The Kansas Board of Regents appears poised to overhaul a controversial social-media policy, adopted last fall, to rid it of many provisions denounced as threatening academic freedom and shared governance at that state’s public universities.
Nevertheless, faculty leaders and free-speech advocates who had denounced the policy that the board passed in December say they also have reservations about the revised version it is expected to approve next week. Although such critics praise proposed changes in the policy as substantial improvements, they express fear that faculty members will continue to remain subject to discipline for statements that should be protected.
The existing policy’s chilling effect on academic speech “is only beginning to be felt,” and the proposed revisions “won’t help things a whole lot,” said Ron Barrett-Gonzalez, president of the Kansas conference of the American Association of University Professors.
Charles R. Epp, a professor of public affairs and administration at the University of Kansas who served as co-chairman of a panel that suggested revisions in the policy, said the latest version reflects “some good changes” but remains “long, complicated, and in some ways very ambiguous.”
(The existing policy and the proposed revisions can be viewed on the Board of Regents’ website.)
The nine-member board embarked on its review of the policy in response to the uproar that greeted the original version it passed in December with little public notice or input. Still on the books, the policy grants public colleges’ chief executives the authority to discipline employees for a wide range of controversial statements aired online.
While requiring the top official of each public college to conduct a “balancing analysis” weighing their institution’s interests against their employees’ right as citizens to speak on matters of public concern, the policy subjects a long list of employee utterances to placement on the scale. Those include any communication that “impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers,” impedes “the performance of the speaker’s official duties,” or otherwise interferes with a university’s operations.
The backstory behind the policy’s adoption did little to assure free-speech advocates. The regents took up the measure in response to a controversy at the University of Kansas involving a faculty member who was disciplined for a Twitter post that angered the National Rifle Association.
Responding to the September 16 shootings at the Washington Navy Yard, David W. Guth, an associate professor of journalism, had tweeted: “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters.” The resulting backlash in social media, as well as threats to him and others, led the university to place Mr. Guth on leave, allowing his return only to perform administrative duties.
Revising the Revisions
Mr. Barrett-Gonzalez, of the Kansas AAUP, had denounced the social-media policy adopted last fall as “an affront to First Amendment freedom of speech and academic freedom.” Among those who had sharply criticized it were some heads of the state’s public universities, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and the national office of the AAUP.
The regents responded to the uproar by establishing a panel of faculty and staff members from each of the state’s six public universities to suggest policy revisions. Although the regents refused demands by university faculty senates to suspend the policy, the universities that were supposed to adopt their own policies guided by it did little to carry it out.
The faculty and staff panel last month proposed its own version of the policy, emphasizing how academic freedom covers faculty utterances related to research, teaching, and shared governance, and the First Amendment covers other expressions that do not advocate violence or otherwise violate the law.
The Board of Regents’ governance committee incorporated the suggested language into its proposed new policy but did not remove from it the controversial language describing the types of speech for which faculty members may be disciplined.
Fred Logan, the board’s chairman, had praised the version of the policy adopted by governance committee last month as containing strong protections of academic freedom and the First Amendment. But the document was widely denounced by most of the more than 170 people who responded to the board’s request for public comment on it, whose statements were published on Tuesday in the Lawrence Journal-World.
Among those who submitted their views, Richard J. Harris, a professor psychological sciences at Kansas State University, wrote that “many of my junior colleagues are seriously worried about losing their jobs if they say something unpopular.”
Kirk McClure, a professor of urban planning at the University of Kansas, argued that the policy should be completely abandoned because it had so hindered his efforts to recruit new faculty members.
The board’s governance committee met again on Tuesday and revised its policy again in response to such comments. Among the most substantial changes it made, it stripped the policy of provisions offering the board’s definition of “improper use of social media,” replacing them with a summary of limits on public employees’s speech articulated by the U.S. Supreme Court.
‘Less Harmful,’ but ‘Fuzzy’
Critics of the original policy on Wednesday described the latest version as an improvement but said the regents would be better off just scrapping what they had passed in December.
Henry F. Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University-East Bay and chairman of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, on Wednesday said the latest version of the policy is “clearly an improvement” but “strikes me as internally contradictory.”
“It seems,” Mr. Reichman said, “that they are trying to otherwise save face by keeping what they had and rendering it less harmful with academic-freedom language.”
Mr. Barrett-Gonzalez, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas, described the policy as “crafted by lawyers to be read by lawyers and acted on by judges.” It is now so confusing, he said, that it will lead to misunderstandings throughout the state’s public universities. “To laypeople,” he added, “what this says is, if your president or chancellor does not like what you say, you can be fired.”
Will Creeley, director of legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, said the policy’s current limits on speech were so “fuzzy” that “the average faculty might conclude that he or she is better off to keep their mouth shut.”
