Kansas Board of Regents restricts free speech for academics | Hacker News Reader

Kansas Board of Regents restricts free speech for academics

washingtonpost.com

29 pointsSuraj-Sun28 comments

Considering that it's the Kansas Board of Regents and not say the Kansas Legislature and Governor I'm not sure their right to free speech is being violated. What I mean is that every job comes with restrictions on speech, you shouldn't badmouth the boss, you shouldn't stir up dissent, you can't give away company secrets or violate an NDA you might have executed. None of those are in violation of the First Amendment since they're voluntary measures. These kinds of things have been going on in the corporate world for many years now.

The thing that's unsettling about it is that a paper getting published with fake data by someone at the university would make the university look bad. So they're saying that professors have to deal with those kinds of issues privately which is really unfortunate. Probably means issues like that simply won't be addressed at all and I do think that's a big loss for everyone, not just those scientists who are directly affected.

Yeah, I could buy "reneges on tenure" here but not "restricts free speech."

I think you're wrong on two counts: one practical, one theoretical.

The practical one is that state schools are arms of the state. Given that their governor sits on the Board of Regents, I'm not sure they're effectively distinguishable in the way you suggest.

The theoretical one is that universities are not like "every job". The whole point of universities is to encourage bold intellectual inquiry. Academic freedom is at the heart of what universities do. Whether or not they can legally get away with trying to treat professors like serfs seems less important to me.

I always thought that your right to free speech was as a citizen, not as an employee. For example if you work for the President and you badmouth him, he can have you fired. The distinction is that once you don't work for him anymore, you're now free to say whatever you want.

I'm not a lawyer so I don't know. If my mental model for how free speech works is wrong I'd love to find out. Especially if you can give me case law to look at.

that's right. 'freedom of speech' is about the right not to be thrown in jail for your speech, not about your entitlement to a sum of money, or a position with a title.

Practicing free speech is a duty for an academic - there is this idea of "public intellectual". It's also the duty of the employer not to restrict it in the name of political expediency.

"Free speech" and "the First Amendment" are not synonymous. The First Amendment makes no guarantee of employment, of course. But if you fire people based on speech, you are making the speech of your employees less free. This is what the debate is about. The First Amendment is a red herring in this context.

> The theoretical one is that universities are not like "every job". The whole point of universities is to encourage bold intellectual inquiry. Academic freedom is at the heart of what universities do. Whether or not they can legally get away with trying to treat professors like serfs seems less important to me.

Then maybe universities shouldn't be funded by the state. A CIA operative, military officer, cabinet member, etc. doesn't have a broad freedom of speech, because they are paid by the state to do a job. If you want to be free, don't take the 'dirty money'.

That's an idealistic view. The US has seen immense success in the past 100 years or so by funding universities for research and at the same time still providing a "reasonable" amount of academic freedom for professors. It attracted the brightest minds of the world and gave them the resource to study what they wanted to do. And you propose throwing that away for an absolutist principle?

wrong. The federal government has only been broadly funding academic research for the past 50 years or so. While there was scattered early research (such as the Michelson-Morley experiments done at the USNA), and the land-grant acts. Big guided research operations such as NIH and NCI were largely internal, small research operations from the 30s through the 50s. NIH first issued grants in 1967.

Oh, please. Universities are a fine example of something that the state should fund. Knowledge is a public good. An educated populace is important societal infrastructure, especially in a democracy. Education is such a long-cycle thing that purely private funding of it is deeply problematic.

I grant that people working under the rules of wartime discipline have reasonable speech restrictions. And people whose job is to publicly represent the organization also have some limitations on their public speech. But there's no general reason that employers should be able to control employee speech except when they are directly working.

false dichotomy. Just because there is no profit motive doesn't mean that it can't be private. For example, the chemiosmotic effect is something that was discovered by a private nonprofit scientific effort.

You could also argue that education is such a long-cycle think that state control is deeply problematic. Knowledge is a public good so it shouldn't be sullied by grubby hands of politicians seeking to control the populace and gain more political power for the sake of their narcissism.

Ken White has a post titled "Ninth Circuit Clarifies First Amendment Rights of Public University Professors" [0] which goes in to some detail about the various legal issues at the nexus of free speech rights and professorship.

[0] - http://www.popehat.com/2013/09/05/ninth-circuit-clarifies-fi...

Thanks for the link.

While not an attack on free speech as a constitutional provision, it is a direct attack on the ability of academics to speak freely. If academics cannot communicate their work without fear of personal or political retribution, then the research itself is fundamentally tainted.

The Kansas Board of Regents is established by the legislature, correct? That makes it a public institution, subject to the 1st amendment (through incorporation under the 14th amendment to apply to the states, and applying to a State's board of regents as a proxy of the legislature set up to deal with higher educational matters).

This is directly related to a professor's controversial tweet after the navy yard shooting:

http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2013/nov/25/after-discord-cause...

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas-regents...

That's an absurdly low bar for controversy. If they're looking to police innocuous comments like that, this particular comment is just a pretext.

> The Kansas Board of Regents just adopted a new social media policy, which allows Kansas state universities to fire (tenured and untenured) employees for “improper use” of social media. “Improper use” includes inciting violence (perhaps justifiable though potentially open to contentious interpretations), posting confidential information about students (fine) or posting things that are “contrary to the best interests of the university”

If the OP's summation is correct, then this is quite a curtailment. Keep in mind that it's not about the "reasonableness" of the rules, it's about the actual implementation and more importantly, the chilling effect. In America, how Supreme Court has made it so that the media has a considerable amount of leeway when it comes to publishing falsehoods. This sounds absurd, but in practice, it has allowed the press to be far more aggressive in its examination of public figures (whether they are best taking advantage of it is another debate)

Consider it this way: your company says engineers are allowed to brainstorm and implement features, unless those features end up causing an "unreasonable" amount of harm to the customers or to the company. Otherwise, just stick to maintaining legacy code and having meetings. What effect do you think that'll have on the engineering culture?

> Consider it this way: your company says engineers are allowed to brainstorm and implement features, unless those features end up causing an "unreasonable" amount of harm to the customers or to the company. Otherwise, just stick to maintaining legacy code and having meetings. What effect do you think that'll have on the engineering culture?

Depends on the field. In software, there's enough competition between companies for talented engineers, so some companies might offer "you're allowed to work on harmful projects" as a hiring perk/bonus, for some definition of "harmful" (for example, not directly profitable projects).

Additional reading (links from the article):

http://www.philnel.com/2013/12/18/kansasregents/

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas-regents...

Aaaaand this is why I'm developing an alternate, anonymous online personality.

Well good luck, 'Adam Wong'.

Don't forget to use separate browsers, so you don't accidentally do something with one account that you should have done with the other.

Everything I do with as Mr Hyde is done through a virtual machine which I encrypt and store on a thumb drive. And I only connect to the internet through Tor. I'm not a security expert so these aren't extraordinary measures but it makes it reasonably safe to post material that future employers might find unsavory.

Don't want to do it the wong way, after all.

After 27 years, that joke is still fresh as ever. /s

As my last name is Rapp, I can sympathize...

Sorry man. Couldn't help meself.

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