Like airports, college campuses have become places where one can get a lot of negative attention by making any reference—no matter how offhand or joking—to having or intending to use a weapon.
Such is the lesson learned the hard way by a Widener University law professor who was banned from campus in December after he hypothetically discussed shooting his dean in a criminal-law class. Similarly, a University of Oregon instructor lost his job for a May incident in which, after describing to a class how his communication skills might have saved him from being shot in Pakistan, he asked disruptive students if he needed to shoot them to make his point.
In other recent developments, the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater barred from the campus, and opted not to reappoint, a computer-science professor who in February was accused of making a threatening reference to the Virginia Tech massacre while discussing his tense relations with his colleagues, a charge he denies. An associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania was suspended last year after she joked on Facebook about wanting to kill students. And a graduate teaching assistant at the University of California at Davis was arrested by campus police and spent four days in jail after a 2009 incident in which he metaphorically characterized the end-of-semester instructor evaluations he was distributing to students as “a bomb.”
In the wake of tragedies such as the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting rampage by Seung-Hui Cho, a student who took 32 lives before killing himself, and the slaying of three faculty members at the University of Alabama at Huntsville last year by a biology professor who had been denied tenure, colleges have gone beyond establishing threat-assessment teams for identifying students or employees who appear capable of violence. They also, in several cases, have cracked down on instructors who made statements that could be construed as threatening, even when most who heard the remarks did not find cause for alarm.
The line between acceptable campus speech and speech treated as threatening “has certainly shifted,” says W. Scott Lewis, a partner at the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, a nonprofit consulting group. “We are far more likely to investigate—and at times take actions on—statements or behaviors that 10 years ago would have been dismissed as flippant or sarcastic.”
Sketchy Lines
The quickness with which colleges are removing or disciplining faculty members who make such statements is troubling to some advocates of free speech and academic freedom. In some courses, instructors discuss wishing to harm others or possessing weapons as an expected part of the pedagogy. An English professor teaching William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, for example, might quote the line “let’s kill all the lawyers.” The American Association of University Professors’ guidelines for colleges hold that statements related to a class are especially protected by the principle of academic freedom, far more so than statements that have little to do with the subject being taught.
Even when there is no educational justification for making a threatening remark, and a professor expresses a wish to harm others out of anger or frustration, “unprofessional, stupid comments don’t necessarily rise to the level of true threats,” says David L. Hudson Jr., an adjunct professor of law at Vanderbilt University and a scholar at the First Amendment Center, which studies free-speech issues. “I would certainly hope one’s entire career is not judged by one inopportune comment in the classroom.”
Robert M. O’Neil, general counsel for the AAUP and director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, argues that colleges err in drawing a hard line against any utterance perceived as threatening and should deal with complaints of such speech case by case. “There are no clear, sharp, fast, or firm lines that delineate—or differentiate among—potential malefactors,” he says.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s chief guidance in legally defining threats came in its 2003 ruling in Virginia v. Black, in which it held that a Virginia law against cross-burning violated the First Amendment by banning speech based on its content. In tackling the question of whether the cross-burning incidents in question were illegal acts of intimidations, the court’s majority opinion defined “true threats” as statements “where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”
Most recent court rulings dealing with threats on campuses have focused on statements made by students. Among such decisions, a federal judge ruled last fall that a former president of Valdosta State University could be held personally liable for having wrongly expelled, as posing “a clear and present danger,” a student regarded as harmless by counselors and other administrators, who had been protesting the university’s plans to build new parking garages. A state appeals court last month upheld the University of Minnesota’s decision to discipline a student in a mortuary-sciences class over her Facebook posts, including one in which she discussed stabbing someone. The appeals court said the university was justified in taking seriously any potential threat and enforcing academic-program rules requiring respect and professionalism.
In most of the recent controversies over faculty speech, the accusers were students or administrators with whom the faculty members had been at odds, raising questions about the motives underlying the complaints. More often than not, the instructors eventually were found to pose no real risk.
Talk of Targets
In the Widener University controversy, Lawrence J. Connell, a tenured associate professor at the university’s law school in Wilmington, Del., was placed on administrative leave and banned from the campus as a threat to safety, after two students he taught in the spring of 2010 complained about him. The students alleged that in class he discussed trying to shoot the law school’s dean, Linda L. Ammons, and at one point pretended to point a gun at a female student and said, “Die, bitch.” Noting that Ms. Ammons is a black woman, the students cited such classroom discussions to back their accusations that Mr. Connell is racist and sexist.
Mr. Connell has since filed a defamation lawsuit against Ms. Ammons, who is seeking to have him dismissed for cause, and has moved to have the university and the students who complained included as defendants. His lawsuit accuses Ms. Ammons of setting out to destroy his professional reputation out of opposition to his politically conservative views.
In an affidavit submitted in connection with the university’s efforts to dismiss him, Mr. Connell says that, in his spring 2010 classroom discussions of attempted crimes, he constructed three hypothetical scenarios in which he considered shooting Ms. Ammons over an employment dispute. In one, he aimed a gun in her direction and missed; in a second, he was wrestled to the ground by a police officer and arrested after getting out of his car outside her office; in a third, he initially believed he had shot her but found out his bullet had pierced a pumpkin painted to resemble her. Mr. Connell acknowledges in his affidavit that, as part of the second scenario, he might have described pointing the gun at Ms. Ammons and saying, “I’m going to blow your [expletive] head off.” He denies ever saying “die, bitch” to a student.
In her response to Mr. Connell’s lawsuit, Ms. Ammons said Mr. Connell’s actions left her so fearful for her safety that she felt justified in asking the university to arrange protection for her after she placed Mr. Connell on leave.
In separate affidavits submitted in the disciplinary proceedings against Mr. Connell, law professors at other schools have defended his teaching methods as he describes them. Orrin S. Kerr, a professor of law at George Washington University, said professors teaching criminal law often present hypothetical situations using their schools’ faculty members and administrators as perpetrators and victims. Mr. Kerr said such absurd hypotheticals add levity to classes and train law students “to focus on the legal questions quite apart from the identity of the individuals involved.” Several of Mr. Connell’s students also came to his defense.
The Widener law school eventually dropped its assertion that Mr. Connell posed a danger. Last month a university committee cleared him of charges of racial and sexual harassment but found him guilty of retaliation for making public statements about his accusers. It is now up to Ms. Ammons to decide whether to terminate him through additional judicial proceedings or discipline him in some other way.
Failures to Communicate
The instructor involved in the University of Oregon incident, Peter Quint, lacked tenure and the due-process rights that come with it. Having been appointed as an instructor of American Sign Language there in each of the past two academic years, he no longer works there following the university’s decision to bar him from the campus before its spring semester ended.
A university spokesman, Joe Mosley, refused last week to discuss Mr. Quint’s situation, saying it is a confidential personnel matter. Mr. Quint’s lawyer similarly refused to discuss the case or to make him available for an interview. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech watchdog group that the instructor has contacted for help, the incident in question occurred after months in which Mr. Quint, who has been deaf since early childhood, had been expressing frustration with students who disobeyed a classroom policy requiring them to communicate only in sign language.
In May, Mr. Quint caught students speaking aloud after he told of how his ability to communicate respectfully in a foreign environment had helped him escape potential harm from armed Pashtun tribesmen while traveling in Pakistan. According to an account he provided to FIRE, he asked the students: “Do you want me to take a gun out and shoot you in the head so you understand what I am talking about? I had to practice being respectful in Pakistan, otherwise I would have been shot. Can you practice the same respect here?”
Following the incident, Michael Bullis, dean of the university’s college of education, suspended Mr. Quint from teaching, barred him from the campus, instructed him not to communicate with faculty, staff, or students, and told him he would not be reappointed. In an essay in the student newspaper, the Oregon Daily Emerald, Tyree Harris, a student who had been in the class, wrote that “no student in our class felt legitimately physically threatened by Quint’s actions, but we were all uncomfortable at how quickly Quint made use of such a violent metaphor.” Other students in the class have come to Mr. Quint’s defense, however, arguing that his remark was clearly harmless and that students’ refusal to communicate in sign language amounted to discrimination against him. The police did not find any reason to bring charges against him.
Among other recent incidents, James Marchbanks, a graduate teaching assistant at the University of California at Davis, was arrested by the campus police in December 2009 and jailed for four days on suspicion of making a false bomb threat and threatening with intent to terrorize. According to a statement issued by the police, Mr. Marchbanks had pulled out an envelope containing end-of-semester instructor evaluations and said, “I have a bomb, this is the last time I am going to see you,” and then added that he was “going to leave class before the bomb goes off,” before tossing the evaluation forms to the floor and running out of the classroom. According to Sacramento Bee reports, prosecutors declined to press charges against him, and several students in the classroom said he clearly had been using “bomb” as a figure of speech (because the evaluations could demolish his teaching-assistant career). Three students had complained about the incident, however, and university officials defended their decision to have him arrested as a needed precaution.
Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology, returned to work at East Stroudsburg University last fall after a psychologist said she posed no threat. She had been placed on administrative leave after a student complained about two comments she had made on her Facebook page: “Had a good day today, didn’t want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ...” and “Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete [sic] hitman, it’s been that kind of day.”
Considering Context
Mr. O’Neil of the AAUP recommends that any college that gets a report of threatening faculty speech conduct an investigation to determine the context of the remark, the faculty member’s intent in making it, and the effect it had. A comment directed at an individual student who is complaining of harassment generally should be treated more seriously, he says, than a remark to the entire classroom.
When speech is determined to have been threatening, “suspension is always a quite-drastic remedy,” Mr. O’Neil says. “A severe warning might be more appropriate.”
Ann Franke, president of Wise Results LLC, a consulting company that helps colleges with employment, risk, policy, and training issues, says the threat-assessment committees that most colleges established in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings should focus not just on perceived threats from students, but also on college employees suspected of posing a danger.
Mr. Lewis of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management says such intervention teams should consider, among other factors, whether a perceived threat by a faculty member is an isolated comment or part of a pattern of erratic or poor behavior, and whether those alleging a threat have ulterior motives.
The National Behavioral Intervention Team Association, an organization set up by the leaders of Mr. Lewis’s center, has developed a tool for colleges to use in assessing whether students pose a threat. It places aggressive behavior on a continuum, ranging from that which signals little risk, such as behavior that is merely disruptive, to that which suggests extreme risk, such as specific, direct threats and steps taken to carry them out.
Colleges remain in a tough position in determining how to deal with threatening behavior. After Jared Lee Loughner killed six people and injured a congresswoman in a shooting spree in Tucson in January, Pima Community College, where he had previously been a student, drew criticism for not doing more to investigate and deal with his erratic behavior. But civil-liberties advocates have expressed strong reservations about college threat-assessment teams’ investigating and filing reports on speech that falls short of threatening.
“Putting innocent outbursts into a campus database,” says Adam Kissel, an official at FIRE, “is a chilling way to police discourse on campus.”
