In June 2018, I was attending the monthly meeting of the senior administrators, mostly chancellors and deans, who oversee the 24 campuses of Pennsylvania State University. I was there as the new chair of the Faculty Senate, knowing that I would be spending the next year in meetings like this, in the rooms where it happens.
That day, one of the things that happened was a presentation about the use of social media. The point was to urge chancellors and deans to urge their faculty members to get the word out about their work. Social media, we were told, can be powerful platforms for promoting new research, drawing attention to new academic programs, and highlighting innovative teaching. And apparently Penn State professors weren’t making the most of those opportunities.
I sat through the presentation with a growing sense of disbelief. Just a week earlier, I had been in a very different meeting — the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. We’d had a vigorous discussion of extramural expression as a component of academic freedom, during which the AAUP staff circulated an extraordinary document that had just been released by the provost’s office at the University of Iowa. It bore the curious title “Faculty Support Safety Guidance,” and it was about 16 pages of monitory advice: Here’s what to do when the trolls and online outrage addicts come after one of our faculty members.
What made the document extraordinary is that it was the opposite of that well-known — though never committed to print — administrative procedural manual, “Here’s How to Throw Your Suddenly Controversial Faculty Member Under the Bus.”
Iowa’s guide forthrightly acknowledged the phenomenon of spittle-flecked rage sweeping the country (even before conservatives began having hallucinations about the omnipresence of “critical race theory”). It was quite clear that it had been prompted by an unhinged campaign of harassment mounted against a classics professor who had noted, altogether accurately, that white supremacists and white nationalists have an obsessive belief that the ancient Greeks did not paint their statues.
And of course the campaign could have been about any number of academics. It could have been a medievalist noting, altogether accurately, that white supremacists and white nationalists like to appropriate motifs and iconography from the Middle Ages. It could have been a historian noting that the American right’s current infatuation with Viktor Orban of Hungary has roots that go back to right-wing crushes on Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco as well as apartheid apologists (indeed, the New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has made precisely that argument). Or it could be a climatologist noting that the Earth is burning before our eyes.
That last example will hit home for Penn State administrators because the renowned climatologist Michael E. Mann is on our faculty, and his career vividly demonstrates that the trolls and outrage addicts don’t have to come from the fever swamps of the internet. On the contrary, they can be prominent Republicans like Ken Cuccinelli, who, as the attorney general of Virginia, subpoenaed Mann’s emails in search of the one super-secret message that would reveal his and other scientists’ “true” motive: “We all know this climate-change thing is a hoax, but we have to keep talking about it if we want those lucrative grants.” Mann has been dealing with harassment for many years now. Indeed, the entire country has been suffering from a powerful class of trolls and outrage addicts, some of whom happen to be elected officials.
Obviously, campus administrators, especially at public institutions, can’t actually call out those trolls. So Iowa’s document was scrupulously content-neutral, as it should be. After all, it is always possible that an outragefest can come from the left — although those tend not to involve death, rape, and other threats to personal safety. And of course there is no leftist state legislature trying to criminalize an entire school of thought.
So on that day in 2018, I raised my hand and asked our strategic-communications people what advice they might have for administrators when it came to dealing with the dark side of social media. It is all well and good to urge people to get the word out about their work, but if their work deals with gerrymandering or the history of white supremacism or trans rights or the politics of the Middle East, not everyone out there is going to like hearing about that work. And the really destabilizing thing is that it won’t necessarily be the hot-button disciplines that draw fire: Next thing you know, your classics professor or your medieval-literature scholar could become Public Enemy No. 1.
I then circulated the Iowa pamphlet to the entire leadership group, and suggested that Penn State develop something like it. I was therefore pleasantly surprised to see — last fall, in the middle of the pandemic — a new campus guide: “Social Media Support and Resources for Penn State Faculty.” Explicitly modeled on the Iowa pamphlet (with Iowa’s permission), our 15-page version offers specific advice to each of the main players caught up in those controversies, including faculty members, public-relations officers, and senior administrators. It also explains when and how to involve such offices as affirmative action, educational equity, general counsel, and behavioral-threat management.
I had no role in producing Penn State’s new document, so I’m not patting myself on the back when I call it a superb, comprehensive guide to defending faculty and staff members and students from trolls and outrage addicts. The inclusion of the staff in the report is especially welcome, since people sometimes forget that staff members (especially in communications) can be on the receiving end of random and frightening abuse.
In the spirit of helping those of you who have no such social-media guide on your campus, I am passing along some of the advice offered in the new Penn State guide. First, here are some tips for faculty members who find themselves the focus of intense social-media attacks:
- “Do not delete any messages, but you may want to disengage from reading all emails in your inbox, listening to all voice messages, etc. Preserved messages may be of use in identifying the harassers and pressing any relevant charges. Create a log to document and archive all threatening emails, tweets, Facebook posts, and phone messages. Consider asking a friend to monitor social and other media on your behalf and to keep you apprised of any developments or threats.”
- “Save screenshots of harassing or threatening social-media posts to preserve as evidence in case the author deletes the original post.”
- “Be cautious about responding to threatening emails, tweets, blog comments, etc. In most cases, it will be in your best interest not to respond. Although responding may seem like the right thing to do, it may only provide harassers with additional material and serve to prolong social-media harassment. The university’s Office of Social Media can help you determine whether and how to respond. If you choose not to respond, you may also want to encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same.”
- “Reach out to friends, and develop a support system.”
- “Know that you are not alone as an academic who has experienced this type of harassment. Several scholars have written about the coordinated and systemic patterns of attack against scholars and faculty members. Connect with others who have gone through similar situations to decrease your isolation and learn from their experience.”
- “Consult with your academic-unit administrator if you feel this attack has affected your progress toward tenure, promotion, or reappointment.”
And here is some of the advice our guide offers to administrators for how to help a faculty or staff member caught in these delicate and stressful situations:
- “Before all else, work with the faculty member to address their on-campus and off-campus safety and security concerns. Be aware that the identity of the faculty member may influence their individualized needs (e.g., parental status, faculty rank, minoritized identity). Refer the faculty member to appropriate campus resources, or, with the faculty member’s consent, reach out to such resources as appropriate to address whatever issues the faculty member identifies.”
- “It is possible that social-media and phone intimidation and harassment will be received by multiple offices. Inform the unit administrative staff on a need-to-know basis. Ensure that unit staff members whose responsibilities may include answering harassing phone calls are supported and informed about strategies for being on the front line (e.g., a script or template response, instructions for preserving phone messages to aid future investigations). The college’s or campus’s communications director can help with messaging.”
- “Stay in communication with the dean/chancellor’s office to ensure a coordinated response. Share details of the situation on a need-to-know basis, and be mindful that all email communication may be subject to request via subpoena or other legal process.”
- “Consider the well-being of the rest of the unit faculty, staff, and students (e.g., co-authors, graduate assistants, front-line staff). Consult with the threatened faculty member about what and how to share information with the department. If possible, bring people together to discuss the situation, the department’s actions, and available support resources.”
- “Facilitate the physical movement of assigned classrooms and/or workspace, if feasible and if the affected faculty member requests it.”
- “Facilitate the removal of the faculty member’s direct contact information from department or college webpages and the university directory, in collaboration with human resources and the college/campus communications office, if the affected faculty member requests it.”
- “If the attacks are identity-based (e.g., harassment based on gender, race, sexual identity, country of origin), consult with the affirmative-action office to counsel the faculty member about their options, and explore additional support and resources for the faculty member and others in the unit who share their identity (e.g., students, colleagues, staff).”
- “Keep in mind the potential effect of this event on their academic career. For example, if their scholarship was attacked, discuss how or whether it will affect their future research trajectory. Connecting the faculty member with other scholars who have experienced similar attacks may be useful.”
It is a sign of the times, surely, that we need documents like this. I am reminded of a meeting with Eric J. Barron, president of Penn State, and Nicholas P. Jones, our provost, just after the deadly “Unite the Right” rally descended on Charlottesville, Va., and the University of Virginia in 2017. For whatever reason, UVA officials did not enforce its policy forbidding open flames on campus grounds, and were roundly and rightly criticized for that.
In the course of that meeting, I checked to make sure that Penn State had a policy on open flames. (We do.) “I don’t think any of us got Ph.D.s with the expectation that we would someday be consulting open-flames policies and strategizing about how to deal with tiki-torch-bearing Nazis,” I remarked, “but here we are.”
Indeed. And it looks as if we’ll be here for a while. But when faculty and staff members are targeted, at least we now have substantive guidance on how to respond.
Every college or university should develop something like it.
