Advances in technology have increased the speed and reach of academic communication—and, along with it, the speed and scale of backlashes against provocative remarks by professors. Here are some recent examples:
Twitter
It’s amazing how much trouble can come from no more than 140 key strokes.
David W. Guth, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, learned that lesson after he reacted to the September shootings at the Washington Navy Yard with a tweet. “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA,” it said. “Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters.” The public outcry over his comments prompted the university to condemn his statement, place him on leave, and reassign him to nonteaching duties. The incident inspired the Kansas Board of Regents to adopt sweeping social-media restrictions, which are now being reconsidered.
Among other faculty members whose tweets preceded falls is Geoffrey F. Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, who tweeted last year that obese Ph.D. applicants lack the willpower to finish a dissertation. The university censured him—not for the tweet itself, but because it determined he had later falsely described the tweet as part of a research project.
Email
Email has created vast, easily searchable repositories of messages, exposing faculty members at public colleges to sweeping open-records requests. Many have fought such demands for their correspondence, triggering debates over where to draw the line between justified public scrutiny and privacy seen as necessary to protect research and promote scholarly candor.
One high-profile example involves Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist. In 2011 the American Tradition Institute, a conservative advocacy group now known as the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, submitted an open-records request to the University of Virginia to try to obtain research-related documents Mr. Mann had produced as a professor there. Virginia’s decision to withhold many of those documents as proprietary has spawned a legal battle pitting higher-education groups against media organizations that oppose such an exception to the state’s open-records law.
More recently, Gene Nichol, a law professor and director of a poverty-law center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, became the subject of an open-records request from the Civitas Institute, a conservative group. Professors at two dozen colleges in that state spoke out against the records request. The university handed over documents that Civitas has cited in accusing the professor of organizing a conference with a partisan speaker lineup, a charge he denies.
Video
College instructors are reaching unintended audiences as a result of students’ ability to videotape them surreptitiously on cellphones and laptops and distribute the footage online. Among those caught on camera is William S. Penn, a professor of English at Michigan State University whom administrators temporarily removed from the classroom last year after he was videotaped attacking Republicans in front of his students.
Instructors have also come under fire from footage captured by their institutions for distance education. Administrators at the University of Missouri at St. Louis tried to pressure Don Giljum, a labor-studies instructor, to resign in 2011 after the blog Breitbart.com posted lecture footage that depicted him advocating union violence. The administrators reversed themselves after determining he had been the victim of selective and misleading video editing.