Category Archives: Free speech

The Chronicle: Temple U.’s Past Policy Violated Free-Speech Rights, Appeals Court Says

A federal appeals court ruled on Monday that a sexual-harassment policy that Temple University abandoned early last year was unconstitutionally broad and violated students’ freedom of expression.

The Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit—upholding a district court’s March 2007 decision—said the university’s policy could have stopped its students from making legally protected speech. The case was brought two and a half years ago by a former Temple graduate student, Christian M. DeJohn, who said his conservative views were unwelcome at the university.

Follow

The Chronicle: When It Comes to Free Speech, Is a Professor Just Another Government Employee?

Steve Sanders: The Rights of a Department Critic

By STEVE SANDERS

A case pending in a federal court of appeals in California may clarify a surprisingly murky question: Do faculty members at public universities enjoy a special privilege to speak freely about institutional matters, or, as far as the First Amendment is concerned, are they just another category of government hirelings?

Juan Hong, a professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of California at Irvine, sued the university after he was denied a merit salary increase in 2005. The denial was in retaliation, Hong alleges, for his history as a self-described “outspoken critic of university administrators on their mismanagement of their administrative responsibility.”

Follow

The Chronicle: U. of Alabama at Birmingham Fires Editor Over His Political Blog

A longtime editor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has been fired because, he says, he used his personal blog to harshly attack high-ranking Republicans in the state. A detailed account of the case appeared last week on an alternative-news blog, The Raw Story.

Follow

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Free-speech award goes to Penn professor

University of Pennsylvania history professor and free-speech advocate Alan Charles Kors defended the student who uttered the “water buffalo” comment at black female students in 1993 that pushed the university into a controversial national spotlight.

Follow

AAUP: Loyalty Oaths Threaten Faculty Rights

State oaths of allegiance requiring all state employees, including teachers in public colleges and universities, to affirm their support of a state’s constitution as condition of government employment are decades-old, but two recent cases on different California State University campuses underscore how the execution of the requirement can damage faculty rights.

The California oath requires persons employed by a California university (other than foreign nationals) to swear to “support and defend” the constitutions of the United States and of California, to take the obligation “without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion,” and to “faithfully discharge” the duties they are about to assume. Sometimes described as an affirmative oath, this kind of pledge can be distinguished from belief, or test, oaths, which have been struck down as unconstitutional in their requiring the individual to attest to an absence of past or present political beliefs or associations.

Affirmative oaths are not without their problems, however, as two adjunct faculty members who are Quakers learned this past year. In fall 2007, Wendy Gonaver was preparing for her first teaching assignment at Cal State Fullerton when informed that she had to sign the California oath. She sought to attach a statement to the oath explaining that signing it would be contrary to her “nonviolent beliefs as a Quaker.” Administration officials rebuffed her efforts to submit a statement of any sort, stating that there are “no exceptions allowed” to the oath within the CSU system. Gonaver did not waver in her objection to the oath, whereupon the administration told her just before the start of classes that she would not be allowed to teach. Gonaver, represented by the People for the American Way Foundation, is currently seeking reinstatement.

In March 2008, Marianne Kearney-Brown, a mathematics instructor at Cal State East Bay, lost her position for refusing to sign the oath. Her attempt to insert the word “nonviolently” before the phrase “support and defend” the constitution was rejected by the university administration. The administration, however, reappointed Kearney-Brown after the office of the state attorney general drafted a statement for her which declared that signing the oath carries no obligation or requirement for public employees to bear arms or otherwise engage in violence.

The oath resisted by Gonaver and Kearney-Brown has no doubt been signed by thousands, and no doubt has been seen as a harmless remnant of a dark period in American history. The harm done by this oath and ones similar to it in other states can be measured in the respect that insistence upon its signing led to the termination of appointments of two university teachers. Others may have quietly sought opportunities elsewhere rather than sign the oath.

Affirmative oaths are not likely to fade away any time soon, but refusal to sign the oath should not, in and of itself, be a justifiable reason for not appointing a faculty member or for terminating an appointment. The resolution of the Kearney-Brown case shows what can be done consistent with the interests of an institution of higher learning and the rights of faculty members. It is not too much to hope that public colleges and universities required to administer the oath will appoint and retain faculty members as determined by academic considerations, not dictated by legislative enactments.

(5/08)

Follow

Aberdeen News: Senator says PC disinvited her over stance on abortion
Turbak Berry was scheduled to speak at commencement

A state senator who was scheduled to speak at Presentation College’s commencement Saturday in Aberdeen said she was disinvited because of her views on abortion.

Sen. Nancy Turbak Berry, of Watertown, said she heard of the college’s decision not to allow her to address the graduates on Friday.

Follow

The Los Angeles Times: Ousted Cal State Fullerton teacher revises oath of loyalty

A Quaker who lost her appointment as a Cal State Fullerton lecturer after she objected to a state loyalty oath submitted a revised statement of her beliefs Thursday in a bid to win the job back.

People For the American Way, a Washington-based civil rights group now representing lecturer Wendy Gonaver, called on the university to reinstate her and adopt a policy protecting the religious freedom of all California State University system employees.

Follow

AP: Turkey’s parliament softens law restricting free speech

ISTANBUL, Turkey (AP) — Turkey’s parliament approved a government-backed proposal Wednesday to soften a law restricting free speech that has been used to prosecute intellectuals and dissidents.

The legislators voted 250-65 in favor of amending that section of Turkey’s penal code, under which thousands of people have been prosecuted and 745 convicted since 2003, including Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Follow

The Chronicle New Blog: $250,000 Prize Awarded to Penn Professor, a Fierce Critic of Speech Codes

Alan Charles Kors, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania who has been a longtime scourge of political correctness, speech codes, and other issues in higher education, has been awarded a $250,000 prize by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. The citation for the Bradley Prize, to be presented in June, recognizes Mr. Kors as both a scholar of European intellectual history and a defender of free speech.

Mr. Kors drew notice in 1998 as a co-author of The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses, a withering attack on “campus Stalinists” bent on enforcing left-wing views. He and his co-author, Harvey A. Silverglate, subsequently founded an organization dedicated to protecting what they described as victims of political correctness. The group, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, has since made a name for itself as an outspoken critic of campus speech codes and advocate for people said to have violated the codes. —Andrew Mytelka

Follow

Inside Higher Ed: Pardon Me, but Your Door Is Terribly Offensive

Getting one’s own office can be a rite of passage right up there with defending a dissertation or receiving tenure — and many professors’ lairs are reflections of their own attitudes and beliefs. Usually, it takes just a quick glance at the door, as anyone who’s taken a stroll down the hall of an academic building can attest: What a professor finds amusing, outrageous or just plain interesting is there for all to see.

At a public university, such common displays of individual preference would presumably fall under the protections of the First Amendment. But not when such displays are offensive to others, according to officials at Lake Superior State University, which threatened to reprimand a tenured professor whose door boasted cartoons and other images of a conservative political bent. In a March 26 letter to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which had been monitoring the case and publicized it on Wednesday, an outside lawyer representing the university reiterated its argument that because the professor “acted in an unprofessional and insubordinate manner, his actions cannot be considered protected speech.”

Follow

Inside Higher Ed: Not So Free Speech in Campus Governance

When the U.S. Supreme Court two years ago limited the First Amendment protections available to public employees, faculty groups thought that they had dodged a bullet. While the decision didn’t go the way professors hoped, it specifically indicated that additional issues might limit its application in cases involving public college professors.

Now, however, a federal court has applied just the principle that faculty groups thought shouldn’t be applied in higher education — that bosses can punish employees for speech deemed inappropriate — to a case involving a university. As a result, the American Association of University Professors and the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression are asking a federal appeals court to affirm that the Supreme Court decision does not apply to public higher education. The two groups warn that failure to reverse the lower court’s decision could make it impossible for professors to freely debate hiring choices or campus policies.

Follow

San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. State GOP group wins free-speech case

To the relief of a campus Republican group, the 417,000 students at California State University’s 23 institutions no longer face the possibility of discipline for failing to be civil to one another.

The change was part of a settlement approved by a federal magistrate in Oakland this week in a lawsuit by the San Francisco State College Republicans, whose members were subjected to a disciplinary hearing after some of them stomped on two flags bearing the name of Allah during an anti-terrorism rally in October 2006.

Follow

Inside Higher Ed: A Loyalty Oath Firing in 2008

Many people think of loyalty oaths as relics of the McCarthy era, long ago outlawed or abandoned. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has banned only certain kinds of loyalty oaths, permitting others. Last week, a mathematics instructor at California State University East Bay lost her job for refusing to sign one.

Marianne Kearney-Brown, who is also a graduate student at East Bay, tried to add a word to the state’s Oath of Allegiance so that it would conform with her Quaker beliefs. The university offered her the chance to add a statement with her views, but insisted that she sign the oath, unaltered, and said that it had no choice but to fire her when she refused. A statement from the university said that if she changes her mind, East Bay would rehire her.

California’s oath for state employees states: “I, ____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter.”

Follow

Detroit Free Press: Students want university to define hateful speech

The Michigan State University Student Assembly voted Thursday to ask the administration to define the difference between free speech and hate speech.
Advertisement

The issue is expected to be discussed today when the university’s Board of Trustees meets.

MSU President Lou Anna Simon has been adamant that free speech is “at the heart of academic freedom.”

Follow

The Chronicle: Columbia U. Says Professor Repeatedly Plagiarized Students and Colleagues

In a strange twist of events, a professor at Columbia University who reported finding a noose outside her office door last fall has been reprimanded after an investigation concluded that she had committed numerous acts of plagiarism over several years.

The investigation, which was conducted by a law firm hired by the university, found that Madonna G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia’s Teachers College, was guilty of plagiarism in at least two dozen instances, borrowing passages from both colleagues and students without attribution. The findings of the investigation were first reported by the university’s student newspaper, the Columbia Spectator, which obtained a copy of a memorandum from administrators at Teachers College to faculty members.

Follow