JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A visiting English instructor is speaking out after being terminated by the University of North Florida for allegedly making comments about shooting students during a lecture.
They are comments he claims were not serious and intended to illustrate a point about the problem with violent rhetoric following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
>>> STREAM ACTION NEWS JAX LIVE <<<
According to the termination letter obtained by Action News Jax, visiting UNF English instructor Jacob McElroy is accused of telling students he “had access to guns,” was “crazy” and would “****in’ shoot everyone” during a lecture one day after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“We as a class were discussing, not only the events, but more importantly the way people were talking about the events,” McElroy said.
McElroy spoke to Action News Jax and explained his intent was to demonstrate and convey to students in his “Writing for Audience and Purpose” class what bad rhetoric looks like.
RELATED: UNF fires professor, says he told class he’d ‘shoot everyone’ day after Charlie Kirk assassination
“I started to take this dramatic theatrical approach where I started to portray myself as like, almost a maniac version of a professor who was operating under the new rules of American public discourse. And in the course of doing so, I did joke that if students disagreed with me or questioned me, the new rules must be that I must therefore now shoot them, because that’s what we do now when we’re in disagreement,” McElroy said. ”And so, I went on in the elaborative, demonstrative irony to decry that very sort of thinking.”
But at least one student in the classroom took offense, recorded the lecture and reported it to the administration.
Despite Florida’s two-party consent law, which generally prohibits recording an individual without their consent, a law passed in 2021 allows students to record video and audio of class lectures for their own personal educational use or “in connection with a complaint to the public institution of higher education where the recording was made.”
After explaining what happened to police, McElroy was cleared of any criminal charges.
[DOWNLOAD: Free Action News Jax app for alerts as news breaks]
“I’ve certainly never seriously threatened a student. I would never harm a student. I felt bad that a student had felt so upset that they didn’t feel comfortable coming to me about it,” McElroy said.
But soon after, he was informed by the administration he was to be terminated on December 17 for “incompetence”.
“I was shocked by that. I really thought this all could have been worked out with another conversation, in another step or two or, you know, even an apology,” McElroy said.
[SIGN UP: Action News Jax Daily Headlines Newsletter]
The United Faculty of Florida’s UNF chapter confirmed the union is moving forward with a formal grievance on McElroy’s behalf in an effort to prevent him from losing his job.
McElroy said he hopes he’ll succeed in keeping his job, and he regrets offending his student and making them feel threatened.
“I’d love to learn from it and move forward with that new knowledge and reflection, and I think the university as an educational institution should want the same thing,” McElroy said.
The University of Florida provided only audio of the class recording to protect the identifiable information of the students.
Click here to download the free Action News Jax news and weather apps, click here to download the Action News Jax Now app for your smart TV and click here to stream Action News Jax live.
