BY KEITH E. WHITTINGTON

Is it possible to go a month without a controversy about the extramural speech of a faculty member? Probably not. There are, after all, a lot of faculty out there, and they have greater unmediated access than ever before to put their views about matters both great and small before a public audience. Someone, somewhere, is likely to say something controversial. At the same time, we live in an era in which there are substantial incentives to stir up controversies. Professors are not themselves immune from the temptation to seek attention by being provocative in public. More disturbing is the growing number of activists, interest groups, and self-proclaimed watchdogs eager to whip up controversy in order to advance an agenda of undermining higher education.

An aspiring professor can find him or herself in the crosshairs as easily as an already ensconced professor. The University of Georgia has ominously announced that it is “vigorously pursuing all available legal options” to potentially rid itself of a graduate teaching assistant in its philosophy program. The graduate student is an outspoken public figure with a YouTube channel under the handle The Funky Academic and a history of making racially charged statements about local and national politics and the need to resist what he saw as the extensions of white supremacy.

An undergraduate of the university took offense and eventually confronted the graduate student when the latter was speaking at a meeting of the Young Democrats of UGA on the college campus and filmed the exchange. After the undergraduate left campus, he posted the video and began a campaign to call the attention of alumni, donors, and administrators to the graduate student’s public remarks. There is little doubt that the graduate student’s political views are relatively extreme and boldly advanced, but the university initially took the position that just because a member of the campus community violated Facebook’s community standards (as the graduate student had done) did not mean that he had violated the university’s non-discrimination policy. Students, faculty, and staff had the right to express their personal views in public places. Lacking evidence that the graduate instructor had engaged in discriminatory conduct in the classroom, the college should not sanction him for his personal political views, no matter how discomforting they might be for some alumni of the institution.

The University of Georgia’s discretion in such matters is particularly constrained by the constitutional protections that students, faculty, and staff at a state university enjoy. Private universities have more of a free hand, but at both private and public universities advocates for academic freedom have urged university administrators to respect the right of faculty to engage in controversial extramural speech. Such protections will be even more important in the future as these sorts of controversies increase and universities feel the pressure to clamp down on members of the campus community who might cast the institution in a less than flattering light. It is particularly important that we not only defend contractual, legal, and normative protections for extramural speech, but also that we do so for the right reasons.

In the case of the University of Georgia, the college initially emphasized that students, faculty, and staff alike enjoyed the freedom to express their personal views on their own time without university reprisal. For the AAUP, the rights of faculty and graduate students to engage in such speech should be further protected as a component of academic freedom. The traditional justification for protecting extramural speech such as the various remarks on social media and at political meetings at issue in this case is awkward, however. Such speech does not obviously advance the truth-seeking mission of the university and does not depend on the particular scholarly expertise of the speaker. In both tone and substance, such remarks might well fall significantly short of what we would expect in a scholarly venue.

In my article in the current issue of Academe, Academic Freedom and the Scope of Protections for Extramural Speech, I argue that extramural speech should be protected in a university-setting but not for the same reasons that we protect teaching and research. The protection of extramural speech is better understood as a prophylactic rule. Such protections are necessary not because we value the extramural speech in and of itself, but because leaving such speech unprotected will inevitably undermine the scholarly project that universities must be dedicated to preserving. One need not approve of the particular opinions expressed by this graduate student or think such remarks are especially valuable in a community of scholars to nonetheless think that universities would be far more censorious intellectual environments if we did not extend robust protections to such speech and discourage university administrators from pursuing investigations of students and faculty who find themselves in the midst of public controversy.

Guest Blogger Keith E. Whittington is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Politics at Princeton University and the author of Speak Freely: Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech.

Articles from the current and past issues of Academe are available online. AAUP members receive a subscription to the magazine, available both by mail and as a downloadable PDF, as a benefit of membership.