The Kansas Board of Regents has adopted a broad new policy barring employees, including faculty, from “improper use of social media,” which include content that “impairs … harmony among co-workers” or is “contrary to the best interests of the university,” with some narrow exceptions such as “academic instruction within the instructor’s area of expertise (emphasis added)” The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, among other groups, have argued that the new policy “authorizes punishment for constitutionally protected speech, and … leaves professors unsure of what speech a university might sanction them for,” the result being a chilling effect on both free speech and academic freedom [FIRE, NPR]. The policy was adopted at the behest of critics of one professor’s controversial anti-gun tweet, and Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO says conservative regents should have been among the first to realize that professor-muzzling is not the way to respond.
KSU’s Dan Warner did a series of posters (Creative Commons permissions) skewering the new policy, including the one above; more on that here.
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Well, let’s see. Story gets posted to the Internet. On par with selling free tickets to a Barbra Streisand concert.
Before the Internet came along, there still was gossip.
Plus, there was Who Is Afraid of Virginia Wolfe. Which pretty much exposed faculty life.
I even heard that the reason professors on college campuses were so petty, is that they had nothing important to argue over. So they argued over getting themselves “better” parking spaces, in the faculty parking lot.
Will this become quaint, if, ahead, college attendance is seen as not worth the ticket price of admission? You mean you can’t get an education on the Internet? More people hear me, now, than if I was just gossiping about this over my backyard fence.