Having witnessed social media’s potential to carry professors’ statements far and wide, higher-education officials in Colorado and Kansas recently have moved to limit what messages take such a journey. They have argued that they are simply trying to protect their institutions, but their actions have raised the question of whether risk-averse definitions of academic freedom really offer much freedom at all.
The broadest, and most striking, effort to limit social media came at the hands of the Kansas Board of Regents, which on Wednesday shocked faculty leaders throughout the state by adopting a policy that grants public colleges’ chief executive officers the authority to discipline their institutions’ employees for a wide range of controversial statements aired online. Although some of the types of speech that the policy restricts, such as incitations of violence or disclosures of confidential student information, have long been seen as unworthy of First Amendment protection, several of its other prohibitions are being denounced as threats to the essence of shared governance and academic freedom.
While requiring the top official of each public college to conduct a “balancing analysis” that weighs the institution’s interests “against the employee’s right as a citizen to speak on matters of public concern,” the Kansas policy subjects a long list of employee utterances to placement on the scale. They include any communication that “impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers,” hurts “close working relationships for which personal loyalty and confidence are necessary,” impedes “the performance of the speaker’s official duties,” or otherwise interferes with the university’s operation and ability to efficiently provide services.
What happened in Colorado was simply a single institution’s decision to discipline a single tenured sociology professor, over concerns raised by her staging of a student-performed skit on prostitution in a class on social deviance. But along with provoking outcries that it had denied the professor, Patricia A. Adler, due process by cracking down on her in the absence of a formal investigation or complaint, the University of Colorado at Boulder invoked an entirely new social-media threat to academic freedom. At a news conference on Wednesday, Steven R. Leigh, dean of the university’s College of Arts and Sciences, expressed concern that students in the skit were subject to being videotaped on cellphones without their consent.
The Boulder Faculty Assembly, a campuswide faculty governance body, held an emergency meeting on Ms. Adler’s case on Wednesday. It announced that it and the representative faculty body for Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences planned to establish a joint committee to examine how her case had been handled.
Ms. Adler said on Thursday that the university’s administration had made no mention of concerns about students’ being taped until after it came under widespread public criticism for telling her she could not teach the class and, she alleges, pressuring her to resign.
Colorado’s fears were hardly imaginary, however. On Monday shaky footage of the skit appeared on a local news broadcast by NBC’s Denver affiliate, which says it obtained the footage from a source other than the university’s administration. Anyone with Internet access could see one of Ms. Adler’s student teaching assistants portraying a “sex slave,” although the setting—a crowded auditorium—left little doubt all was make-believe.
Digital Amplification
Even the staunchest advocates of academic freedom acknowledge that the Internet has transported colleges to a strange new place where changes in communication have left administrators needing courage, faculty members needing to use their brains, and aroused mobs often showing little heart.
“We have heard now too many instances” of faculty members caught up in controversies over statements “they never thought anyone but one or two people would hear,” said Henry F. Reichman, a professor emeritus of history at California State University-East Bay and chairman of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
In a draft report on academic freedom and electronic communications issued this month, that committee urged faculty members to exercise caution in their utterances, especially when communicating online.
Mr. Reichman also argued, however, that “too many administrators seem to have abandoned their backbone” when defending faculty members who come under attack for their speech.
“If there is any place in our society where people should be allowed to push the envelope, it is academia,” he said. He argued that the way to avoid controversies over professors’ being photographed or videotaped is not to restrict their speech but to adopt policies prohibiting students from disseminating such images and recordings without the faculty members’ formal consent.
Few institutions have had a rougher landing in the new environment for academic speech than the University of Colorado at Boulder, the focus of one of the biggest academic-freedom controversies in recent decades.
Ward Churchill remained securely employed at Boulder as an ethnic-studies professor for more than three years after publishing his incendiary 2001 essay arguing that people who had died in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center were not innocent civilians but “little Eichmanns,” part of an oppressive empire. Then, in late 2004 an ideologically unsympathetic Hamilton College professor discovered the previously little-discussed essay online and used it to ignite a public controversy that quickly spread via conservative blogs and cable-television talk shows.
The besieged Boulder campus ended up firing Mr. Churchill on charges of research misconduct and was caught up in a legal battle over his academic-freedom and due-process rights until last spring.
The University of Kansas has recently weathered its own storm, involving David W. Guth, an associate professor of journalism who reacted to the September 16 shootings at the Washington Navy Yard with a tweet that said, “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.” The backlash in social media, and resulting threats to him and others, led the university to condemn his statement and place him on leave. He has been allowed to work only on administrative duties.
‘Blindsided’ in Kansas
The nine-member, gubernatorially appointed Kansas Board of Regents, which serves as the coordinating board for the state’s 32 public higher-education institutions and governs the six state universities, did little to publicize or solicit input on the policy it passed on Wednesday.
“We were completely blindsided,” said Ron Barrett-Gonzalez, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Kansas and president of the AAUP’s Kansas conference. On Wednesday night, he said, “my email box lit up” with dozens of messages, many from prospective hires of Kansas colleges who now had concerns about going there.
Mr. Barrett-Gonzalez called the new policy “an affront to First Amendment freedom of speech and academic freedom,” and expressed disbelief at its language dealing with the preservation of harmony within the institution. “A healthy body of faculty will be a deliberative structure, and they will not always agree,” he said.
A background statement introducing the policy characterizes it as intended to provide guidance to administrators and employees on the acceptable use of social media that can be misused and can damage universities.
The policy defines social media as including but not limited to blogs, wikis, Twitter, YouTube, and social-networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. The balancing analysis that it proposes calls for colleges’ chief executive officers to consider whether employees purported to speak on behalf of their institutions or made the statements at issue using their employer’s resources or during work hours.
Julene Miller, the board’s general counsel, said the policy does not eliminate academic freedom and whistle-blowers’ rights, and merely “gives the university CEO’s a tool and some guidance to use in determining whether discipline is appropriate” based on fact-based analyses of given cases. “It is up to them how they utilize it,” she said.
Both the introduction to the policy as it was put before the board and a press release issued by the board after the policy’s adoption say that its language was cleared by the state attorney general, Derek Schmidt, as complying with U.S. Supreme Court precedents dealing with free speech and due process. But Joan E. Bertin, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, on Thursday called the policy overly vague and said it “is in all likelihood unconstitutional, if it is applied the way it could be applied.”
“Since when are we telling university professors they cannot send provocative personal opinions out into the world?” Ms. Bertin asked. “If we are doing that, we are going to change the whole nature of the academic enterprise, and not for the better.”
Anita Levy, an associate secretary of the AAUP, similarly said the policy “raises significant issues about academic freedom and due process,” in part because it gives administrators too much power to subjectively decide what speech crosses the line.
Mr. Barrett-Gonzalez, of the state AAUP, said, “It remains to be seen how much of this will be adopted by institutions. Wise institutions will reject it completely.”
