Will Professors Viscusi and Chopra permit disagreement, or will disagreement constitute a lack of collegiality, a claim recently made at Brooklyn College? The e-mail does not indicate whether the democratic ideologies of Stalin and Mao will be used to illustrate Robin’s and Chopra’ commitment to freedom and democracy.

Two conservative groups that have stirred controversy by demanding that public colleges in Michigan and Wisconsin hand over professors’ e-mails related to labor controversies have failed to produce any evidence of wrongdoing by the scholars from the documents obtained.

In March the deputy executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party filed an Open Records Law request to see emails from University of Wisconsin history professor William Cronon’s university account. The request seems to have been a response to Cronon’s political activism – the Wisconsin Republicans were checking to see whether the professor was using his university account (at a public university) for political purposes.

The AAUP and other groups denounced the move as a violation of academic freedom. NAS president Peter Wood, however, called it petty and foolish but not an infringement of academic freedom or other rights:

I don’t know of any evidence that Professor Cronon did in fact violate any laws. It may be that the Wisconsin Republican Party is simply fishing. If so, its action is further unwelcome, not as a violation of academic freedom, but as a demonstration of small-mindedness. The better way for the Wisconsin Republican Party to answer a critic is by answering his arguments on their merits.

If Professor Cronon were in jeopardy of losing his job for what he wrote on his personal blog or published in the Times, I would agree with the AAUP and the AHA. Academic freedom in that case would be at risk. He faces no such risk.

The Wisconsin Republican Party has made no statements about its findings, so it may still be possible that the emails contain evidence of wrongdoing by Cronon. But even if it does not find such evidence, its actions were legitimate, albeit pettifogging. As the Chronicle puts it, “A Chronicle analysis of state open-records laws determined, however, that they contain no blanket exemptions for college faculty members or explicit references to the desire to protect academic freedom as grounds to withhold records from the public.”

Keep in mind that “sexual harassment” codes extend to a wide range of behavior that is not sexual: namely, creating a “hostile environment.” The “hostile environment” category embraces speech and makes this an academic freedom concern, according to both AAUP and FIRE.

How low does this bar go? Pretty darn low. Consider a case from North Dakota where a male student (Caleb Warner) was suspended for three years after a female student accused him of rape. The police later found evidence that this woman had made a false accusation (they never happen, right?) and “lodged criminal charges [against her] . . . for filing a false police report.”

So the male student was let back on campus, right? No. Based on the “preponderance of evidence” letter just issued by OCR, North Dakota State still refused to re-consider the case. In the administration’s opinion, there was no “substantial new information” (bold for emphasis) and “Warner’s three-year suspension ‘was not a legal process but an educational one.’”

It’s a bad turn of events because in 2003 the same Office of Civil Rights was concerned with the “convict first and fast” attitude of harassment officers in areas of speech. In 2003, the Office of Civil Rights issued a statement clarifying that enforcement did not require campuses to abandon the First Amendment. Today’s OCR seems to think its lower standard is just fine, thank you. It will apply not only in cases of alleged rape but also “expressive activities” (speech).

This gutting of due process will leave administrations with the power to blur the difference between rape (a crime that must be proved, except on campuses) and innocent speech, however controversial. In either case, due process is there to prevent Star Chambers from walling themselves off from the rest of the world and declaring their authority Supreme on campus. So now places like North Dakota will stonewall and say: we don’t deal with legal processes, only educational ones.

AAUP and FIRE have fought so many of these cases that they have lost their shock value.  Indifference breeds the arrogance of power. Fortunately, faculty/staff/students can organize or speak out. In some cases, they can bring in the AAUP and FIREs of the world and “sue the bastards.” Perhaps that is the only thing that Power understands.

For more, read this FIRE FAQ on the new OCR mandates

HT: Adam Kissel

The hard left needs to keep up a stream of pseudo-issues to keep its base whipped up. When the FSU/Koch Foundation flap stops working, they’ll replace it with something else that’s just as ridiculous.

In the words of Peter Wood, President of the National Association of Scholars, a university has a four-fold mission:  pursuit of truth, transmission of ethics, cultivation of character, and preparation for professional life.

He was quoting from Dr. Wood’s 2009 lecture in Switzerland on the Sustainability Movement in the American University.