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U. of Wisconsin Professor and Administrators Clash Over Posters Called Threatening

September 28, 2011, 2:23 pm

The University of Wisconsin-Stout has come under fire from free-speech advocates for refusing this month to let a theater professor decorate his office door with posters described by some administrators as threatening. The conflict over speech began when the professor, James Miller, hung a poster from the science-fiction television series Firefly that referred to killing. The campus police chief took it down, telling Mr. Miller in an e-mail exchange that he could face a criminal charge if he rehung the poster or another one similar to it. When Mr. Miller hung a second poster denouncing fascism as leading to violence, the campus police took it down, as implying a threat, at the urging of a campus threat-assessment team that had conferred with the university system’s office of general counsel. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group, has accused the university of censorship, but top campus officials argued in an e-mail to the faculty and staff that they had “a responsibility to promote a campus environment that is free from threats of any kind.” As discussed in a July 31 Chronicle article, colleges have struggled to balance free-speech and security concerns in dealing with complaints that faculty members have somehow threatened others on the campus.

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  • 22280998

    I assume the TV-series and movie poster (?) mean that these shows and similar ones will not be shown on campus. Are they cleaning out the library Oh, cut those Shakespeare classes as well.

    Obviously, administrators with not enough real work to do and not enough smarts to do it anyway.

  • archman

    So I clicked on the posters that the professor put up. One looks like a movie poster that would normally grace a lobby in a theater. The second poster appears basically harmless and is mildly funny.
     
    Completely ridiculous behavior on the part of the campus police. For their next act, I suppose any laboratories with hazardous material warnings will have their door signs removed, and the research faculty will be sanctioned over “threatening behavior”.

    The UW-Stout “Campus Threat Assessment Team” needs to have its head examined.

  • mikep

    This is another example of administrators (and law enforcement official, apparently), who simply can’t be bothered to know and understand the law. Hello, first amendement? Concepts of free speech? The actual semantic issue of words and their meanings? Do you really think that a poster satirically referencing a duel, from a MOVIE, really (really?) is an implied threat to anyone? If the people in charge at that school actually truly believe (and/or if they actually believe ANYONE who saw either poster would ACTUALLY believe) that they were in danger or were being personally threatened, then they are simply too ignorant or unintelligent to work at a university. Don’t we have better things to worry about? Aren’t there actual threats, and acts of real violence, on campuses, that need to be dealt with? Get some perspective, people!

  • bag31050

    Give a person a uniform and a badge and they become the Thought Police.

    “People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the
    usual word.”

    
- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 1

  • http://twitter.com/GerardHarbison Gerard Harbison

    I hope they don’t teach any of that nasty Shakespearian drama. Some of those plays are bloodbaths!

    (But actually, they probably don’t) 

  • jefffager

    As a college administrator, and given the information in this article, I certainly would NOT have removed the poster, and if the campus police did so, I would have them return it to the professor.  Unfortunately, administrations feel caught between competing interests.  In our litigious society, colleges and universities are being sued to failing to prevent violence on campus.  (Of course, the big event was the shooting at Virginia Tech.)  The public cries out (and lawyers argue) that “something should have been done.”  Unfortunately, there is a tension between safety and freedom.  We do as much as possible to maximize both, but ensuring the safety of the many might involve the contraction of freedom for some.  As human beings, administrators sometimes err in trying to maintain this balance–and sometimes they err badly. 

    Besides, I have learned in a quarter century in higher education that the first story is NEVER the whole story.  There is more to this than we read here, so I am loathe to judge people that I do not know and cannot be complete idiots too harshly.

  • hawkeye515

    Sometimes posters fall down, and someone could get hurt. Kudos to those stout risk-managers.

  • bfrank1

    How about the classic sign “The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”?

  • akprof

    Silly!

  • samusa

    This incident is totally idiotic. Why would a prof. hang such a stupid poster on his office door is beyond me unless he is a complete moron; and he is teaching at college where the security officers are no better.

  • Guest

    What troubles me is that this professor was hanging the posters on his office door, not on the doors of other people or in public spaces. 

    The professor should not have been subject to this kind of control by the campus if he was only using his own door.

    I do have some personal experience in this area but I think the Wisconsin case was a strictly wrong application of public display policy.

    I objected when someone in my department hung 15 posters promoting his theatrical work, because they were antiwar, ridiculed the US military, and showcased a protagonist who shared many uncomfortable details with my own biography. I serve in the Army Reserves; not only I but some veterans were angry about the posters. But the issue there was that this colleague was hanging the posters in public areas and specifically in the walkway between the elevators and my office door (about thirty paces). But even then I did not ask him to take the posters down; I blogged about it and explained on my blog how offensive it was. Within hours of posting my blog I was called in by authorities to delete my blog because it was endangering my colleague.

    I hung up a letter on my own office door protesting the department support for his play contrasted against the repression of my free speech on a blog that was not hosted by the University. The chair and dean then chastised me for hanging a letter on my door, telling me I was doing a “disservice” to the department and myself. 

    I am not a lawyer so I don’t understand the implications of federal, state, and local regulations. My rule of thumb would be that posters that overwhelm a public space with one point of view likely to offend people are a problem, especially if people cannot have the right to contest or criticize that use of public space. If this professor only hung one poster on his door, that seems to me something not subject to intervention by campus authorities. Sometimes it seems that administrators are straining at gnats and swallowing camels.

  • procrustes

    Since you don’t know them, how can you declare that they are not complete idiots.

  • oldphyrte

    . . . and the Homer’s “violence filled” epics. And for Heaven’s sake and don’t get caught with anything about Oedipus, Medea, Clytemnestra, Ajax  and all the rest of those vile characters from violence-inducing Greeks plays adorning your office.

  • tdb489

    The Navy Recruitment Center has a very large poster in its window which says:  “Life, liberty and the pursuit of all who threaten it.”  I immediately walked into the recruiting office and asked if I could have a poster.  They reply was “all out of posters, but here’s a bumper sticker.”  I proudly took my bumper sticker home and contemplated where to display it.  After weeks of serious thought, I concluded that displaying the bumper sticker would probably lead to someone shooting me.  That someone being a politically correct person or the enemy.  The bumper sticker is now in my box of treasures for the future generation to contemplate. 

  • corwinamber

    This is amazingly absurd. My oldest son co-wrote published RPGs for Firefly/Serenity while an undergrad, and my youngest son developed a skit in 7th grade for his class based on one episode. SF posters and series like this are sophisticated and intelligent,and are one thing we can get college students to voluntarily think about, read and discuss. Taking this poster down shows how incredibly ill-informed and stupid some administrators can be. I really am astounded by this.

  • mseifter

    The police took down a poster that denounced fascism as leading to violence? This tells a sad story about the level of pc on this particular UW campus. The gibberish propounded by UWS campus admins, never a sure bet for deep thinking, tells why, in their little hole, students are probably wasting more of their time texting each other than hitting the books. Try to learn? Why should I try?  

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