POSTED BY KELLY HAND
The AAUP released an open letter to US congressman Jeff Fortenberry letting him know that threatening and harassing faculty members is unacceptable after Fortenberry’s chief of staff harassed Ari Kohen, an associate professor of political science at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. After Kohen “liked” on Facebook an image of an altered campaign billboard for Fortenberry, Fortenberry’s chief of staff, William “Reyn” Archer III, called Kohen and then contacted his department and UNL administrators when he did not immediately receive a return call. Kohen subsequently called Archer and shared publicly a recording of their phone conversation, in which the chief of staff characterized Kohen’s social media “like” as an expression of support for vandalism, threatening to draw public attention to it. Kohen commented on the conversation and its implications in a series of tweets.
Archer’s actions are of particular concern in a political climate in which right-wing media outlets are increasingly targeting faculty members for their comments on social media. Sign the open letter.
May I humbly suggest that this kind of puerile drama so prevalent among many segments of society but perhaps most unfortunately so in academia, because of the presence of student role modeling susceptibility, would simply not exist but for electronic speech, the Internet but especially so called social media. It promotes even more infantile behavior among a sector already abundantly so endowed, but it also undermines maturity in thought and management of rational self-determination. Even the ancient Greeks were aware of such public traps. Imagine Plato with an email account?