What We’re Reading: May 2020

Students, Instructors Face Threats and Hateful Speech as Zoom Meetings Get “Bombed”
Jake Goldstein-Street and Claudia Yaw | The Daily | April 1, 2020

On April 1 at the University of Washington, “an individual in a password-protected Zoom conference for a biostatistics seminar class used the annotation tool to post the n-word repeatedly across the screen, visible to everyone in the class. Over chat, they called students racist slurs, specifically targeting Asian students with xenophobic remarks about the coronavirus and threatened to ‘shoot up’ one student’s house.” Working with students, the teacher was able to remove the perpetrator but ended class early. The university, located only a few miles from one of the first U.S. COVID-19 outbreaks, is among the first to experience remote classes being “bombarded with hateful language targeting black students, Jewish students, women, and the LGBTQIA+ community, making it harder for instructors and students to shift to fully online classes during the novel coronavirus pandemic.”

College Probes Controversial “MenofDickinson” Instagram Account
Sarah Manderbach | The Dickinsonian | April 19, 2020

A social media account called “MenofDickinson” stirred controversy at Dickinson College with posts that are derogatory towards women. Students traced the IP address and phone number of the account to a Dickinson student, who denies creating and operating the account. After complaints from students and alumni, administrators directed campus police to identify the account’s owner and contacted the social media platform to request that it close the account, which has since been deactivated.

UNT Professor Fired Over Microaggressions Dispute Sues University
Marshall Reid | Denton Record-Chronicle | April 22, 2020

Former University of North Texas adjunct professor of mathematics Nathaniel Hiers is suing the school for wrongful termination and breach of his constitutional rights. “According to the lawsuit, Hiers’ contract was rescinded after he criticized flyers decrying microaggressions, left by an unknown person in a faculty break room. …Hiers said he wrote, ‘Please don’t leave garbage lying around,’ on a nearby chalkboard with an arrow pointing to the flyers.” His attorney “wrote that Hiers ‘firmly rejects bias and prejudice against any person or group of people, including marginalized groups’; however, he thinks the concept of microaggressions harms diversity and tolerance by promoting a culture of victimhood.”

“They Are Against Free Speech”: Baylor, TCU Refuse to Recognize Turning Point USA Chapters
Mary Margaret Olohan | Daily Caller | April 22, 2020

Administrators at Baylor University and Texas Christian University have declined to recognize chapters of Turning Point USA, despite efforts on the part of the schools’ students to form branches of the organization. Both schools “cited the presence of other conservative organizations on campus as part of their rationale.” “The universities are treating TPUSA as if it were ‘one and the same’ as other conservative groups, [a TPUSA representative] said. ‘We’re not,’ he said. ‘Each and every organization, we all work together, but we all have different focuses on campus and when this many students are interested in starting a Turning Point chapter on campus, it shows that we’re not just another duplicate—that we also have something to serve that students want to be part of.”

Kirkwood Settles with Professor it Removed for Antifa Comments
Vanessa Miller | The Gazette | April 28, 2020

Kirkwood Community College will pay $25,000 in a settlement with former adjunct professor Jeffrey Klinzman, who said he was asked to resign after the fallout from telling a local reporter “I am Antifa,” and for posting to an Iowa Antifa Facebook page. Klinzman had taught at KCC for the past 16 years and said he was “protecting [his] right as a college faculty member to exercise extramural free speech.” Kirkwood Community College noted that Klinzman resigned voluntarily and stated that it agreed to the settlement to avoid “potentially lengthy and costly litigation.”

Board of Regents Approves Amendments to Legislation on Student Free Speech
Aashna Sheth | Badger Herald | April 22, 2020

The University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents approved proposed changes to its system-wide disciplinary policies for students who have “materially and substantially disrupted the free speech of others.” The policy states that students who disrupt free speech may face disciplinary action after two complaints from other students and a panel hearing. After the panel determines whether the student has violated free speech, the student would be subject to a warning for a first offense, suspension for a second, and expulsion for a third. The Wisconsin Legislature considered, but did not pass, a similar measure this year.

Political Diversity on Campus: Brown U. 2019 Speakers
Greer Brigham and David Sacks | Brown Gadfly | March 31, 2020

Brown SPEAK, a coalition of students at Brown University, has released its third annual report on the political leanings of campus speakers. Its report finds that although Brown invited several notable conservatives, “In a poll of speakers from Brown’s most politically-relevant speaker series, we found that 0% identified as Republican, 0% voted for President Donald Trump in 2016, and only 6.9% listed themselves as somewhat conservative on a scale of extremely conservative to extremely liberal… in contrast to the 24.1% that identified as extremely liberal.” Brown SPEAK’s founder reflected on the coalition’s impact over the last three years: “After all our work, the university did increase the number of big name moderate conservative speakers. We did get the message out to our community, as can be seen in the content change of the [Brown Daily Herald ] editorial pages and in the scores of letters we received from alumni and current students thanking us for taking a stand on this issue. And yet… we still have so far to go. A true political diversity of speakers does not exist on Brown’s campus today, and likely will not for some time to come.”

Journal Retracts Paper on Gender Dysphoria After 900 Critics Petition
Adam Marcus | Retraction Watch | April 30, 2020

A journal published what proved to be a controversial paper on gender dysphoria in late 2019. The journal’s editors, facing criticism for publishing the article, issued a statement that they and the author had agreed to additional edits and excisions and defended their publication of an article that “serves to question existing dogma.” The journal retracted the paper after criticism and an online petition led it to commission a third review, which recommended pulling the article. Retraction Watch weighs in: “We can’t comment on the merits of [the paper in question] as a work of science. But we do feel comfortable saying that the journal appears to have badly botched this case… either the initial round of peer review and editing failed or the second round failed, or both failed. The end result is a journal that looks inept and an author who’s thrown under the bus.”

No Comment: Public Universities’ Social Media Use and the First Amendment
Report | Foundation for Individual Rights in Education | April 22, 2020

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education analyzed the ways in which over 200 public colleges and universities in 47 states and the District of Columbia use automated content filters and other features to curate content. Among its findings: that nearly a third of institutions surveyed use custom “blacklists” banning a wide range of words; that schools manually remove posts or comments; and that schools block certain social media users. “These tools enable public universities—and other government actors—to quietly remove critical posts, transforming the Facebook pages into less of a forum and more of a vehicle for positive publicity.”

The First Amendment on Campus 2020 Report: College Students’ Views of Free Expression
Report | Gallup and Knight Foundation | May 5, 2020

Gallup and the Knight Foundation released their third nationally representative survey of undergraduates. They find that several key trends continue to hold since the first such survey in 2016. For example, 63% of students agree that the climate on their campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find them offensive (up from 54% in 2016 and 61% in 2017); students broadly support free speech but increasingly large majorities favor restricting expression that targets minorities such as slurs and stereotypical costumes; and only 29% agree that dialogue on social media is usually civil (down from 37% in 2019 and 41% in 2016), even as a majority of students report that most political expression occurs on social media. As in previous surveys, racial, gender, and political ideology gaps exist in views about whether colleges should protect students from certain speech and perception of whether dissenting opinions can be comfortably expressed in class.