Kevin J. Renken learned the limits of his academic freedom the hard way.
As an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, Mr. Renken says he felt obliged to speak out about his belief that administrators there were mishandling a National Science Foundation grant to him and several colleagues. When the university subsequently reduced his pay and returned the grant, he sued, alleging illegal retaliation.
Because he is a tenured faculty member, and he viewed the public university’s use of public funds as a matter of clear public interest, Mr. Renken figured his complaints qualified as legally protected free speech.
Not so, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit declared last September, in one of several recent court decisions that have raised doubts about the status of academic freedom at public colleges and universities.
Ruling against Mr. Renken in his lawsuit, a three-judge panel of the Seventh Circuit used logic that stood his assumptions about his speech rights and academic freedom on their head.
Mr. Renken’s statements about the grants were not legally protected speech, the court held, precisely because he made them as a public-college professor and they related to his job. “In order for a public employee to raise a successful First Amendment claim, he must have spoken in his capacity as a private citizen and not as an employee,” the court said.
At issue in the case was whether public-college professors should be treated any differently from other public employees. Did the professor — given the traditions of academic freedom and shared governance — have more freedom to speak about the running of his academic department than the tax collector does when complaining about his boss?
Mr. Renken says the outcome of his legal battle “has put a bitter taste in my mouth as a professor.” It also, he says, has left him convinced “this can happen to anybody” working for a public college.
Several faculty advocates and legal analysts think he is right. Fearing that the federal courts may be disowning the idea that academic freedom offers the nation’s professoriate a distinct set of First Amendment protections, they have begun sounding the alarm in articles in law journals and have mounted efforts to try to dissuade judges elsewhere from issuing similar decisions.
The American Association of University Professors has begun aggressively monitoring — and looking to wade into — legal battles over faculty speech. The rulings, says Rachel Levinson, senior counsel at the AAUP, are “narrowing the universe of things that faculty members can speak about and what they will be protected for.”
Robert M. O’Neil, director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University of Virginia, says such rulings threaten to stifle faculty members’ speech in virtually any area connected to their jobs, including the faculty governance of their institutions. The federal courts, he says, are beginning to treat tenured professors “indistinguishably from run-of-the-mill public employees.”
Mounting Defenses
Not everyone shares these concerns. Ada Meloy, general counsel at the American Council on Education — an umbrella organization for colleges and higher-education associations — says that “the cases, to date, have not created any apparent injustices. ... Public-college employees do enjoy First Amendment rights, but that should not turn every case of employee discipline or discharge into a retaliation lawsuit.”
The AAUP, not nearly as content with the rulings as Ms. Meloy, has established a panel of prominent First Amendment scholars to come up with new ways to defend academic freedom at public colleges. They are looking at innovative legal arguments, as well as institutional policies or contractual agreements offering speech rights beyond those the courts might currently recognize. The panel is headed by Mr. O’Neil and includes among its members Judith C. Areen, a professor of law at Georgetown University; Robert C. Post, a professor of law at Yale University; and William W. Van Alstyne, a professor of law at the College of William and Mary. (The panel’s efforts are focused almost entirely on public colleges because private colleges have never been bound by the First Amendment, which limits actions of government, in dealing with their employees.)
In a move that the AAUP is citing as pointing the way for other public colleges, faculty leaders and administrators in the University of Minnesota system are working to revise its policies to broadly protect speech related to faculty jobs. Their proposed policy change, which has yet to be approved by Minnesota’s Board of Regents, expands the system’s definition of academic freedom to cover speech “on matters of public concern as well as on matters related to professional duties and the functioning of the university.”
“We feel that faculty governance, which is very important in the running of this university, requires this protection,” says Tom Clayton, a professor of English at the Twin Cities campus and chairman of the systemwide Faculty Senate’s Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure. He argues that the recent federal court decisions “make it difficult for employees to speak frankly without imperiling their position.”
Tom Sullivan, the system’s provost, says he favors the proposed policy change out of a belief that “a very important part of our universities — particularly our public universities — should be transparency,” which is lacking where employees do not feel free to speak their minds.
Picking Precedents
In fighting for his right to speak his mind, Mr. Renken of Wisconsin — without knowing it — had wandered into an exceptionally unsettled area of constitutional law.
The Supreme Court has held for more than half a century that the First Amendment’s restrictions of government infringement on speech protect academic freedom at public education institutions. But it has left unanswered a host of key questions like what types of activities “academic freedom” covers, or whether it affords individual faculty members speech rights beyond those of other citizens.
“I think the court is actually torn itself about where academic freedom fits,” says Alan K. Chen, a professor of law at the University of Denver. “They have been dancing around the academic-freedom issue for 50 years and never really have addressed it head-on.”
Remarking on the lack of Supreme Court guidance on the matter in a November ruling upholding the Bush administration’s restrictions on academic travel to Cuba, Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said it remains unclear “whether academic freedom is a constitutional right at all.”
A separate thread of Supreme Court decisions has undermined the speech rights of public colleges’ professors in their roles as public employees, by chipping away at whatever protections the First Amendment affords public workers in disputes with their managers over speech. It began with a 1968 ruling, in Pickering v. Board of Education, calling for the speech rights of public employees to be balanced against the government’s need to operate efficiently and provide needed services. In 1983, in Connick v. Myers, the high court said their speech was only protected when it dealt with matters of public concern. In a 2006 ruling, Garcetti v. Ceballos, the court said public agencies can discipline their employees for any speech made in connection with their jobs. (See a timeline, below.)
In the absence of clear guidance as to what speech protections academic freedom provides, lower courts have been turning to these Supreme Court public-employment rulings in handling faculty members’ claims that public colleges violated their First Amendment rights. The result has been a spate of decisions letting public colleges penalize faculty members for statements made in connection with shared governance, personnel decisions, and other activities related to their jobs.
Threats on the Horizon
Public-college professors received some indication of how little they could count on academic-freedom protections with a 2000 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Urofsky v. Gilmore.
The case involved a lawsuit by Virginia public-college professors challenging, as an infringement on academic freedom, a state law prohibiting public employees from using state-owned computers to view sexually explicit material over the Internet. The lead plaintiff, Melvin I. Urofsky, was a constitutional historian at Virginia Commonwealth University who argued that the law hindered his ability to teach students about the Communications Decency Act.
In their opinion upholding Virginia’s law, a majority of Fourth Circuit judges said they had extensively reviewed the history of academic freedom and concluded that, to the extent the Supreme Court “has constitutionalized a right of academic freedom at all,” it is only a right possessed by higher-education institutions, not by individuals. The ruling said professors at public colleges do not have any speech rights beyond those of other public employees.
No other federal circuit’s appeals court has issued a similar decision. Nevertheless, William E. Thro, a former Virginia solicitor general who is now a lawyer at Christopher Newport University, argues that Urofsky has the potential to influence courts beyond the Fourth Circuit, partly because it may represent the lengthiest and most detailed discussion of individual academic freedom to emerge from a federal appeals court.
Of far greater immediate concern to faculty and free-speech advocates is the fallout from the Supreme Court’s 2006 Garcetti ruling. That case involved a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles, Richard Ceballos, who challenged disciplinary actions taken against him for questioning an affidavit issued by his office. Writing for a five-member court majority, Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking out as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.”
In a dissenting opinion, Associate Justice David H. Souter expressed hope the decision would not jeopardize the speech rights of public-college faculty members who “necessarily speak and write ‘pursuant to official duties.’” The majority responded to his concern by sidestepping the issue and putting aside the question of whether its logic “would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.”
Drawing the Line
But despite its language explicitly placing speech by academics out of its reach, the Garcetti decision has been cited by lower courts in three recent decisions involving public-college professors: the Seventh Circuit’s ruling against Mr. Renken; a U.S. District Court’s ruling against a retired professor at the University of California at Irvine, Juan Hong; and a U.S. District Court’s denial of a Delaware State University professor’s claim that he was protected for speech related to a presidential search, student advising, and a campus event he helped organize.
“The potential harm coming out of that can’t be overstated,” argues Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a Philadelphia-based speech advocacy group.
Leonard M. Niehoff, an adjunct professor at the University of Michigan’s law school and a higher-education lawyer for the Michigan-based firm Butzel Long, says he fears that more such rulings will have the effect of creating “a serious body of precedent” influencing how courts around the nation regard academic freedom. He says “the advocates of academic freedom have not always done a very good job of picking their fights,” and may be hurting their own cause by invoking it too often. “It is possible,” he says, “to argue that the right is so broad that it becomes no right at all.”
Lawrence Rosenthal, a professor of law at Chapman University School of Law, says “most academics are extremely protective of virtually unfettered rights of academics to say almost anything,” which can lead them to defend scholarship that is not just controversial, but shoddy as well. “I see that as a threat to the university,” he says.
But Mr. Post, the Yale law professor who is on the AAUP’s academic-freedom panel, argues in the book Knowledge, Democracy, and the First Amendment, slated for publication by Yale University Press next year, that the application of Garcetti to public-college classroom instruction and scholarship would seriously harm academe and society as a whole. Professors “would be responsible in their ‘official duties’ merely for promulgating the opinions of the governors of the university” and “could no longer serve the function of identifying and advancing knowledge.”
The AAUP has decided to draw a line in the sand in the case of Mr. Hong, an emeritus professor of chemical engineering and materials science who claims he was denied a merit salary increase in 2004 because he criticized the hiring and promotion decisions within his department at Irvine and voiced concern about its reliance on part-time lecturers to teach lower-division classes. Together with the Thomas Jefferson Center, the AAUP has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Mr. Hong’s behalf and is seeking, with his consent, to present oral arguments in his behalf in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The friend-of-the-court brief argues that the application of the Garcetti ruling to the speech of college faculty members has the absurd effect of leaving them least protected in speaking about those subjects that are most central to their jobs, on which they have the most expertise and are most likely to make statements that benefit society.
The brief says: “Both in practice and in constitutional law, the actual duties of state university professors implicate — indeed, demand — a broad range of discretion and autonomy that find no parallel elsewhere in public service.”
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Balance of Power is a series examining new challenges to faculty influence.
Next in this series: The Rise of Adjunct Professors
RECENT LEGAL BATTLES OVER ACADEMIC FREEDOM Gorum v. Sessoms In a 2008 ruling, a U.S. District Court held that Delaware State U. was entitled to take action against a tenured professor for statements connected with a presidential search, the organization of a campus breakfast, and the advising of students because all were made in accordance with his official duties. Urofsky v. Gilmore The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in 2000 offered the most restrictive view of academic freedom put forth by judges in decades, in a ruling against a group of public-college professors who had challenged a Virginia state law that prohibited them from viewing pornography on state-owned computers. The court held that individual professors do not have any First Amendment speech rights beyond those possessed by other citizens. Emergency Coalition to Defend Educational Travel v. United States Department of the Treasury In upholding restrictions on academic travel to Cuba, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held in 2008 that professors are protected only against government efforts to regulate the content of academic speech, and that content-neutral restrictions — such as travel bans — are acceptable. Renken v. Gregory The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit held in 2008 that a professor at the U. of Wisconsin at Milwaukee was acting officially — and thus not covered by the First Amendment’s speech protections — when he lodged complaints about his academic department’s handling of a National Science Foundation grant. Piggee v. Carl Sandburg College In a 2006 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit ruled against a part-time instructor of cosmetology at a community college. She had argued that the college violated her First Amendment rights by taking actions against her for giving a student religious pamphlets denouncing homosexuality. The court said her academic-freedom protections did not cover speech having nothing to do with what she was hired to teach. William P. Harman v. U. of Tennessee at Chattanooga A lawsuit pending in a Tennessee state court could assume national importance. The plaintiff, a professor of religious studies, is alleging that the university violated his First Amendment rights by demoting him as head of an academic department because he refused to stop accusing a colleague of professional malfeasance and academic fraud. Hong v. Grant A U.S. District Court held in 2007 that a professor at the University of California at Irvine was acting officially — and was thus not entitled to First Amendment protections against actions by his employer — when he made statements connected with the hiring, promotion, and staffing decisions of his academic department. SOURCES: Federal and state court documents; Leonard M. Niehoff, “Peculiar Marketplace: Applying Garcetti v. Cabellos in the Public Higher Education Context,” Journal of College and University Law, Vol. 35, No. 1; William E. Thro, “Academic Freedom: Constitutional Myths and Practical Realities,” Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, December 2007. |
KEY SUPREME COURT RULINGS ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM AT PUBLIC COLLEGES At public colleges, academic freedom — as a legal principle — exists at the intersection of two different lines of Supreme Court rulings. One deals with the question of whether public colleges and their faculty members have distinct First Amendment rights beyond those possessed by ordinary citizens. The other defines the power the government can exercise over the speech of its employees to ensure effective public services. What remains unresolved is how the court will reconcile such precedents. 1952. Adler v. Board of Education. Justice William O. Douglas introduces the idea that academic freedom is a First Amendment right in his dissent in the first of several Supreme Court decisions dealing with McCarthy-era restrictions on speech. The court majority, unconvinced by his argument, upholds a New York law that requires state employees to take loyalty oaths. The majority says that teachers have First Amendment rights to speech and association, but they do not have a right to jobs as teachers. 1957. Sweezy v. New Hampshire. A plurality of justices affirm the importance of academic freedom in a case involving a University of New Hampshire guest lecturer investigated for possible subversive activities. The controlling opinion, by Chief Justice Earl Warren, shows that the court strongly believes academic freedom affords individual faculty members at least the same speech rights possessed by other citizens. It is another opinion in the case, by Justice Felix Frankfurter, that has the greatest long-term impact on the court’s thinking. Quoting a statement drafted by scholars in South Africa in response to their government’s plans to racially segregate students, Justice Frankfurter argues that each university, as an institution, has “four essential freedoms,” those being “to determine for itself on academic grounds who may teach, what may be taught, how it shall be taught, and who may be admitted to study.” 1967. Keyishian v. Board of Regents. The Supreme Court revisits and strikes down the same New York law challenged in the Adler case. Writing for the majority, Justice William J. Brennan Jr. calls academic freedom “a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.” 1968. Pickering v. Board of Education. The court takes a limited view of the First Amendment rights of public employees in a case involving a public high-school teacher who had criticized school-district officials in a letter in the local newspaper. It overturns the teacher’s dismissal on the grounds he had been exercising rights as a private citizen, but it makes clear that public employees’ rights as citizens must be balanced against the government’s interests as an employer. 1978. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri v. Horowitz. The Supreme Court declines to second-guess the judgment of a university’s faculty members and their right to dismiss a medical student for bad grades. 1978. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke. Citing the “four essential freedoms” invoked by Justice Frankfurter in the Sweezy case, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. holds that a public medical school’s right to set its own admissions standards extends to the consideration of minority applicants’ race as a “plus factor.” But he also says academic freedom must be balanced against other Constitutional rights. The court strikes down the school’s use of race-based admissions quotas as too heavy-handed to be reconciled with the equal protection clause. 1983. Connick v. Myers. The court holds that the First Amendment protects the speech of public employees when that speech involves matters of public concern, but not when that speech involves personal matters. It sides against a woman fired from her job as an assistant district attorney after distributing a questionnaire soliciting her co-workers’ views of their office’s transfer policy. 1990. University of Pennsylvania v. EEOC. The court distinguishes between “direct” and “indirect” infringements on academic freedom — and says colleges are not protected from the latter — in holding that the university must comply with a federal subpoena from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It says the agency had not directly infringed on academic freedom in seeking peer-review materials related to a faculty member’s discrimination complaint. 2003. Grutter v. Bollinger. The court invokes the “four essential freedoms” in upholding the use of race-conscious admissions by the University of Michigan’s law school. Writing for the majority, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor says “universities occupy a special niche in our constitutional tradition” and the court has a tradition of giving deference to their academic decisions. Lower courts would later reject the argument that academic freedom gave public colleges the right to disregard voter-passed bans on affirmative-action preferences. 2006. Garcetti v. Ceballos. The court holds that the First Amendment does not preclude the government from taking action against public employees for speech made pursuant to their official duties. SOURCES: Federal court records; “Government as Educator: A New Understanding of First Amendment Protection of Academic Freedom and Governance,” by Judith Areen (Georgetown Law Journal, forthcoming in April); “Defending the Ivory Tower: A Twenty-First Century Approach to the Pickering-Connick Doctrine and Public Higher Education Faculty After Garcetti,” by Kevin L. Cope (Journal of College and University Law, Vol. 33, No. 2); “The Emerging First Amendment Law of Managerial Prerogative,” by Lawrence Rosenthal (Fordham Law Review, October 2008) |
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 55, Issue 25, Page A1