an email that he could not comment.

The case opens a window on the world of conspiracy theorists who promote an alternative narrative of the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in which Adam Lanza killed his mother, 20 children and six school staff members before committing suicide. They contend the killings were orchestrated by the Obama administration as a pretext to strengthen gun control. Some have gone so far as to declare that the thoroughly documented massacre did not occur.

The university’s move to dismiss Tracy came days after a clash that the professor had with Lenny and Veronique Pozner, the parents of a 6-year-old boy murdered at Sandy Hook, in the online opinion section of The Sun-Sentinel.

On Dec. 10, the paper published an article by the Pozners condemning Tracy as a driving force in the Sandy Hook conspiracy movement, a group responsible for “a wave of harassment, intimidation and criminal activity against our family and others.”

“They seek us out and accuse us of being government agents who are faking our grief and lying about our loss,” they wrote.

Their article recounted a clash with Tracy in March. Lenny Pozner had demanded that Tracy remove a photograph of their murdered 6-year-old son, Noah, from his blog, Memory Hole. Tracy responded with a certified letter demanding proof that Pozner was Noah’s father.

In a column published by The Sun Sentinel on Monday, Tracy, a tenured professor who has been a faculty member for 13 years, reiterated his doubts about “the state-sanctioned Sandy Hook narrative,” argued that his tenure gave him refuge to make controversial claims, and accused the Pozners of “playing upon the prejudices of decent, good-hearted yet often poorly-informed Americans.”

In a letter attributed to him on the Sandy Hook Hoax Facebook page, he went further. “The Pozners, alas, are as phony as the drill itself, and profiting handsomely from the fake death of their son,” he wrote, referring to another theory of the massacre that contends the mass murder at the school was an exercise staged by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in which no one died.

Tracy has seemed to question just about every case of mass death on U.S. soil, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to the shootings this month in San Bernardino, California. He promoted his theories on his blog, on a weekly radio program and even in the classroom.

His course “Culture of Conspiracy” examines alternative theories around events like the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It sometimes elicits skeptical responses from students, he said in a 2013 interview with The Sun Sentinel.

“But I encourage that,” he said. “I want to get students to look at events in a more critical way.”

Tracy began to question Sandy Hook less than two weeks after the massacre, publishing a blog post titled “The Sandy Hook Massacre: Unanswered Questions and Missing Information” in which he suggested that the public’s belief in the official narrative reflected “a deepened credulousness borne from a world where almost all news and information is electronically mediated and controlled.”

Tracy’s views have been an increasing embarrassment for Florida Atlantic University and his colleagues there. He has been reprimanded twice: once in 2013 for failing to make clear that his opinions did not represent those of his employer, and again in November for “insubordination and failure to follow university policy.”

The university faces a potentially thorny challenge in stripping a professor of his tenure, an institution fiercely guarded in higher learning.

Jeffrey S. Morton, a professor of international law at the university, said in a statement to The Times that Tracy’s “harassment of the parents of murdered children was vulgar, repulsive and an insult to the academic profession.”

He added, “While there are real reasons to protect tenure for academic research, Tracy’s ‘scholarship’ makes a mockery of what academics do.”

On Thursday, The Sun Sentinel published a strongly worded editorial urging the university to dismiss Tracy.

“Let there be no debate,” the editorial board wrote, “that the intemperate Tracy has caused undue heartache for grieving parents, brought embarrassment to his university and our region and his employment deserves to be terminated.”