The university will probably say that Dr. Curtiss was a regular employee on a contract which could be renewed, or not, at will. However, the essence of what Dr. Curtiss is saying, as far as I am concerned, is that he was acting, in significant part, as a faculty member, and that academic administrators object to political views he expressed in an academic setting. In other words, it was a violation of academic freedom. There is no law that the University of Wisconsin has to grant academic freedom. However, I'm thinking that academic freedom is a value they profess, and that if they are humiliated by having it shown that they violated academic freedom principles, they will back down. There was a very similar case at John Hopkins shortly after September 11, when a professor made politically incorrect statements at a open university discussion of the attack on America. The Hopkins professor was demoted, but then, after negative publicity, the university backed down. One can hope for it to happen here also.