Breaking ranks with several other federal judges who have recently considered the question, a U.S. magistrate judge held last week that the First Amendment protects job-related statements made by faculty members of public colleges. The case at hand involved a physician, Elton R. Kerr, who has accused his former boss at Wright State School of Medicine, William R. Hurd, of wrongly moving to discipline him in his capacity as a professor of obstetrics and gynecology for teaching certain techniques and procedures against Dr. Hurd’s wishes. In asking the judge to dismiss Dr. Kerr’s claim that his First Amendment rights had been violated, lawyers for Dr. Hurd argued that the Supreme Court’s 2006 Garcetti v. Ceballos decision left Dr. Kerr accountable to his employers for speech made in connection with his job. U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael R. Mertz rejected the idea that the Garcetti ruling, which upheld the disciplining of a deputy district attorney for job-related statements, should be applied to speech in an academic setting. The judge’s ruling said universities “should be the active trading floors in the marketplace of ideas.”
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Great, now we’ll have faculty thinking they can talk about climate change, evolution, and ridiculous things like that. What’s this world coming to? Shouldn’t the government stifle professors like that?
Who is this Dr. Hurd and what gives him the right to determine what medical procedures and techniques should be available to obstetrics and gynecology patients?
Perhaps the article does not completely present the issues. Most of us recognize an institution’s responsibility–through it deans, chairs, and departments–to develop the curriculum which is taught. Indeed, we don’t hire part-timers as independent contractors because we want them to teach our curriculum, not whatever they wish. The degree of flexibility varies from discipline to discipline–greater, probably, in philosophy, much less, I’d hope, in engineering. It seems quite possible in a medical area such as ob/gyn that there are preferred techniques which a medical school would want to be taught and ones which it quite reasonably would not: osteophathic schools teach a certain type of physical manipulation that allopthaic schools do not; we do not expect instructors in allopathic school to teach what is taught in this regard in osterpathic schools. Even in areas where there are professional differences of opinion, a particular institution may reasonably decide to support, and teach a particular approach or technique. The medical profession should certainly accommodate “active trading floors in the marketplace of ideas,” and so, in crucial ways, should an individual medical school–but not necessarily within the professional curriculum.
If “dfay” is being ironic, he or she should signal it more decisively. Merely taking a sociopathic stance no longer constitutes satire–not these days.
So the use of irony is now deemed “taking a sociopathic stance” . . . . Jasmine, if “dfay” had to spell it out for you, then there would be no point in using irony.