When Do Public Rebukes of Students Cross a Line?

Nada Merghani ended up getting way more attention than she had sought.

In August, just before Donald Trump spoke at her campus, the junior at the University of North Carolina Wilmington wrote a Facebook post telling her friends to expect to see her at the event. “Y’all are not prepared for what I’m about to do,” wrote the 19-year-old gay-rights and Muslim activist. “All I can say is pray I make it out of this alive.”

The fallout from her post included a precautionary visit from the U.S. Secret Service, barbed coverage by the conservative publication The College Fix, and a scathing online column about her from an unlikely source, one of her institution’s own faculty members.

The op-ed’s author, Michael S. Adams, a professor of criminology and prominent conservative commentator, dismissed Ms. Merghani as a “queer Muslim social justice warrior” in search of victim status and attention. Among the other digs he got in, he said Ms. Merghani “lacks intellectual coherence” and likened her to Gerald Ford’s attempted assassin, Lynette Alice (Squeaky) Fromme, “minus the handgun and resolve.”

Ms. Merghani did not respond to The Chronicle’s requests for comment. In a post on the social-media channel Tumblr, however, she described being barraged with online threats and hateful statements as a result of the column. She complained that the university has done little to protect her from two years’ worth of efforts “to make my life hell,” by Mr. Adams (who has never had her in a class.) She later told local journalists that she plans to transfer at the end of the current semester.

Mr. Adams’s column has been denounced by faculty leaders and is the subject of a petition demanding his dismissal. Wilmington’s administration has disavowed his remarks while also holding that they are protected by the First Amendment, triggering a debate there over the limits of faculty speech about students.

Wilmington is not the only institution grappling with such a controversy. Both Marquette University and the University of Illinois system are being sued by tenured professors whom they disciplined for criticizing students by name online. More broadly, as many faculty members use social media to vent frustrations with students who, though unnamed, might nonetheless recognize themselves, other academics have argued such speech humiliates and discourages young people and amounts to an abuse of power.

The internet has exponentially expanded the potential audience for a beratement by an instructor. Criticisms once confined mainly to classrooms now can instantly travel far beyond campuses and academe. The law, college policies, and professorial ethics have yet to fully account for the new arena in which faculty members and students clash.

When it comes to placing limits on what college instructors can publicly say about students, “I don’t know where I would draw the line, exactly,” says Henry F. (Hank) Reichman, chairman of the American Association of University Professors’ Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. In touching upon the issue in a speech delivered last year, he says, “I literally threw up my hands.”

Speech as ‘a Weapon’

Mr. Adams, the Wilmington criminology professor, is no stranger to speech controversies. He won a $700,000 settlement from his employer in 2014 through a successful lawsuit claiming he had been denied a promotion based on his conservative writings. Along the way he scored a major legal victory, widely hailed by academic-freedom advocates, by persuading a federal appeals court to declare certain types of speech as off-limits for consideration in colleges’ personnel decisions.

Last month, Wilmington’s administration said that it was “deeply disappointed by the use of hateful, hurtful language” in Mr. Adams’s column about Ms. Merghani but that it nonetheless had no plans to discipline him. It said it had determined that his statements in the column were both unrelated to his job duties and protected under the First Amendment, and that it had found no evidence that he had improperly released her private student information or discriminated against her in the campus environment.

“It deeply saddens me to see freedom of expression used as a weapon to degrade and demonize,” Chancellor Jose V. (Zito) Sartarelli said in a Facebook post that sought to offer assurances that his administration values diversity and inclusiveness and takes discrimination seriously.

The campus’s Student Government Association declared itself “appalled and disgusted” by the professor’s article and said, “We will not stay silent while a member of our community feels threatened.”

In an interview this week, Stephen Meinhold, a professor of political science at Wilmington and president of the campus’s Faculty Senate, said his institution has no policy barring professors from making such statements partly because “no one would have imagined that it needed to be on the books.”

Wendy Brenner, an associate professor of creative writing there, said, “Nobody has the expectation, when they send their son or daughter to college, that something like this might happen to them.”

For his part, Mr. Adams has accused faculty leaders of using a double standard because they had not similarly voiced outrage at a past Faculty Senate president who, in a local newspaper, criticized the campus chapter of the College Republicans.

In emails to The Chronicle, Mr. Adams argued that his column on Ms. Merghani actually defended her “by saying she was not threatening — only an attention seeker.” He dismissed accusations that he had inappropriately disclosed her sexuality in his column as “comical” given her involvement with a campus gay-rights group and her previous willingness to discuss herself in an interview with The College Fix.

Questions of Status

The Marquette University controversy centers around a 2014 blog post that John McAdams, a tenured associate professor of political science, wrote about a graduate teaching assistant, Cheryl Abbate. It accused her of stifling debate in a philosophy class by refusing to let one of her undergraduate students discuss objections to same-sex marriage that might offend gay students in the room. When conservative websites publicized the blog post, Ms. Abbate became the target of angry and threatening emails and online comments. She transferred out of the university.

The Roman Catholic university suspended Mr. McAdams in April, based on the recommendations of a faculty hearing committee that unanimously concluded that his actions had been “imprudent, unprofessional, and unwise.” Along with faulting him for giving his blog readers Ms. Abbate’s name and a link to her contact information, the panel said the post had been one-sided, factually inaccurate, and based on improperly gained information, the unnamed undergraduate’s surreptitious tape-recording of a private conversation with the graduate instructor.

The university’s administration has told Mr. McAdams he will be fired unless he submits a letter apologizing for the post and pledging not to engage in such behavior in the future. The professor has chosen instead to sue Marquette in state court, based on claims it breached its contract and violated his due-process and academic-freedom rights. His legal filings emphasize Ms. Abbate’s role as an instructor, while the university’s stress her status as a student.

In hindsight, Mr. McAdams said this week, he probably would not have identified Ms. Abbate by name if he could have anticipated the public response to his blog post. He added, however, that he feels justified in treating her as an adult instructor, rather than a student, on a blog that he has long used to air criticisms of Marquette. “I see myself as a whistle-blower,” he said.

The University of Illinois controversy centers on a tenured engineering professor’s use of his website and a YouTube video to publicize accusations that his department had pressured members of a student honor society to deny him a teaching award in 2009. In the video (since removed), the Urbana-Champaign professor, Louis Wozniak, had described the student honor society’s president, a senior, as crying when confronted.

The university system fired Mr. Wozniak three years ago based on its conclusion that he had violated student confidentiality and shown no willingness to cease such conduct. In a lawsuit filed in federal court, he has accused university officials of violating his free-speech and due-process rights under the U.S. Constitution.

Navigating Hazards

Paul G. Lannon, co-chair of the education-law practice group for the firm Holland & Knight, was one of several experts who characterized federal statutes as offering little guidance on such faculty speech beyond the demarcation of some areas that are off limits. He said professors could run afoul of the law, for example, by disclosing the contents of educational records covered by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or engaging in defamation, or making statements seen as amounting to racial or gender-based discrimination. But other public criticisms of named students might be seen as covered by the First Amendment at public colleges, and by academic freedom at all types of higher-education institutions.

“The motivation of the faculty member matters too,” said Rima N. Kapitan, a Chicago lawyer who handles cases involving academic freedom and employment law. “If the faculty member is going after the student for retaliatory reasons, that would be improper.”

Colleges can conceivably adopt policies dealing with public statements about students, but doing so “might be a fool’s errand” in light of how much the context for such statements matters, said Robb Jones, general counsel for claims management at United Educators, a risk-management and insurance firm. Faculty members often publicly praise students by name, for example, without suffering repercussions.

Defining which such public statements are appropriate may come down to professional ethics, but there appears to be little consensus on where the ethical boundaries lie.

Montana Miller, an associate professor of cultural studies at Bowling Green State University and an early scholar of Facebook communication, said she sees any public criticism of college students by their instructors as “beyond the pale” and a form of online bullying. “Free speech stops when you start to create a hostile environment for someone you have power over,” she said.

But John K. Wilson, co-editor of Academe, the American Association of University Professors’ blog, asked: “Are college students children or adults? If they are adults, then, in general, they should be treated like adults and given the respect of being criticized by name, which is how adults criticize one another.”

Mr. Reichman of the AAUP’s academic-freedom committee said he sees faculty members as having a right to respond to students who take a public role in debates, “but have an ethical obligation to treat students with respect and take into account concerns for their safety” based on how outsiders might respond.

The Rev. James F. Keenan, a professor of theological ethics at Boston College and author of the book University Ethics, said, “A student’s vulnerabilities have to be taken into account.”

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.