What Colleges Can Do When the Internet Outrage Machine Comes to Campus

As her plane was about to take off from Baltimore last Tuesday, Joanne Berger-Sweeney got a call from her communications head: Facebook messages written by a Trinity College professor had been picked up by conservative media. By the time the president of the Connecticut institution landed in Hartford 90 minutes later, the story had gone viral. It jumped from one site to another, each with an inflammatory headline: “Professor Calls White People Inhuman,” “College professor to blacks, other minorities: Let white people f**ing die.”

Trinity’s switchboard was flooded with calls, and outraged emails poured in. By the next day, the anger had turned violent: One caller threatened to bring a rifle to the campus. Another said black people had better watch their backs. Several members of the admissions office seemed to be singled out for harassment because of the color of their skin. Johnny Eric Williams, the associate professor of sociology who had written the Facebook messages, received death threats.

Ms. Berger-Sweeney had not known the stories were coming. But she was prepared for how to handle the growing storm. Less than three weeks earlier she and her emergency-management team had gathered with law-enforcement officers and others to play out different scenarios, like a campus shooter, to determine how to act in crisis situations. “We activated exactly what we had spoken about days before. We knew where to gather. We knew who was going to put out calls.”

Trinity joined a growing number of colleges that have found themselves under virtual attack. Faculty members nationwide have been harassed and threatened with death for statements that were sometimes twisted or taken out of context. The larger campus has often been drawn into the fray. A few weeks ago, in the midst of what had become a national controversy over race relations on campus, Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Wash., canceled classes after someone threatened to come to its campus armed.

While viral media events are hardly new, the level of threatened violence is, experts say. And for colleges, that presents unique challenges. How do you determine what threats are real when they’re anonymous and coming from outside your campus? How do you keep people calm while keeping them safe? And how do you react in a way that doesn’t veer into censorship?

This last question is the most troubling for many academics, who see a concerted, coordinated effort in these media attacks to vilify higher education and paint professors as tone-deaf and possibly dangerous radicals. “These things are intended to make us fearful, to give up our rights.” says Ms. Berger-Sweeney. “We cannot give in to the fear.”

A Measured Response

At Trinity, the emergency-management team swung into action, forwarding the threats that were starting to come in to the Hartford police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Ms. Berger-Sweeney had met an FBI representative at the simulation exercise and she remembered what safety officials told her at the time: “You cannot relinquish your authority of knowing the culture of the institution.”

What followed were a series of meetings connecting safety officials with campus leaders. Each knew what role to play, says Ms. Berger-Sweeney, which made decision-making move more smoothly. When her senior leadership team, including deans and vice presidents, met Wednesday morning, the chair of the emergency-management team presented them with a series of questions: At what point do we alert the community, lock down buildings, close the campus? In about 30 minutes they came up with answers.

“We didn’t have a playbook, but we listened carefully to questions and recognized we needed to make decisions quickly,” she recalls. Trinity closed the campus Wednesday afternoon out of caution and sent a letter to the community. The college also contacted the local police, who sent an officer to Mr. Williams’s house before he left the area and went into hiding.

The leadership team met again Thursday morning and decided to reopen the campus after receiving reports on how law enforcement had evaluated the threats. That day Ms. Berger-Sweeney also held a community-wide meeting to discuss what had been happening, then later met with members of the Board of Trustees and faculty leaders.

She had talked early to several other college presidents who lived through similar situations. Their advice: Act quickly on safety issues, but otherwise slow things down. In the furor there had been many calls to fire Mr. Williams, for example. “Even in this crisis and rush of everything going on, there is a role for taking a breath and trying to calm things down,” she says. “I’m very conscious that everyone is watching Trinity right now.”

(In a message to the campus on Monday, Ms. Berger Sweeney announced that Mr. Williams had been placed on leave, saying it was in his best interest and the college’s. Mr. Williams disputed that characterization, telling the Hartford Courant that “they want this to die down and go away.” The campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors criticized the move, saying it lent credence to an attack “specifically designed to stifle critical engagement with issues of race.”)

A Cultural Challenge

Safety consultants say the viral threats confronting campuses are tied to a larger shift in society, in which anonymity, partisanship, and cyberbullying have created a toxic level of public discourse.

“This is not just an emerging challenge in campus safety, this is an emerging challenge in the American culture,” says S. Daniel Carter, president of Safety Advisors for Educational Campuses, which provides training and advice to colleges.

In such an environment, he says, it is important to keep open lines of communication on the campus, not circle the wagons. He also recommends a broad-based partnership that includes local and federal law enforcement, which is equipped to track anonymous threats that come from outside the campus and possibly from thousands of miles away.

Many campus police departments also now have cyber units or a designated officer responsible for tracking social-media threats, says Mr. Carter.

George Washington University has been ramping up its social-media monitoring, says RaShall M. Brackney, the university’s chief of police. Two staff members, plus an outside consultant, keep an eye on mentions of the university 24/7, alerting officials when certain triggers appear, like threats of protest. While very little has come across their screens to create immediate concern, she says, because the campus is in the heart of Washington and very politically active, the university is installing panic alarms and cameras in classrooms. It is also offering training to faculty members to identify behavioral threats in and out of the classroom.

The FBI has a campus liaison program as well as specialists trained in behavioral threat assessment, notes Marisa R. Randazzo, a managing partner with Sigma Threat Management Associates. She recommends to all of her campus clients that they establish a relationship to a local FBI office.

She also suggests that campus emergency management or threat assessment teams receive additional training on these kinds of social media firestorms. And faculty members should be made aware of the importance of quickly relaying threats to safety officials. “Oftentimes department chairs think, This is my department, this is my faculty member, and isn’t this protected speech anyway?’” she notes. “Whether or not it’s protected speech has nothing to do with whether there is a safety concern.”

‘A Media Trick’

Experts also recommend that faculty members not to respond to attacks. While it’s human nature to want to defend yourself, it exposes you to additional risk, says Peter F. Lake a law professor and director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University. Not only does it fuel the outrage machine, he says, it can change a person’s legal status from a private figure to what’s called a limited public figure.

“You can literally make anybody a limited public figure by drawing them into the controversy, then you can attack them because of that,” he says. “That’s what this is all about. It’s a media trick.”

Mr. Lake says that stories describing a campus incident or a professor’s writings are often “on the far edge of the First Amendment,” spawning a series of other potentially more extreme coverage. He thinks universities will need to introduce media training to their employees to better understand what’s being written. “Some of this behavior is just not legal. Most professors are not in the position to sort that out.”

While he expects to see lawsuits and criminal prosecution come out of some of these cases, the larger threat, he worries, is self-censorship. “Because so much of our work is judged by how it’s received, there could be a very strong tendency for a lot of teachers to just stay completely away from matters of public importance for fear that they’re going to be drawn into the crossfire.”

Beth McMurtrie writes about campus culture, among other things. Follow her on Twitter @bethmcmurtrie, or email her at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.

Updated (6/27/2017, 11:55 a.m.) with responses from Mr. Williams and from the American Association of University Professors to Trinity’s decision to put the professor on leave.