Academics involved in mobbing other academics: the cowbell analogy
A dangling conversation with Will Creely a Senior VP of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) comparing protesters disrupting live academic talks to cyber harassment
My wife and I were beginning a digital nomad trip through Europe, sometimes traveling together and sometimes apart, dictated by differences in where I had to give lectures and workshops versus her visiting small museums and craftspeople doing research for her online fine linen business. The relaxed style of my email to FIRE suggests either multiple rewrites to polish or maybe just that we were enjoying our time in a small Airbnb apartment somewhere out of the usual tourist destinations that she had found with a lot of research.
I thought I would give it another try with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization I never got very far with when trolls were flooding my institutional affiliations with hateful emails. However, this time, I was a lot clearer on the nature of the harassment and was developing a conceptual framework to accommodate the 100s of screenshots I had accumulated.
The brief exchange generated some nice quotable quotes on both sides.
The concept of pickets drowning out a speaker by shaking cow bells became a powerful image of what is not tolerated on campus but accepted in online behavior.
James Coyne <jcoynester@gmail.com> Wed, May 1, 2019 at 4:40 pm To: fire@thefire.org
I have watched with great interest the evolution of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) position concerning free speech and protest, which is an effort to disrupt and make the free speech of others virtually impossible. I appreciate FIRE’s nuanced position concerning the Cowbell incident:
“If one heckler with a cowbell is all it takes to silence expression at PSU, no one’s speech is protected,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “PSU must demonstrate that it takes its First Amendment obligations seriously and is willing to stand up for campus expression.”
Universities face the challenge of mobbing and cyberbullying of academics by those who object to the exercise of free speech, often by inventing misstatements or distorting what the academics said and demanding they be reprimanded or fired. I think this pattern will continue, and we will need strong action to guarantee due process and protect the tenure of those under attack.
Having been the target of some mobbing in social media, I have come to appreciate how impossible it is to intervene in a rapid fire Twitter storm of attacks. I had the experience of the attacks being both at me and at the official Twitter accounts and academic institutions where I have emeritus appointments. Whoever managed the Twitter accounts of these universities panicked and fueled more attacks.
I understand that FIRE can do little to discourage such assaults on academic freedom when they come from anonymous, pseudonymous, and off-campus accounts. In such instances, it is important to speak out, as FIRE has, in defense of the rights of the academics under an attack against their employment and free speech.
But I’m wondering if FIRE will eventually move towards endorsing some recommendations for how academics involve themselves in social media, including protests.
By being in academia, people enjoy special privileges to study and write about whatever topic they want without fear of reprisal. Would asking administrators and mentors to instruct those around them about using social media would be too much?
I note, for instance, that both the Google and Facebook organizations encourage the idea that employees are responsible for whatever tweets they “like” or retweet. Could those in a position of influence in academia similarly promote the preservation of the rights of academics to express themselves about fear of reprisal?
I do not think it’s too complicated a position to advocate free speech and uphold the free speech of protesters, but point out how they are jeopardizing the basic rights to free speech without fear of reprisal. “We deplore the organized effort by Y to prevent a speech by X but uphold the rights of Y to register their disapproval of X.”
Anyone who has ever been mobbed can appreciate that it can become the social media equivalent of cowbells.
My mobbing experience and Arthur Isak Appelbaum’s excellent Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life influenced me. I am] attempting to construct some recommendations that universities and professional organizations can adopt in conjunction with, rather than in opposition to, free speech.
I would welcome your thoughts and pointing me to any relevant statements by your fine organization.
Kind regards
James C. Coyne, PhD
Professor Emeritus of Psychology in Psychiatry
Perelman School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA 19104
Response from Will Creeley
Will Creeley <will@thefire.org> Tue, May 7, 2019 at 5:05 PM To: jcoynester@gmail.com
Professor Coyne,
Thank you for writing FIRE. I appreciate your kind words, this good question, and your insight, which sounds like it was hard-earned. Thanks, too, for your patience with our delayed response. The end of the semester is a sprint for us, and we received more case submissions this past April than we've received in any other single month in our nearly twenty years of defending student and faculty rights.
Social media presents a minefield. On the one hand, as you suggest, it's straightforward enough for FIRE to defend faculty threatened with punishment for protected speech posted online via social media accounts. Speech does not lose protection, no matter how controversial or unpopular, simply by being posted on social media. As you note, we have defended many faculty members in recent years for their controversial social media posts; here's a representative example, just for ease of reference.
But those are the easy calls, to some extent, and I understand your question to concern something else -- i.e., whether institutions can ask that faculty respect the expressive rights of others online by refraining from certain speech. This is a harder question.
Institutions that are bound by either the First Amendment or their own robust promises of free expression cannot instruct faculty to refrain from participation in social media debates, even when such participation feels like being on the receiving end of the cowbell to their online "opponents." They can certainly ask faculty to be mindful of their online presence and expression, but any such reminder must be aspirational, lest it chill protected speech. That may be a frustrating answer, but any other result would empower the university to police what faculty may say online to an impermissible extent, resulting in inevitable abuse and censorship.
However, any institution that panics in response to one of its faculty members being targeted by an online mob and punishes that faculty member in response has violated its obligation to protect faculty speech, and FIRE would come to that professor's defense. Our defense of Jim Livingston at Rutgers University provides a good example of how such a defense works in practice. In that instance, Rutgers was free to denounce Livingston's speech -- but as we reminded the institution, it could not capitulate to the cowbells ringing loudly online by punishing his protected expression, controversial thought it may have been.
Your idea of a set of best practices is interesting. Have you seen the AAUP's warning about targeted online harassment? If so, what do you make of it?
Thanks again for writing FIRE, Professor Coyne. I hope these brief thoughts prove useful, and thanks again for your patience. I'd be happy to continue this conversation at your convenience.
Sincerely, Will
Will Creeley
Senior Vice President of Legal and Public Advocacy * Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) 510 Walnut Street, Suite 1250
Philadelphia, PA 19106
215-717-3473
Admitted in New York and Pennsylvania.