Many colleges have been slow to develop policies governing professors’ online speech. But institutions’ hesitancy to adopt new rules for new forms of communication might be wise, a number of faculty leaders and legal experts say.
Among the more than 70 four-year colleges whose faculty leaders recently provided details about their policies to The Chronicle, nearly half said their institutions had no policies specifically regulating online speech. Relatively few had rules governing faculty members’ work-related websites or speech on popular social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
“We have a lot of work to do!” said one of the faculty leaders. Others who responded to the online survey, sent to current and recent faculty-senate presidents and other top faculty representatives, similarly complained that their colleges are behind the times.
The American Association of University Professors, for its part, has urged college administrators to work with their faculties to develop policies governing the use of social media and other forms of online communication.
Its committee on academic freedom said in a draft report issued last fall that advances in online communication have broadened the definition of a classroom, blurred distinctions between personal and work-related communication, and created new threats to faculty privacy. The committee argued that electronic communications “are too important for the maintenance and protection of academic freedom” for their regulation to be left up to colleges’ technology officers.
Other experts on the law and academic freedom argue, however, that rather than crafting new policies on online speech, colleges should govern it with well-established rules predating the Internet and simply advise faculty members to be wary of how far their remarks can travel.
“My general pitch is that computer-use policies ought to look a lot like your typewriter-use policy,” said Steven J. McDonald, general counsel for the Rhode Island School of Design.
The question of how to ensure that college policies account for online communications has gained prominence as a result of several recent controversies stemming from the wide distribution of provocative statements by faculty members.
In many cases, administrators or governing boards responded in ways that led them to be accused of trampling academic freedom.
Such was the case after David W. Guth, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, responded to the shootings at the Washington Navy Yard with a tweet wishing harm on the children of leaders of the National Rifle Association. The university placed Mr. Guth on administrative leave and reassigned him to nonteaching duties.
Then the Kansas Board of Regents went on to adopt a sweeping social-media policy widely denounced as threatening academic freedom and shared governance. It includes provisions potentially subjecting public colleges’ faculty members and other employees to discipline for any communication that impairs “harmony among co-workers” or hurts “close working relationships” requiring “personal loyalty and confidence.”
The Kansas board’s leadership has responded to criticism of the policy by asking a committee of faculty and staff members from each campus in the university system to review the policy and suggest changes. The committee has drafted new language, to be taken up by the board in April, which emphasizes traditional protections of academic freedom and free speech.
Fears of regulatory overreach may be one reason why many faculty leaders say they are fine with having their colleges lack policies tailored to online communication. A substantial share of the professors who told The Chronicle they were happy with their institutions’ approach to online speech came from colleges without policies specifically governing it.
On the whole, most of the faculty members characterized their colleges’ policies on different forms of online communication as appropriate. Email stood out as the only online medium that they were more likely to see as regulated too much rather than too little. Substantial majorities of those who expressed dissatisfaction with their colleges’ policies governing work-related websites, Twitter, and Facebook said those areas were not being regulated enough.
Well over half of the faculty leaders who responded said that, contrary to the AAUP’s recommendations, professors play no role in shaping their institutions’ approach to online speech. A majority said their institutions also lack an AAUP-recommended policy requiring administrators to obtain a faculty member’s consent before examining or disclosing that instructor’s private online communications.
Even though many faculty leaders say they are satisfied without online speech policies at their colleges, some experts say professors have a lot to lose by not having such policies on the books.
Colleges without carefully thought-out policies “are just waiting for trouble,” said Henry F. Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University-East Bay and chairman of the AAUP’s committee on academic freedom. The lack of a policy, he said, “is an open invitation to an administration to make it up on the fly under pressure.” Policies drafted under such circumstances, he said, are likely to be too heavy-handed.
Joseph C. Storch, associate counsel for the State University of New York system, said he comes down on the side of applying well-established policies focused on what is said and not how people say it. The old rules concerning libel, plagiarism, student privacy, or the protection of free speech in public forums apply no matter what the medium.
“We don’t want to regulate the social-media technology, we want to regulate behavior,” he said.
Among those opposed to any policies specifically governing online speech is Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group. He said he distrusts such policies because they “empower administrators to limit what people can talk about,” and often end up being enforced “on a viewpoint basis,” with statements administrators endorse enjoying more protection than statements they oppose.
One way to prevent controversies over faculty members’ speech is to limit its audience.
The distribution of surreptitiously videotaped classroom discussions has become such a common source of public outrage that officials at the University of Colorado at Boulder cited fears of such videotaping to justify their decision in December to discipline a sociology professor over a classroom skit on prostitution.
Of the faculty members who answered The Chronicle’s questions about their colleges’ policies, about 20 said their institutions let faculty members prohibit the unauthorized recording and redistribution of classroom speech.
Tracy Mitrano, a former director of information technology at Cornell University who now consults for colleges, said students have every right to complain about a faculty member to a dean or department chair. But, she said, airing such a complaint by posting a secretly recorded videotape online is immediately “going from 0 to 60.”
If students object to a professor’s ban, she said, her advice is, “Don’t take the class.”
