Thursday, June 1, 2000

Lawsuit Pits 2 Instructors Against Anonymous 'Teacher Review' Postings By SCOTT CARLSON There's a war over words going on at City College of San Francisco, where a teacher-evaluation site has stirred up a debate about how the First Amendment applies to the Internet. A court may have to decide whether the postings on the site are libelous or merely offensive. Two instructors at the college have filed a lawsuit against a former student who maintains Teacher Review, a Web site that posts anonymous comments about the college's faculty members. Daniel Curzon-Brown, who teaches creative writing, and Jesse David Wall, who teaches physics, say that their reputations and livelihoods are being destroyed by obscene and threatening postings on the site. And they say that other instructors at the college feel pressure to give better grades to avoid bad reviews on the site. "It's there, hanging over everything now, and it's putting the integrity of the classroom under serious pressure," Mr. Curzon-Brown says. "Grades will become absolutely worthless. They'll be extorted." According to its mission statement, the Web site is a forum for students and a guide to help them pick the best instructors before enrolling. Anonymity, the site says, ensures that the reviews will be honest and that the students will "be protected from retribution." However, Mr. Curzon-Brown and Mr. Wall say, the site makes little effort to protect instructors from people who want revenge for bad grades they've received -- or who want to strike back at professors who complain about the Web site. Unlike other teacher-evaluation sites that have irked professors, Teacher Review does not take advertising. On its front page, the site offers links to lists of professors who it says are either "Making the Grade" or "Not Cutting It" -- the 15 "best" instructors and the 10 "worst." The site currently features 5,000 reviews of more than 600 City College instructors. Most professors receive a typical mix of good and bad reviews, although postings on the site tend toward the poles -- many reviews characterize instructors as either "the best teacher ever" or "the worst, worst, worst." According to the site's own statistics, half of the reviews posted give instructors A's; almost a third give D's or F's. Among the pans, some reviews might constitute libel if distributed in any traditional medium. In a mild example, one review says about a music instructor: "SHE'S A CRACKHEAD. I'M SERIOUS ABOUT IT." Mr. Curzon-Brown, an openly gay teacher of creative writing, has been the subject of several graphic postings that use the word "faggot" frequently, and allege that he raped and molested students in exchange for better grades. Mr. Curzon-Brown also claims that some of the reviews were written by people who clearly have never taken his courses -- especially those submitted after news accounts about his lawsuit began appearing. "I've had tons of reviews about me since I've been in the media, and they're not written by people who know me." Mr. Wall says he joined Mr. Curzon-Brown's lawsuit after bad reviews shrunk his classes last fall. He says his evaluations on Teacher Review were the usual mix of good and bad until he spoke out against the site at a faculty meeting last spring. After that, he says, the positive reviews were dropped from the site and he received a string of F reviews, and his rating on Teacher Review plummeted. That fall, he says, his courses had half the usual enrollment. Mr. Wall says he's so frustrated about the site and what he sees as a lack of support from the college that he'll retire at the end of the year. He says the site's backers "like to intimidate their teachers, they're finding a way to get good grades at City College, and they like that site." "Here I am attacking their site, and they're going to get me for it," he says. "And sure enough, they have found a mechanism by which they can destroy my career." The lawsuit names Ryan Lathouwers, the Teacher Review's Webmaster, who started the site in 1997 when he was a student at City College. Mr. Lathouwers is currently the engineer for a similar site, TeacherReviews.com, which will offer instructor reviews for hundreds of universities across the country. Attempts to reach Mr. Lathouwers for comment were unsuccessful. Bernard A. Burk, a lawyer who is representing Mr. Lathouwers at the request of the American Civil Liberties Union, says that the obscenity-ridden content about Mr. Curzon-Brown and others "isn't slanderous or libelous," although he acknowledges that "it's disgusting and intemperate hate mail, and it doesn't have anything to do with teaching performance." The site asks people to avoid posting profane or threatening reviews, and urges users to "Please accept the responsibility that comes with anonymous postings!" But reviews are posted automatically, and many users appear to have ignored the guidelines. Nothing prevents users from posting multiple reviews of the same instructor, and many of the reviews seem to be responses to earlier comments about the professor in question. "People disregard those guidelines, and when Ryan is informed about those postings, he looks at them and decides whether they comply with the guidelines or not, and whether he's in a position to make a judgment about that," Mr. Burk says. "Is that an imperfection in Teacher Review? I would say that it is an imperfection. Is it a basis for a lawsuit or a reason to close down the open forum? Absolutely not." In Mr. Lathouwers's defense, Mr. Burk asserts that the Communications Decency Act of 1996 gives immunity to Webmasters like Mr. Lathouwers who maintain open forums online. "We believe that Congress let a garden like that bloom understanding that there would be some weeds," Mr. Burk says. As for the instructors' claims that some of the pans are fake, Mr. Burk says that's a convenient way to silence critics. "Our Constitution says that open communication is what is demanded by our society," he says. "Otherwise you have to pick a philosopher king that says what communication is allowed. Professor Brown would like to be the philosopher king of the Internet, but the Constitution is not going to allow him." Mr. Curzon-Brown and Mr. Wall also named City College in the suit, because the college has a link to Teacher Review on its Web site. Philip R. Day Jr., chancellor of the college, says he finds some of the content on the site "disgusting," but he says that the ill effects of the site have been overblown and haven't affected morale among most faculty members. He says the college is negotiating a settlement with Mr. Curzon-Brown and Mr. Wall. "They won't get a cent," Mr. Day says. Administrators believe that the instructors have no case, and say that the college won't seek to recover the cost of its legal fees from them if the suit is dropped. Mr. Day bemoans City College's link to the Teacher Review site, adding that it wouldn't have been added to the college's site if the institution had a comprehensive review process for links placed there. The college is in the process of forming such a review. For now, City College officials say they are stuck with the link because removing it from the college's Web site could bring a First Amendment lawsuit from student groups or the A.C.L.U. "As one of the lawyers involved in the case said to me, 'If you think you've got big problems now, sever the link and you're really in the big time,'" Mr. Day says. Background article from The Chronicle: Web Sites Offer Evaluations of Professors, for Better or Worse (9/29/1999) Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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