A professor of American Indian studies takes to Twitter to denounce Zionism. A senior lecturer in business communication posts racist, homophobic comments on Facebook about an investigation into the shooting death of a 12-year-old. A journalism professor tweets, after a mass shooting, that the National Rifle Association has blood on its hands.
Social-media eruptions like those have produced the kind of headlines that make colleges cringe. They’ve had seriously negative consequences for the scholars involved and, in some cases, for institutions. They’ve also raised an urgent question for administrators: As more and more faculty and staff members lead active lives online, publicly sharing their work along with personal opinions, what can colleges do to protect themselves from fallout while preserving the core values of academic freedom and free speech?
Colleges typically have employment codes that define inappropriate behavior for faculty and staff members, but few have imposed formal social-media policies. As Twitter, Facebook, and other online platforms become more and more intertwined with faculty members’ lives and work, though, more institutions will have to confront the issue of whether—and how—to regulate online behavior.
Many observers argue that guidelines work better than rules. Administrators sensitive to the sometimes competing issues at stake should recognize that attempts to control what scholars do online may be more damaging to a college’s reputation, and to the campus community, than isolated cases of offensive behavior. Some are finding that accentuating the positive aspects of social media is a more compelling approach than attempting to eliminate the negative.
The offensive comments described above weren’t posted on official college accounts or made in any official capacity, but they had swift consequences for the scholars involved. Steven G. Salaita, the scholar who posted the anti-Israel tweets, had accepted a tenured job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the university rescinded its offer after his tweets caused an uproar. Deborah O’Connor, the Florida lecturer, resigned her non-tenure-track job soon after her Facebook comments came to light. David W. Guth, a tenured associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, was put on administrative leave after his NRA outburst—for safety and to prevent disruptions, the university said.
TAKEAWAY
Does Your College Need a Social-Media Policy?
While academics and administrators are split over whether controls on employees’ use of social media are necessary, here are points that experts say colleges should consider before adopting such policies:
- Realize that many faculty and staff members are experimenting with social media as a way to promote their work and engage with the public. Most are not embarrassing their colleges in the process.
- Beware the possible chilling effects of attempts to regulate social-media use. Guidelines and how-to tips are likely to be more warmly received than are threats of disciplinary action.
- Protect the core values of academic freedom and freedom of expression, which are central to the missions of colleges, and make sure there’s a faculty-approved process in place for handling alleged misuse of social media.
A college’s response to perceived misbehavior, however, can lead to institutional aftershocks that flare up for months or years. Mr. Salaita still hasn’t found another academic job. But he has been active on the lecture circuit, and has sued Illinois, claiming that top administrators, trustees, and some donors unduly influenced the decision of the flagship campus’s chancellor to rescind the job offer. Scholars at the university have criticized the chancellor for being too autocratic. An academic activist has organized a boycott of Illinois, urging other scholars to turn down speaking engagements at the university. And department chairs warned the system’s new president, Timothy L. Killeen, that faculty searches had been put in jeopardy.
Cases like Mr. Salaita’s get most of the attention, but they’re the exception. Most faculty members active on social media are not creating public-relations dramas. In fact, they’re doing their employers and themselves a service, says Tarleton Gillespie, an associate professor of communication and information science at Cornell University. He’s at work on a book about how social-media platforms like Twitter and Facebook handle speech-related issues such as threats and online abuse.
Given the newness of social media, Mr. Gillespie says, it’s too easy to focus on what can go wrong rather than what’s already going right. Scholars are using social media to connect with colleagues and take part in conversations beyond their campuses, which can boost their institutions’ profiles, too. “Lots of academics are doing this really well,” he says.
Opportunities for scholars to share controversial opinions existed long before social media, of course: Before Twitter, there were the op-ed pages. “The underlying questions of what it means to speak in public, what it means to command an audience, what it means to be an individual who represents an organization, these are not new questions,” says Mr. Gillespie.
But the speed of social media, as well as the way in which they mingle personal and professional activities, has created new anxieties for colleges. “It’s a very murky space right now,” Mr. Gillespie says.
He would rather see carrots than sticks: Instead of punishments or threats, colleges should offer general guidelines about how to use social media effectively. “Universities could be clearer about how faculty’s responsibility and the protections of academic freedom extend to social media,” he says.
Nancy Baym, a researcher at Microsoft Research and a visiting professor in comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies how communication technologies intersect with everyday relationships. She says that many academics feel professional pressure to have an online presence but don’t know whether they’ll be rewarded for it or who their audience is.
“We’re under a lot more surveillance,” she says, “at the same time that we have to be out there.”
At Kansas, where Ms. Baym worked before joining Microsoft, the storm over Mr. Guth’s NRA tweet included state legislators, who control the university system’s budget. The professor had posted the controversial tweet on the day of a mass shooting at the Washington Navy Yard, in September 2013; less than a week later, he was placed on paid leave while the university reviewed the situation. (He has since resumed teaching.) Some months later, the Kansas Board of Regents instituted a social-media policy that gave the system’s chief executives the power to suspend or dismiss any employee who makes improper use of social media.
Having such a policy in place might help nervous administrators and trustees sleep more easily. But “improper” is a slippery term, and faculty concern about the regents’ decision demonstrates that social-media policies, especially if they seem to threaten free expression, can generate bad press on and off campus. (See related article on Page B22.)
If faculty members’ objections to restrictive policies aren’t enough to give administrators pause, the risk of litigation might. Ronald Barrett-Gonzalez, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at Kansas, is president of the state chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which is keeping tabs on the issue, along with the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups. “This is a real hot potato for administrators,” he says.
Whether or not a test case emerges, the philosophical debate is in full swing.
Fear of offending those who hold the purse strings shouldn’t trump values central to the university mission, says Ms. Baym. “That’s what it always comes down to—it might affect our funding,” she says. “That speaks to a much larger problem, which is, Why the heck are we beholden to funding sources that can turn on a tweet?”
Correction (3/9/2015, 4:45 p.m.): This article originally stated that Nancy Baym is a visiting professor in comparative literature and media studies at MIT. She is a visiting professor of comparative media studies there. The article has been changed to reflect this correction.
