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FAU Doesn’t Want You to Hear This Speech

  • Writer: Indivisible Boca Raton
    Indivisible Boca Raton
  • Sep 18, 2025
  • 3 min read

Academic freedom at Florida Atlantic University is under fire. GEO Group’s shadow looms over it all.


On September 5, 2025, Dr. Karen Leader, a tenured professor of art history at Florida Atlantic University, delivered a powerful speech on campus. She reminded the community of FAU’s proud diversity, defended programs for equity and inclusion, and called out the university’s renewed entanglement with GEO Group and ICE’s 287(g) deportation program. Her closing message was clear: “We are stronger together.”



Days later, FAU placed her on administrative leave. The official explanation was that she had reposted criticisms of conservative activist Charlie Kirk after his tragic shooting. Leader insists she never commented on his death, only on Kirk’s public statements. The timing of this enforcement speaks volumes and she is not alone. FAU has suspended multiple professors in recent weeks, a wave of actions that looks less like neutral discipline and more like political targeting.


That’s why groups like the Florida Valkyries are sounding the alarm. They’ve launched a simple Action Network letter calling on FAU leadership to reinstate Dr. Leader and the other professors placed on leave, and to end politically motivated investigations. Visit the link below and submit a letter respectfully voicing your opinion on this matter.



Click on this image to write to FAU Leadership about this.

Why FAU Doesn’t Want You to Hear This

When Dr. Leader denounced GEO Group’s profiteering from prisons and detention centers, she wasn’t just speaking about distant corporate policy. She was speaking directly to the ties between FAU’s own leadership and the private prison industry.


FAU’s president, Adam Hasner, is a former Republican legislator who also served as a GEO Group executive. One of FAU’s trustees is a current GEO vice president. And FAU’s police recently signed onto ICE’s 287(g) program, entangling the university in federal deportation pipelines.


Ask yourself: does it make sense for a public university, one that claims to be the most diverse in Florida, to be so deeply linked to a company whose profits depend on incarceration and detention?


That’s the uncomfortable question Dr. Leader’s speech put front and center. And it may be the reason FAU doesn’t want you to hear it.


What a GEO Group Executive Does and Why That’s Not Education

The job of a GEO Group CEO or senior executive is clear: maximize shareholder returns by keeping prisons and detention centers full. Their responsibilities include lobbying lawmakers for harsher policies, cutting costs in facilities often at the expense of safety and dignity, and protecting the company’s image from lawsuits and human rights scandals.


Success is measured not in how many lives are uplifted, but in how many beds are filled.

A university president’s job should be the opposite. It requires defending academic freedom, nurturing intellectual curiosity, and expanding opportunities for students from every background. It demands investment in diversity and inclusion, not the criminalization of communities.


A person trained to see people as “units” in a profit-and-loss sheet may be well suited to running a for-profit prison corporation. But that same mindset is fundamentally at odds with leading a public university that claims to advance social mobility and truth.


This is the conflict at the heart of FAU today. Whether the institution will be run like a corporation that profits from confinement, or like a university that empowers people to thrive.


Watch the entire March and Rally from September 5th, 2025



"Public education is a modern miracle of democracy. Florida taxpayers deserve better." - Karen J. Leader
GEO Group's Shadow Over South Florida - Private Prisons, Political Influence, and a University Transformed.
America's Hidden Gulags: Torture, Disappearances, and Forced Deportation - How Florida Created a Shadow Prison System for Asylum Seekers With No Oversight, No Justice, and No Way out.
2025: When Accusation Became Enough for Imprisonment in America - How the Laken Riley Act Changed Immigration Enforcement, and Who Paid the Price



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