to publicly support and convey the agency's positions would allow the agency to do the job more effectively." Waters forced the Third Circuit to no longer require that public employers show actual disruption. In Watters v. Philadelphia, it overturned summary judgment against the administrator of a police department's employee assistance program who had told a local newspaper there was a "crisis" in the program due to the lack of key official policies, and been fired. "Disruption caused by actions independent of the speech at issue cannot be equated with disruption caused by the speech itself", wrote Dolores Korman Sloviter. The Sixth Circuit found Waters very similar to a 2006 case it heard, Farhat v. Jopke. A Michigan school custodian fired after a long history of abusive communications with administrators and his union, which sometimes included threats of violence, was found to have engaged in unprotected speech. "[E]ven if portions of appellant's expression did address matters of public concern," wrote William Bertelsman, "the disruptiveness of his speech in the workplace outweighed any value his expression might have had." Analysis and commentary Advocates for public employees, particularly in education, were dismayed by Waters. "Incredibly, this decision seems to abandon truth as a criterion for decision making and substitutes for it a belief be it true or false as long as it was established by reasonable means" wrote George Madden of Montana State University Billings, echoing Scalia's complaint. He also felt the case raised privacy concerns not touched on in the opinion since Churchill and Perkins-Graham had apparently believed they could speak freely. However, Madden cautioned, this would depend on how lower courts interpreted the case. A.N. Moshirnia sees Waters as a further erosion, along with Mt. Healthy and Connick, of the rights of educators affirmed in Pickering, which "may have indicated the zenith of First Amendment protection for public employee speech." After the later cases imposed some other barriers to a public-employee plaintiff, Waters, Moshirnia said, "dramatically reduced the government's trial burden by permitting the government to justify its employment action with less than conclusive evidence." He also thought it could be used for prior restraint since, in his analysis, a public employer could "fire an employee before he or she has spoken in cases where the government knows the general contours of the speech, and predicts that it might cause a disruption. Charles W. Hemingway, a Virginia federal employment lawyer, took