The Johns Hopkins University, long considered a standard-bearer of academic freedom, has decided it is time to formally spell out its standards on a professor’s right to speak.
In the wake of controversies over the past year that involved faculty speech, the university announced last month that it would convene a panel of students and faculty members to write the university’s first-ever formal statement of principles on academic freedom.
Johns Hopkins first faced turbulence last spring after Benjamin S. Carson Sr., a professor of neurosurgery who was slated to speak at the medical school’s commencement, equated advocates of gay marriage with those who promote bestiality and pedophilia during an appearance on Fox News. Dr. Carson, who has since retired, withdrew as commencement speaker under pressure from students.
The university generated new controversy in the fall. A cryptology researcher, Matthew D. Green, wrote a blog post in September criticizing the National Security Agency for its aggressive surveillance strategies, a post that the dean of Hopkins’s engineering school demanded he take it down. Hours later, after a barrage of media criticism, the university allowed Mr. Green to restore his blog post. The dean apologized and, in doing so, insisted he was “supportive of academic freedom.”
The dean’s letter of apology cited an American Association of University Professors statement of principles on academic freedom that is 74 years old, highlighting the university’s outdatedness, some scholars say. The university had no statement of its own to point to—from this century or last.
University officials realized it was time to act.
“It was a moment where not having a set of principles and a clearly laid-out understanding of our obligations got in the way of a sensible response,” Robert C. Lieberman, Johns Hopkins’s provost, said of the university’s haste in ordering Mr. Green, an assistant research professor in computer science, to remove his blog post from university servers. “It was a good moment to step back a little bit and think through with the whole community what we mean when we talk about academic freedom.”
The panel’s deliberations promise to add a chapter to a long history of academic freedom at Johns Hopkins, sometimes referred to as the birthplace of the American Association of University Professors. It was there that a philosophy professor named Arthur O. Lovejoy organized an early meeting of the group that would become the AAUP in 1915.
But to many, including Mr. Green, the university’s decision to articulate its principles feels overdue.
“I’m surprised they didn’t really have this already,” the cryptology professor said.
“The way you keep really good faculty,” he added, “is guaranteeing they’re at a university that has strong academic-freedom guarantees.”
Need for Clarity
With tools like blog posts and Twitter, professors have never had so many opportunities to take part in public debates. That prospect has unsettled some university administrators, like the Kansas Board of Regents, which passed strict rules policing faculty members’ social-media posts after a controversy involving a journalism professor’s tweet about the National Rifle Association. The board is now re-evaluating its policy.
“Universities are having a hard time with the public face of remarks that otherwise wouldn’t have legs, but that now have centipede’s legs,” said Cary Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was president of the AAUP from 2006 to 2012.
Mr. Green said that outlining clear academic-freedom principles, especially at a time of rapidly evolving technology, might have helped the university deliberate before it acted in a case like his. He said that the university needed to reaffirm its principles across all media, rather than offer different levels of protection to different forms of speech.
“The idea is that you should be allowed to communicate about issues that are important,” he said. “Communicating in a letter to a newspaper or journal article or tweet are just different kinds of communication. We shouldn’t have to rethink anything.”
Mr. Lieberman, the provost, said he hoped the statement Johns Hopkins is developing would clarify the university’s values and “make the conversation much more mature” when controversy arises.
Many scholars say that any statement of principles needs to embrace universities’ new opportunities to contribute to vital public debates.
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said Mr. Green was fulfilling a university’s mission to challenge authority and expertly engage the public when he described his reaction to NSA disclosures. Mr. Rosen writes a blog published by his university, as Mr. Green does. The NYU professor said he was startled that a university with Johns Hopkins’s rich history would interfere with the public work of an expert on cryptography.
“You’d think you would actually have a lot of deliberation about taking a step like that,” Mr. Rosen said.
The Johns Hopkins panel has been asked to submit its recommendations to the president and provost by May.