Inside Higher Ed: Threat to Faculty Free Speech
Typically, observers of the U.S. Supreme Court focus on what the justices definitively ruled. But there are also times when issues that aren’t addressed — even issues that are explicitly not addressed — can create legal controversies. Faculty leaders believe that is what happened three years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that First Amendment protections do not necessarily extend to public employees when they speak in capacities related to their jobs.
The ruling came in Garcetti v. Ceballos, a suit by a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who was demoted after he criticized a local sheriff’s conduct to his supervisors. By applying the case strictly in the context of higher education, lower courts are “posing the danger that, as First Amendment rights for public employees are narrowed, so too may be the constitutional protection for academic freedom at public institutions, perhaps fatally,” says a report being issued today by the American Association of University Professors.
The Chronicle: AAUP Announces Effort to Shore Up Academic Freedom at Public Colleges
The American Association of University Professors is embarking on a campaign to protect academic freedom at public colleges in response to recent federal-court decisions seen as eroding faculty members’ speech rights.
The new campaign urges national faculty unions and higher-education associations, as well as individual public colleges’ faculty groups and administrators, to push such institutions to adopt policies broadly protecting faculty speech dealing with academic matters, institutional governance, teaching, research, and issues outside the workplace. The campaign also calls for faculty members to work with the AAUP to help it monitor and weigh in on new court cases in which the speech rights of faculty members are threatened.
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