Critics of Professor Schaff and myself have been making a rather amazing argument: that a college professor can be forced to choose between his job and the free expression of his political opinions, should his colleagues or the administration conclude that those opinions reflect badly on his institution. As this is an important issue for bloggers, I think it worthy of further comment.
All over the United States college professors routinely engage in partisan political activity, speaking at anti-war rallies, writing op-ed pieces, taping political posters to their office doors. When I recently visited the political science department at the University of Arizona, the hall looked like it housed a socialist newspaper. I dare say that in many cases the political speech of a state university professor will offend her colleagues and the administration, not to mention the state legislature and the majority of voters. But nowhere is it acceptable to force such a professor to choose between job security and free speech. Even in extreme cases-a Ward Churchill calling the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns"-it is virtually impossible to penalize the offending prof. I think this is altogether a good idea. No institution is as dependent on the free exchange of ideas as a university. Arguments that offend the status quo or refused to follow the party line, whether it is left or right, are and should be sacrosanct in universities.
Now there may be extremes beyond which a professor is no longer protected. If he advocates genocide or violence against law abiding citizens, maybe the administration should come down on him. But even then the case would involve specific threats of action, and such a threshold is almost never met.
I acknowledge that there is a distinction between private and professional speech. When someone is speaking as a representative of an institution, the institution will often have every right to control what he or she says. But to keep that distinction from being used as a weapon against unpopular opinions, the burden of proof is on the institution. It must be unambiguous that he is speaking on the school's behalf. And even then the burden of proof must be high. When I am introduced as the Director of the Honors Program at the annual honors breakfast, what I say is professional speech. When I speak on some political subject at a noon forum, that I think is protected speech. The worst that can happen to me if I offend other professors or the students is that I will not be invited back.
Blogs are emphatically protected speech. The whole point of the blogosphere is that virtually any opinion can be put forth in any sort of language. It is the freest and largest market place of ideas ever to exceed the imagination. The very idea that college administrations are to begin trolling it for heretics is anathema to free speech.
Some critics of SDP show how important these protections are. To call SDP partisan is fair. To say that we are extreme is ignorant. We are clearly within the mainstream of American political thought. We have frequently stated that our opinions in no way represent those of Northern State University, the State of South Dakota, or anyone but ourselves. Yet they would shut us down, or better yet make us suffer, because we have offended them. These are the people that our founding fathers warned us against.
Recent Comments