ONE OF THE GREAT CLAIMS of American higher education is that it protects and encourages something called “academic freedom,” a guarantee of protection for teachers and students to engage in free inquiry and exchange no matter how inconvenient or unpopular the ideas they express in their scholarship, teaching, or studies. In contrast to more repressive countries, so the story goes, US academic freedom is well established and secure. Indeed, this claim carries so much weight that some college and university administrators use it to defend opening branch campuses in repressive countries, asserting that these campuses will not only protect academic freedom, they will provide a model for their host countries. There is a problem though. These claims ignore a crucial set of facts: because of the increased privatization of public universities, the increasing managerial domination of public and private colleges and universities, and the narrowing of public employee speech rights, the legal and practical underpinnings of academic freedom are weaker than they have been in decades. Academic freedom is being hollowed out by the economic and social transformation of higher education. It needs to be rebuilt along with the colleges and universities that should provide it a home.
In December of 2013 the Kansas Board of Regents took a series of steps that may dramatically reduce academic freedom in the state’s higher education institutions. Apparently responding to political criticism over one University of Kansas professor’s anti-NRA tweet, the regents instituted a sweeping new policy regulating the proper and improper uses of social media. The policy regulates a wide range of expression and increases the power of university executives over the speech of faculty and staff. The Board defined social media broadly as “any facility for online publication and commentary, including but not limited to blogs, wikis, and social networking sites.” It declared that “the chief executive officer of a state university has the authority to suspend, dismiss or terminate from employment any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media.” In focusing on social media, the Kansas regents sidestepped faculty academic freedom within the classroom (although it is unclear about faculty emails with students), and by granting CEOs the power to control external expression and the right of internal electronic dissent, the Board threatens to return Kansas’s higher education system to an earlier day, 90 years ago, when administrators believed that they had the right to dismiss faculty for their opinions or expressions. That these regulations govern the terrain of electronic communication threatens to embroil both faculty and the universities and colleges in an ever-expanding structure of surveillance and censorship.