Grrr. This story pisses me off beyond all reason. It’s a trumped up contretemps generated by one of our local Minnesota Republican hacks, griping about a UM faculty member using her campus email.
A University of Minnesota professor has come under fire for sending a message using her university e-mail account to help comedian Al Franken with his likely U.S. Senate candidacy.
Sally Kenney, director of the Center on Women and Public Policy at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, sent an e-mail last week from a “umn.edu” address to an undisclosed number of recipients saying that “Al Franken has asked me to put together a Minnesota Team Franken.”
That’s it? She came “under fire” for using her email account? You know, this is a potential US Senator, asking for the assistance of a university faculty member in organizing a campaign—this ought to be a source of pride, the kind of civic outreach we should be pleased to see in a professor. What the hell is wrong with people to complain about this? Especially since she was careful to state up front that this was not a university-endorsed activity:
Kenney declined to comment on the controversy. J. Brian Atwood, dean of the institute, said the message clearly was marked “private” and included a detailed disclaimer from Kenney stating that she was communicating as an individual and not as a university faculty member.
The source was the odious Michael Brodkorb. Did I say he was a hack? He’d have to acquire some infinitesimal modicum of dignity in order to drag himself up out of the gutter slime and qualify to the title of “hack”. Right now, all he is is a junior shit-stirrer; he dreams of being a hack, if only a magic fairy would come along and enchant some hack-level measure of talent into his sludge-flinging brain. I’m sorry, Michael, but fairies don’t exist, so there will be no magic to help you overcome your limitations.
Republican blogger Michael Brodkorb, who recently posted the e-mail on his website minnesotademocratsexposed .com, accused Kenney of using “a taxpayer funded tool not available to competing campaigns. … It crossed the line into clear advocacy.”
A tool not available to competing campaigns? What? Here, you lying wanker, I’ve got 20 gmail invites. Want one? E-mail is pretty much the lowest, simplest, commonest utility around nowadays; the university hands these things out to all of our students. Are we going to start monitoring email to make sure the users don’t commit that horrible sin of expressing their own opinions?
As for advocacy: hell yes! University employees ought to be advocates for our own views. When I signed my contract, I don’t recall one of the conditions being that my blood would be drained and replaced with some colorless, odorless, flavorless fluid that was designed to be inoffensive, nor was I told I had to be neutered to work here. If we are to function as public intellectuals, we cannot do so by burying our opinions and pretending to a false and magisterial aloofness—that’s just not the way the world works.
Now Brodkorb is the kind of marginally multicellular ooze who might play this fake story up, but what I find particularly appalling is that some other university people are mumbling their support of his thesis.
A colleague of Kenney’s, Larry Jacobs, director of the institute’s Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, said that “as someone who works with people from all parties, it’s just an inappropriate use of university resources. … I don’t ever recall seeing an e-mail like that from a faculty member.”
Hmmm. Maybe Jacobs was hired under a different contract—one that required bloodlessness and castration. Does he really pretend that he is an objective observer with no opinions, and is he so fearful that he thinks no one will like him if he admits to an opinion? Email is a commodity, a privilege handed out with our employment, a teeny-tiny perquisite to help compensate for our teeny-tiny salaries, and it’s hardly a drain on university resources for a faculty member to send out correspondence with it. If you want to see a drain on university resources, try turning university employment into an excuse to regulate every action of our faculty.
David Schultz, an ethics expert at Hamline University, said “what’s bad about it is that it lends credence to the perception that academics and professors are all liberal and using college resources to help Democrats. … You shouldn’t use your e-mail or your title or your position to leverage help for particular candidates.”
Why not?
Seriously, what is it with these clowns who want to muzzle academics? It’s not as if we wield some kind of direct clout, able to compel people to obey us with threats and blandishments — we are people who write and speak and have no powers beyond being able to express ourselves (and many of us do not do even that particularly well). And yet people like Brodkorb whine and want to deprive us of even the right to state our opinions, and a certain subset of the university establishment will readily cower and promise not to bark, ever again.
Not me, though.
My name is PZ Myers, I am an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, and you can contact me at myersp@morris.umn.edu. I will be voting for Al Franken, I will be campaigning for Al Franken, I will be praising Al Franken on my blog, and I will be writing email to my friends urging them to vote for Al Franken. I am an academic and a professor, and I’m liberal and proud of it.
Go, Al!
How about this? College Republicans are freely using umn.edu addresses (and I suspect the college Democrats do the same). Shall we inform all our students that they may not use the email accounts we’ve given them to engage in political activities?
Michael Brodkorb is pathetic Republican stooge.
Hey! You got a problem with marginally multicellular ooze?
Yeah, this guy’s just indefensible. :-p
I agree in principle, certainly. Though where I’m at (University of Illinois) we actually have a policy that prohibits using university email for campaigning, so I wasn’t surprised to see the headline of the story. Do other places have a similar rule?
How active is that minnesotademocratsexposed.com anyways? Is it this defunct thing that wriggles to life at the slightest twitch of a lie, or is this a real threat to truth in the media in the area? I’m not in MN, so I don’t have a sense of what is going on politically there, but I’ve heard of this website before, and it was before the elections in November, specifically Wetterling vs. Bachmann (the human shoulder warmer).
It sounds like your run-of-the-mill hatchet factory of powerless people without points to make, only axes to grind.
Our College campus just sent out an email reminding folks to not use campus mail for, among other things, campaigning.
This came about after Seattle was paralyzed by 6 inches of snow a few weeks ago.
Now before you flatlanders laugh yourselves sick, remember..
————— <-- this is the Midwest ^/^/^/^/^/ <-- this is the Pacific Northwest Anyway, we have like 1 snow plow in King County. The campus discussion turned towards politics and how we might have, oh, say 2 snowplows if money wasn't spent on (fill in political boondoggle here). Tempers flared. Email flew. the a-political complained. No more politics using campus email.
Minnesota Democrat sex posed?!
(rereads)
…oh.
I too am at the University of Illinois, and I every year we have to undergo stupid ethics training. It covers situations very similar to this. It’s not clear from the article to whom these emails were sent. Fellow faculty members or to students and subordinates. It’s one thing to say in an email that a faculty member is acting as an individual, it’s another for a subordinate to get an email and have to think, “Well my boss says this is optional, but…”
No one is saying that academics should be silent on issues, or should not intellectually examine policy. But the university is also a workplace, and there is some behavior that is workplace-appropriate and behavior that is not.
Don’t forget, Brodkorb is just Brokdorb spelled backwards
try again:
————– what the Midwest Looks like
^/^/^/^/^/ what Seattle looks like
PZ – Careful there! You look a little like Dan “Grizzly Adams” Haggerty in that picture!
(ref: “Why Not Me” by Al Franken)
ps: The next time you talk to Al tell him I’m still PO’d t him for NOT running for President, leaving us with GW Bush.
Oh whatever. We send each other funny e-mails making fun of Bush and invite each other to local canditates parties and such all the damn time, and especially the last election round. That is, me, my boss, and other grad students and PhDs in the department. We dont send these out to everyone on campus.
We have an email list that goes to EVERYBODY with the university, and no, I dont want people using that for campaign purposes or for Jesus-Spam. But I see no indication in this article that she did something like that.
One of Larry Jacobs nicknames is “master of the obvious”. He’s a small-time local pundit wannabe who seems to badmoth the internt.
Larry Javobs
I suppose I should turn in my old film-studies professor, David Thorburn, for using his university e-mail privileges to promote, um, German Expressionist cinema.
You hear that, Thorburn? They’re gonna be all over you and your tweed jacket. This is what you get for telling impressionable kids they must subject themselves to political indoctrination like, um, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936).
And you, Professor Stephen Meyer of the Political Science Department, just what do you think you’re doing sending messages about environmental politics to the Environmental Politics and Policy 17.32 class list? For shame, professor.
Hey, Henry Jenkins, if you even think one more time about linking to polemical trash like Doonesbury, don’t think tenure will protect you.
I’ve got 98 gmail invites if that guy wants one.
Heck, gmail invites for anyone here who wants one. Just leave me an email at my gmail addy (It’s pretty simple. No special characters or numbers, so you can probably guess.) or drop a comment at my blog.
Brodkorb is well known in St. Paul for getting things wrong. When I was treasurer for the DFL in St. Paul he accused me of not filing proper campaign finance reports for 2005, but he had the State Cycle mixed up with the county cycle. He is also known to shill on his blog for candidates without disclosing that he has been paid handsome fees.
There are certain departments at the State of Minnesota which are prohibited from using their state e-mail accounts for promotion of political causes. I have friends who give me alternate addresses for anything I send to them, because they work in departments in which corruption to influence state or local elections is possible.
Because e-mail accounts through the U can be construed as state supplied accounts, there may a slim connection but unless the employees at the U have anything in their SLA for their account, they are not prohibited from using their accounts as she has done.
Larry Jacobs is one of those people that reporters at the Star Trib and the Pioneer Press call when their editor says “Get me a quote from a political scientist.” He isn’t shy about giving it.
I’m behind Franken, too, unless his Breck classmate Steve Kelley joins the race.
Minnesotademocratsexposed.com had its heyday when one of his posts from 2004 made a case of Mike Hatch holding an event at Alary’s Bar, (known for its exploitation of bartenders and servers.) Brodkorb has been laughed at by democrats ever since.
Until now, I’ve never heard or read the name “Brodkorb” before, and my brain kept accidentally seeing and thinking the word “dork” everytime time PZ wrote it in his post. My brain knows the truth.
Right-wingers know they can get away with this kind of censorship-promoting shit because the corporate media will jump all over it and “have their backs” with no critical examination of the facts or underlying implications.
Sounds like the Republican Dwight Schrute.
Ultimately, this is about Franken, who is not IN goverment yet, but has floated the IDEA of running, and communication with an individual within UNM. I do not see how any of this has any traction, since both political parties have active organizations on campuses all over the nation. Communicating with someone who MIGHT/MIGHT NOT run, and MIGHT/MIGHT NOT win the election even if he does run, sounds pretty benign to me. It’d be entirely another thing if Franken were already in office, or knew someone in office and was trying to get Ms. Kenney a job in government using his status.
The article says the email had a disclaimer on it. Some people only have a work email address. I can’t speak for Ms. Kenney, but who knows if she even has another email address. Sure it’s really east to set one up anywhere for home stuff, but still, it doesn’t require her to do so. Anyhow, the disclaimer is there separating individual from institutional advocacy.
As for Brodkorb’s claim that it’s abusing taxpayer-funded systems and institutions, he is likely to argue that universities far and wide are misuses of taxpayer money in general because they tend to be liberal. And of course this is all part of the assault on education that David Horowitz and other malcontent busy-bodies waste their time on.
This whole situation sounds like another republican non-issue turned cause-for-public-martyrdom. Any excuse to be a victim…
I love Al Franken.
Hey there, PZ! The atheism is one thing, but do not piss off the fairies. God’s too busy running everything in the universe to care one way or the other, but fair folk have way nothing but time on their hands and a mischievous disposition.
Actually Mike, I was right in 2005 when I discovered numerous committees failed to filed their legally required paperwork:
“Neither organization, however, has filed financial paperwork with Ramsey County elections officials. Daniel Duddingston said the Recall Randy filing would be made today. ‘Our bad,’ he said.City DFL chair Stuart Alger said that he believed that the party’s filings with the state campaign finance board — which show they’ve spent $18,000 since 1996 — satisfy the law.
Ramsey County election official Joe Mansky however, said that under city ordinance, political organizations ‘owe us a report any time they raise or spend more than $100.’ That also may mean that more than two dozen political action committees that contributed to Randy Kelly and Chris Coleman are also in violation of the city’s reporting requirements.” Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 21, 2005
Let’s not let facts get in the way of an attack.
BTW, political science departments routinely advertise opportunities for students to become active in government and campaigns. I think the email from Ms. Kenney crossed the line between notifying interested parties about campaign opportunities to advocating for a specific campaign.
A couple of points I haven’t seen here yet…
I work at UC Davis, a campus of 31,000 students and around 20,000 employees. Students and employees are all issued email addresses ending with ucdavis.edu. Students certainly use their campus email for every conceivable purpose (use your imagination). Many of these purposes would probably cause aneurysms in right wing types, but should the University monitor this email to find inappropriate use? And in a public institution, who defines inappropriate? And I’m sure that the ROTC students may occasionally send emails from their ucdavis.edu addresses that would give liberals heartburn.
Second, I use my University email address at any time of day, not just during working hours. The argument that I am using public resources pales, since I work (via email) at any time of day outside of the 8-9 hours I spend on campus.
Finally, UC Davis is now allowing alumni to keep their campus email addresses even after they graduate. (The mail is forwarded to another address, but still….). Does this represent an ethical dilemma?
I once had someone use their university email account to lash out at me with a bunch of swear words and bold statements and accusations. Apparently, it was because I put up a sign in my community garden voicing support for genetic engineering.
I didn’t have a problem whatsoever with him using his university email account to yell at me:
1. He admitted in his emails that he was taking hours of his paid work-time to email me – that’s something I had a problem with.
2. He was violating our university’s Principles of Community with his derisive essays.
3. The bottom of his emails had his standard email signature, including the room number of the lab he worked in, and the phone number.
I let him know that he was violating the PoC, and that should anything happen to my sign, I’ll be sure to give him a phone call. And let his supervisor know that he’s using work time to do all this.
Mis-using an email account? What a sorry claim, indeed. Basically, they are saying that you can’t use an email address that you use for everything else. What, can students not use their school email addresses too?
By the tone of the website you linked to, it appears to me that if this person didn’t use their university email account, then they would be complaining that they are still mis-using their authority as a smart person with a degree and a job. Because they wouldn’t have access to any of those.
As long as it doesn’t detract from their work time, I don’t have a problem with anyone using something so small as a university email address for political emails.
PZ, like the above commenter from Illinois, I work for a university (a certain other U of M) and part of my contract stipulates not using my university email account for any political purpose. One of the examples of “bad uses of email” mentioned in our indoctrination was almost exactly like the one in the article, only did not involve Al Franken.
Hey, cool – I’m in Davis too. Did you hear about the guy that tracked down the blogging professor?
A couple of points I haven’t seen here yet…
I work at UC Davis, a campus of 31,000 students and around 20,000 employees. Students and employees are all issued email addresses ending with ucdavis.edu. Students certainly use their campus email for every conceivable purpose (use your imagination). Many of these purposes would probably cause aneurysms in right wing types, but should the University monitor this email to find inappropriate use? And in a public institution, who defines inappropriate? And I’m sure that the ROTC students may occasionally send emails from their ucdavis.edu addresses that would give liberals heartburn.
Second, I use my University email address at any time of day, not just during working hours. The argument that I am using public resources pales, since I work (via email) at any time of day outside of the 8-9 hours I spend on campus.
Finally, UC Davis is now allowing alumni to keep their campus email addresses even after they graduate. (The mail is forwarded to another address, but still….). Does this represent an ethical dilemma?
I am surprised that you are surprised that Kenney is being called on this. Was she campaigning or not and what does her contract and the University policies allow? I would not be surprised if what she did is prohibited. Lots of businesses specifically prohibit use of their resources for political (and religious) use and state it explicitly in their employment contracts. Maybe someone could let us know what the University’s policies say. BTW, (full disclosure) IMHO Franken is no help to the progressive cause. I had high hopes when I heard about his plans for Air America. But we really don’t need a mirror image of Rush Limbaugh (not that RL has an actual brain).
Though where I’m at (University of Illinois) we actually have a policy that prohibits using university email for campaigning, so I wasn’t surprised to see the headline of the story. Do other places have a similar rule?
I’m also at a university in Illinois, and we can’t use your work accounts for this stuff. They came right out and told us that.
My feeling on this controversy is that the faculty member should have used better sense than to use her campus email for this purpose. Whether it was ethical or not is beside the point. She should realize that she represents the university even if she states that she was acting as a private individual. Her actions reflect on the university just by the fact that her email address carries the umn.edu domain. Sorry, but she made an error on this one.
At our campus we have a policy in place that states essentially that campus mail should only used for university related business.
While I agree that she has freedom of speech and probably should be able to send messages for any purpose she deems appropriate, it is hard for me to believe that she did not have a personal account that she could have used. Bad judgement on her part…
This is such bullshit. College students get email/online accounts and have LESS privileges than professors… and we are not only allowed, but ENCOURAGED to use them for social purposes. Most of my emails come from organizers of the College Democrats or the Progressive Student Alliance. Should they be banned from doing that? We have private accounts, I guess we should just use those [/snark] Damn bullshit…
First, apologies for the double post – it’s all Bill Gates’ fault (yes, I had to reboot to get back into this conversation).
Second, Inoculated, I haven’t heard about the blogging Prof. At UCD? Send a link….
Hey, if a political leader gets elected who already is a comedian, won’t that spell the end of political satire? I mean, these guys aren’t supposed to be intentionally funny.
Closed circuit to Mr. Brodkorb, (apologies to everyone else)
“Actually Mike, I was right in 2005 when I discovered numerous committees failed to filed their legally required paperwork:
“Neither organization, however, has filed financial paperwork with Ramsey County elections officials. Daniel Duddingston said the Recall Randy filing would be made today. ‘Our bad,’ he said.City DFL chair Stuart Alger said that he believed that the party’s filings with the state campaign finance board — which show they’ve spent $18,000 since 1996 — satisfy the law.”
This part is correct, but the Press Release (which Tim Nelson fact-checked) claimed that the St. Paul DFL had not filed pre-primary financial reports with the State Campaign Finance Board. Brodkorb based this on the calender for years in which elections for statewide office are held and not years in which elections for city offices are held. You (Brodkorb) claimed that I was negligent in regards to state as well as county filings go. And yes, I was, as far as the County filings go.
The implication that you tried to draw, and which Nelson dismissed as garbage, when I called him to follow up on your “press release” was that because Chris Coleman was endorsed by the DFL that he was a dirty politician because he associated with groups that didn’t disclose financial reports as required by law. Coleman was not involved with the “Recall Randy” garbage, btw. Joe Mansky unofficially declared amnesty for all of the groups that had failed to file, and ours was one of them, as long as we filed up-to-date reports for 2005. Which I promptly did.
I was negligent in that as a new treasurer I wasn’t aware that the St. Paul DFL, as a state registered entity, also needed to file the County reports; and there were no records of past filings in the documents the prior treasurer handed to me when I took the position.
Nelson also reported, thanks to your press release, that more Republican organizations than DFL organizations had failed to file the County Report.
So, yes, you got it wrong. Again. Only this time you weren’t paid to be wrong.
http://www.mnpublius.com/
Sir, nobody is attempting to silence you and when you try to divert the real topic to something that fits your needs, your claim in this post about being a “public intellectual” loses its luster and credibility.
Professor Kenney was, indeed, asked to use a resource which is not available to other competing campaigns to establish an organization for a particular partisan campaign.
She and you sir, work on my dime.
If you want to add to and stimulate an honest intellectual discussion on matters of public policy, I applaud you. That is what the higher education experienced is designed for.
If you want to organize for a campaign, do so on your own dime.
But please sir, don’t denigrate your own intellect by simply changing the subject to structure it around an argument you can’t otherwise make.
Professors Schultz and Jacobs are correct here, and as long as you attempt to use your position to indoctrinate and organize rather than educate and facilitate, you are going to continue to get called to account.
My feeling on this controversy is that the faculty member should have used better sense than to use her campus email for this purpose.
She was using good sense.
From the article:
Kenney declined to comment on the controversy. J. Brian Atwood, dean of the institute, said the message clearly was marked “private” and included a detailed disclaimer from Kenney stating that she was communicating as an individual and not as a university faculty member.
I’m glad she is not commenting. That Republican doofus does not deserve to be given the time of day. One more example of a conservative sleazeball trying to silence a liberal in academia.
My take at http://www.anomalousdata.com
Perhaps the epic story of protein synthesis as told through hippies dancing will cheer you up?
all apologies if this is indeed old meme.
To all those who are saying she’s using public resources on our dimes, how much does an email inbox cost? Not much. Certainly pales in comparison with the idiotic war being waged over in Iraq right now.
Secondly, this is America. One of our rights is “free speech”. There should not be any clamp on that (even though it does encourage more stupid people to come out and shovel bullshit into the halls of intelligence.) She still has a right to speak as an individual, and no organization should take offense at that. She even put in a disclaimer. Frankly, universities that have problems with this should take a good, hard look at their policies and decide if they want to continue walking down the road to the end of free speech.
Just to dumb it down for the right.
Mike: This statement is wrong: “This part is correct, but the Press Release (which Tim Nelson fact-checked) claimed that the St. Paul DFL had not filed pre-primary financial reports with the State Campaign Finance Board”
Below is the key paragraphs of the release:
“After learning that the St. Paul DFL Party has not properly filed campaign finance reports with Ramsey County for more than seven years and that the St. Paul DFL is paying for and producing lawn signs that are potentially illegally coordinated with mayoral candidate Chris Coleman’s campaign, the Campaign for St. Paul’s Future today demanded an investigation by local authorities and asked the Coleman campaign to disclose and return all contributions received from the St. Paul DFL.
According to public information available at Ramsey County’s election office and confirmed with County staff, the St. Paul DFL has not filed the legally required campaign finance disclosure reports in over seven years.”
It refers to Ramsey County, not the campaign finance board. If you would like me to send you the complete release to refresh your memory, please let me know.
A couple more comments, especially directed at Mr. Dumb. I have a phone in my office, paid for by the University. Occasionally, I use that phone for contacting the City officials, because I am Chair of a City Commission. Some of these conversations involve politics, but ultimately concern citizens of the city in various ways, which cannot be defined as conservative or liberal. (Yard waste, for Pete’s sake…) Are you telling me that this use of the phone is proscribed? Now think of an email address as a phone number….
Secondly, are you proposing cutting off all political advocacy from students using University email addresses? And how do you propose enforcing that?
give ’em hell P.Z.!!!
According to my dad, a professor at UK (er, Kentucky, that is), university policies are more retarded than very retarded cockroaches (entomology professor, if you must know).
I’d send him this article, but he’d say they were justified because he’s a big silly Republican. If I changed Franken’s name to some Republican’s, he’d be as angry as you, PZ. :P
This is standard practice at most jobs. Its called, “Cover everyone’s ass for them, so you don’t get bad relations between workers or between workers and customers.” Or so its “supposed” to work. In reality what it usually means is that you are not allowed to have opinions that differ from the general managerial perceptions *at* work, and if they ever find out that you hold contrary views *off work*, you might not be allowed to have a job either. It doesn’t even matter if its anything illegal, just so long as its something that is “inappropriate for the image of the boss, business, organization, city, state, etc, etc.” If you are lucky, you work some place they don’t care and respect your difference of opinion. If you are not so lucky, you’re basically screwed, because it won’t matter if you where right or not, they will drag you down and spit on you anyway.
Its the dark side of free speech. The idea that in some arbitrary circumstances you should curtail everything from what you say, to even what hobbies you, or even your spouse, may have, so you don’t *offend* someone… Funny.. I never read any laws or constitutional ammendment about, “The right to not be offended.”, but just step on the wrong set of toes some place and…
Mr. Brodkorb: After reading your brilliant investigative report it is clear to me your talents are wasted in Minnesota (or maybe your talent is to be wasted in Minnesota; either way). I’d take it internationally if I were you. And now you have the opportunity. They are signing up Army recruits until age 42 for Iraq duty, something I am sure you feel is important. And when you get there, feel free to start a milblog on my dime. I’d love to hear what you think about it.
Note: Not personal experience in my case, but I have seen some mighty stupid BS done to other people in the news or heard of similar BS done to others, none of it illegal, most of it no one truly cared about, but which some fool with a stick up their bum decided, “detracted from the image or tranquility of our fine ‘insert organization here’!”
I’m as leftwing as they come, but everybody should be able to distinguish between a work email and a personal one and know when to use each. Yeah, the cost of an email is insignificant. So is the cost (zero) of having a personal email account. But cost is not the issue. What if she sent her mailing out on university letterhead and said at the beginning of her text, “This is a personal communication …”? This is the same thing.
It’s stupid mistakes like this that gives bozoes on the right something to make hay about.
On this issue, I have to disagree for once with PZ and agree with AndyS. For personal stuff I have my outside account, for university and professional stuff I have my university account. On my univ. account, I maintain my professorial coolness and pomposity, and on my personal account I can make as much of a fool of myself as I feel like.
Closed circuit to Michael Brodkorb:
Nothing was coordinated with the Coleman campaign. It was a slimeball press release and I still have it, so no need to send it. Your implication was that I was being dishonest when a simple phone call to me would have revealed that I was not fully informed of the County responsibility and I take responsibility for not knowing.
And this is the last that I will post regarding the issue at Pharyngula. I would like to see you respond to the host’s charges against you, and I would like to see you defend your practice of accepting consulting money from candidates and not disclosing that fact when you promote them at MDE.
No, I don’t see it. E-mail is just a medium; the university maintains it because of a general interest in encouraging communication. There is also a post office branch and mailbox almost directly below my lab, and I can mail anything from that point, and it will be cancelled with a postmark from the university branch. Does that in any way imply that my correspondence bears the full weight of the university’s authority, or that there is some burden of responsibility on the U when I pay my phone bill? Of course not.
What I am seeing here is an unwarranted and rather fuddy-duddyish fixation on university email accounts as having some special weight. They don’t. It’s one of many tools the faculty use to communicate, and I oppose any attempt to restrict its use.
Now maybe, if this had been a case of illegal activity, such as using the university’s servers to shuffle child porn around, then I’d see a point. Much as slimeballs like Brodkorb might like to equate criminal activity and child porn with supporting the Democratic party, I hope everyone can see that there is a difference.
In real life, students and academics have been using their emails for all manner of personal, private, and public tasks they would likely never have used university letterhead for.
In the private sector jobs I have had, I find that when I give co-workers a work email and a personal email, and ask them to only use the work email work stuff, I usually get odd looks, and comments like ‘why can’t you just use the same email for everything?’
I admit I have no data, but I suggest that people who behave as if they accept your analogy are in the minority.
The professor performed her due diligence by denoting the communication as private, as far as I’m concerned. If there was any intent to insinuate endorsement by the university, I might feel differently.
But there was not, and right-wing freaks should find better uses of their time than screeching and fainting.
Rail on, academics, rail on. We need your voice in the public sphere.
That’s not really a valid analogy. That’s just a USPS branch office that’s geographically close to you. There’s one close to me on my campus, plus a bakery across the street from it. On the other hand, if you sent off a mass mailing on department letterhead to all the students and faculty in your entire department asking them to vote for Mr. Snuffuluffagus for dogcatcher, that would be inappropriate.
A friend of mine works in an office where they are not allowed to do anything with their work email that’s not work related. That, and surfing the web, are fireable offenses, and people have been disciplined for doing them.
Yes, it sounds like this was a fairly trivial infraction that’s being blown all out of proportion. On the other hand, there’s very little actual information about what actually happened.
I sure hope students in the dorms are not using their snail mail boxes to receive non-school-related snail mail.
I find this whole argument rather silly, and pretty much fully agree with PZ on this one.
There are several issues being discussed here, in a bit of a mishmash: Does the university have rules dictating what accounts can be used for and, if it does, should it? (I say no, for reasons listed below.)
Inoculated Mind hit on what I think is the real issue, and the one that pisses off the university faculty (like me) the most:
“By the tone of the website you linked to, it appears to me that if this person didn’t use their university email account, then they would be complaining that they are still mis-using their authority as a smart person with a degree and a job.”
The email account complaint itself is a red herring, just a way to try and shut up a university faculty member from speaking unpopular views. The whole point of a center of higher learning is to allow a free exchange of ideas, even ‘unpopular’ ones. The winger is just another jerk trying to silence the ideas he doesn’t like.
A word of caution to those using public university email accounts: depending on your particular state laws, your email is potentially subject to Public Records Requests. Here in Ohio several members of a private email list on the evolution/creationism wars had to turn over nearly 1,000 of their archived (by the university) emails, including those from other people on the private list, to the cretins. Less than a month later, material from those emails began to surface in distant places, quoted out of context to make the profs look bad.
So I strongly suggest that activists not use their university *.edu or government *.gov or *.mil email addresses on activism matters.
RBH
I think the real issue here is the concern that some potential voters may lack the number of warm brain cells necessary (three) to determine that an e-mail marked as not representing the university, actually did not represent the university, and thus be fooled into thinking the university endorsed some candidate.
Of course, such voters are coveted by conservatives, for obvious reasons. Basically, she’s poaching in someone else’s territory. I do not believe she can claim to be unaware of the GOP’s campaign slogan, “Dibs on the Morons.”
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
Moreover, I am incensed about my 0.0000002 dime that went towards sending out this e-mail, money that takes away from vital programs like cleaning up the vomit in dorm hallways.
I can’t believe she failed to realize the negative effect this could have on the students. This is truly shameful.
And finally, Al Franken, I hope you take all this free publicity and choke on it!
I also have to agree that this person did not use common sense and it really shows the wide difference between the acadamic environment and the private sector. Regardless if she stated if she was not acting on behalf of the university or if she hit the little “private” flag (which is meaningless) it can still be looked at as being sanctioned by the university. This is for -organizing- a campaign for a federal office for spaghetti monsters sake. Private sector companies have walked people out the door for less.
And for those that are arguing about cost – what is the cost of getting their own account? -zero- There is no undue burden placed on this individual for using a personal account.
btw – gmail accounts are available to everyone now – you don’t need an invite. In addition – gmail is more pleasant to use than the university’s system.
Lets take yet another angle on this. It is foolish of people to comingle their personal and professional email. As one of those nasty administrators I can assure you that it gets mighty messy when someone gets summarily fired and they instantly lose access to their work email account. If they have been using it for personal purposes it may cause them a great deal of personal inconvience, or worse. Suddenly their friends and family cant email them, messages are sent and not responded to, the employer reviews the messages in the account to see if there is relevant work information … and also reads all the personal mail while they are at it. The same applies to files stored on servers, too.
It would have been easier to set up a personal email account than to write the disclaimer that went with the message, and it would be better for her personally if she has control over her personal email, instead of leaving them in the hands of her employer.
Yes, this is a bit of an ‘exceeding the 55 mph speed limit in the middle of the eastern Oregon desert’ infraction; if it is one. I do it all the time, and columnists/reporters ignore me. I dont think I am wrong, but I do think I could get fined if caught. In other words, the rules are bad and I am willing to bend them, as are many others.
None of this email dust up rose to the level of being ‘news’ by any means, but I doubt that her actions were technically innocent, and I certainly would tell her that it is better for her to use a personal account to avoid any appearance of impropriety, and to better allow her control over her personal business.
This might be a stupid question, since many academics have been posting on this thread and none of them have brought it up. But since I’m not a professor, I will. What role does tenure have to play here? Does tenure protect all of a faculty member’s communications? Does Kenney have tenure?
She used the hhh-student-personal list to send this out…. So this was sent out to a University listserv.
I used to post political messages with my U of MN account on political lists – but no longer do so.
One role that faculty are charged with is serving the public. Hence, PZs use of a Pharyngula server (pre-seed) which provided him a medium to disseminate science and other information of public value, would very likely meet that requirement …. while annoying the right wingnuts of Minnesota. Having tenure means he has protections enabling him to meet that ideal without interference (ideally). Non-faculty staff and administrators function in a world much more akin to a corporate environment. I doubt that a janitor could host a server on campus and publish Pharyngula, for example.
Lack of tenure makes one subject to annual contracts which can simply not be renewed … with limited recourse by the instructor/administrator/janitor/etc.
I’ve no doubt shortened this to the point of missing many important factors ….
PZ:
Seriously, what is it with these clowns who want to muzzle academics?
I think this is why –
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html
“3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering’s fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play (“When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” and “universities are nests of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.”
Or am I being alarmist?
Hey, if the jackboot fits…
I think the issue really breaks down to using the email list. If she used the Universities Email list with out their permission she should not have done that because it belongs to the University. If she simply sent emails out to certain people and they got mass circulation then that is OK. She is allowed to state her opinion. It is not like her job and her political choice contradict. A political choice is something that everybody promotes.
My University used to have a group email that went out every Monday that contained every meeting, crime etc. I am sure if she had asked she would have been allowed to add it on the list at my school.
Please reconsider. I hope liberal professors like you continue to dominate academia for a long time to come, but your position on this makes you sounds like you are entitled to priviledges that no one in the private sector enjoys.
It’s not that your university email account has “special” weight, but that it represents a different identity, a professional one. Since it is trivial to maintain a personal email account (you can even use an email client that lets you select which of any number of different acounts from which to sent an email), using your professional identity to send personal correspondence seems egregious. It’s too easy to take your position as “I’m above it all. I don’t have to play by the rules other staff and all of you poor folks in the private sector have to. I don’t have time to fiddle with a personal account.”
Sure, no one cares if you send a few personals emails to friends and family from your university address. But a email list associated with a political campaign should raise an obvious red flag — especially at a public university. The other part of this is, if successful, the mass mailing generates many responses that get mixed into your work email. You’ll want to respond to some, forward others, and store all of them. At what point does it affect the work the institution is paying you to perform?
Would you draw the line at any point? What about a mass mailing to 100,000 potential donors, a million? Would you be just as comfortable if the professor in the office next door was doing that to raise money for a rightwing thinktank or the American Nazi Party?
When did the idea of being a professor, tenured or not, become so all encompassing it includes things like running and/or fundraising for political campaigns using university resources and perhaps on their time and at least co-mingling that work with your professional work?
But here’s to Al Franken, I’d like to see him in the US Senate.
Well, PZ, someone always wants to muzzle someone, now don’t they? Heck, you would like to muzzle creationists, or worse.
But as you a paid by the state, and your facilities are paid for by the state, then you have no business using those for your personal agendas. Do what your were hired to do…teach science. Not anti relgious techniques, or political views that are as fraudelent as the other sides, but SCIENCE.
There is a cultural divide here:
People who work in academia (correctly) presume a certain amount of intellectual freedom.
But people who are provided e-mail addresses in other types of jobs don’t.
“But as you a paid by the state, and your facilities are paid for by the state, then you have no business using those for your personal agendas.”
Yes. No unauthorized use of email. No unauthorized use of computer. No unauthorized use of office room. No unauthorized use of desk. No unauthorized use ofescalator. No unauthorized use of loo. No unauthorized use of worktime. No unauthorized activities during worktime. No unauthorized movement during worktime. No unauthorized thought during worktime. Total and absolute control. Employees are part-time chattel, and during their working hours or while being in contact with any employer property tey should have no more freedom than the chair they are sitting on.
Let me weigh in on PZ’s side. This is a fake controversy cooked up by people who have a grudge against univeristies and try to leverage their “taxpayer’s dollar” in order to get a veto over what people do. People are making it seem that someone was doing the equivalent of using the U postage meter or letterhead.
Given the paranoid reality, it showed a bit of bad judgement not to realize that people like Hinderocket and Brokdorb were out there sniffing around. That’s a different question, though, than saying that she did something actually wrong.
I think that universities should be freer than private workplaces, and I don’t think that taxpayers should be able to micromanage universities.
The issue is the professional idendity suggested by the university email address. The title of this post – “Why should academics be expected to be silent?” – is a red herring. Nobody suggested Sally Kenney shouldn’t be able to express her political views.
PZ rather shoots himself in the foot by rambling about how easy it is to get an email account. Well, if you have 20 GMail invites, why not send one to Sally Kenney, so that she can send political material from a private rather than university-affiliated email account? It can’t be difficult, can it? Why, “E-mail is pretty much the lowest, simplest, commonest utility around nowadays”! And she can still freely identify herself by her academic affiliation if she so chooses, can’t she?
The comparisons to student accounts are a red herring as well. Academics are employed by the university; their paychecks (in state universities) are funded to a degree by taxes on the general population. Students pay the university and are given email addresses as part of the service they get in exchange for their payment. It’s like comparing @yahoo.com addresses belonging to Yahoo employees (who identify as such in their letters) and @yahoo.com addresses belonging to users of the Yahoo webmail service. There’s a huge difference between the two.
I work for a corporation; if I were using my work email to organise a political campaign, I would be reprimanded. Universities are not corporations, but as the issue of a professional idendity goes, the analogy holds. I don’t think it’s a big deal that she was using her university account
to send out a message, or two, or five, and it doesn’t warrant any reprimand. However, using it as a primary, stable account for organising and managing large volumes of political activity would, I think, be inappropriate.
Needless to say, all the rambling about how academics are supposed to be bloodless, that people want to muzzle them, etc. is ridiculous as well.
P.S. Any academic who lacks a convenient email account to organise political activities of any kind with is welcome to email me for a GMail invite.
“Students pay the university and are given email addresses as part of the service they get in exchange for their payment”
.
And staff and are given email addresses as part of the pay they get in exchange for their work.
Have you any problem with it ?
Okay, everyone who thinks this use of e-mail is over the line: Stop right now and send an e-mail to the president of Southern Methodist University telling him that you think SMU would be over the line to host Bush’s political action think tank to be connected to the Bush library.
I dare you.
Yet in KS, it was ruled ok for former AG Phillllll Kline to use a list of email addys from the state in his own failed campaign.
Looks like it depends on who’s doin’ the usin’.
Yes the artificial “controversy” is stupid, but common sense (as well as explicit policies at many if not most workplaces) says to use work email for work and your personal email account(s) for everything else. (For example, I am explicity allowed to do this on my work computer as long as I get my job done, but I’m not supposed to send or receive non-work-related email on my county account. So I use my Yahoo mail account for that. No problem.) Given the easy availability of free webmail accounts that can be accessed from everywhere I fail to see how this imposes a burden on anyone.
I don’t see your point, professor. Not doubt the republican moron who is raising the stink would prefer that academics, or at least all of those that disagree with him, be forbidden to have public opinions. That is nonsense. However, strange as you may find it, most employers frown on employees using their affiliation as a part of the employee’s political advocacy. I do not send out political solicitations from my employer’s domain. I use my private email account. That is, IMO, as it should be.
And yes, there are many examples of similar lapses from all points of the politcal spectrum. I do not think that changes the point. Neither does it constitute the silencing of academics.
I don’t see anything wrong with the professor sending out the email. Without reading it I’ve no idea exactly what she said. I wouldn’t be surprised if Franken contacted her because she’s a politics lecturer, and therefore a very useful source of contacts and campaign workers.
If she used the email to attempt to recruit for the campaign, again, I don’t see a problem, the experience of working on a real political campaign would be a very valuable one for her students, regardless of their political leanings.
What’s to stop Brodkorb and his friends finding a republican lecturer and doing the same thing?
Professor of Public Affairs and Law
University of Iowa, B.A.
Magdalen College, Oxford Unversity, B.A., M.A.
Princeton Univeristy, M.A., Ph.D
Sally J. Kenney has taught undergraduate courses on women and the law, comparative law, and constitutional law. At the Humphrey Institute, she teaches graduate courses on women, law, and public policy; politics, planning, and decisionmaking; and feminist organizations. She has taught law courses on European Community law and women in the legal profession in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Turkey. Professor Kenney earned M.A and Ph.D. degrees in Politics from Princeton University, a B.A. and M.A. degrees in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Magdalen College, Oxford University, and a B.A. degree in Political Science from the University of Iowa. She has been at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and the Director of the Center on Women and Public Policy since 1995.
She is obviously a bright, talented individual who cares deeply about politics and law and women’s place in society.
Let her do whatever the fuck she wants with her email! This isn’t about Sally Kenney. This is about an asshole trying to intimidate her. Focus on him, becuase he is the problem. She’s a respected professor, someone who has achieved a great deal in life, being harrassed by a pipsqueak right-wing fascist who gets kicks out of intimidating feminists.
Read Michael Bérubé’s book. This is how the sleazeballs on the right operate. If you start saying, yeah, he has a point, we might as well throw in the towel right now.
The University of Minnesota Code of Conduct expects “community members” to “speak candidly and truthfully”. The Board of Regents policy says the following:
The policy statement about publishing on the Web specifies that
In summary, I’ve been reading through the Acceptable Use of Information Technology Resources policy, and I can’t find anything which damns Prof. Kenney.
Has anyone followed PZ’s suggestion and looked at Smartie’s comments?
Read the rest; it’s relevant.
If anyone is interested, the University of Minnesota’s “Acceptable Use” policy can be found here.
The only REAL problem she could have is if one of the recipients complained about receiving the letter to University Officials. It could be considered unsolicited mail (IE SPAM) and could result in loss of privileges.
Also, the University of Minnesota has 100,000+ active e-mail users. This includes staff, faculty, students, and alumni. Since it costs the about the same to have 50,000 as 100,000 there is no reason to speak of “wasting government resources.” It is ludicrous.
Further, to assume that this professor is knowledgeable on all of the available free e-mail services is stretching it. As far as she is concerned (and the University as well), it is her e-mail account to do with what she will. There is no push to restrict University e-mail activity to “business only” activities.
This is a non-issue as far as the University is concerned.
I agree that this is a silly non-issue.
Nevertheless, from my experience working in government, I would never issue any sort of sensitive email on a government account, no matter what qualifications I added to it, no matter how harmless, precisely because of the existence of idiots like Brokdorb who’ll try to blow it up into a flagrant misuse of government resources. Hell, one friend got himself in trouble at work for a purely personal, private letter-to-the-editor he wrote and sent from home.
I’ve seen it happen before, and I don’t want the mess, however silly it is. Perhaps that’s cowardly of me, but I don’t want to pick that particular petty, so-easily-avoided battle. So yes, I tell friends to use my personal account for certain things, and they look at me funny. Except the other (mostly former) government employees. They look at me sympathetically.
I’d like to point out that the University of Minnesota was at one point the largest ISP (Internet Service Provider) in Minnesota. Anyone could get a umn.edu email by using the U as their ISP. You had to make a donation to the alumni association (but you didn’t have to be an alumni) and it was cheaper than other ISPs. This is a big distinction from state.mn.us email addresses.
When I was at UNC-Chapel Hill, posted on the wall next to the telephone was a notice informing employees that it was forbidden to use the phone system for personal telephone calls (dialed or received). “Personal professional calls” could be made if the University was reimbursed for the expense.
Yes, it was the 21st century at the time.
lloydletta said, “She used the hhh-student-personal list to send this out…”
Could that be a fact? How refreshing.
Blake Stacey:
I’ve now read Smartie’s blog- and it doesn’t change my opinion, other than the fact that the situation is even more absurd!
I know the post volume is down here because of PZ’s upcoming book, but is this really worth our time? We’re debating a right-wing intimidation tactic?
Seriously, people, we should be cluttering up the fringed shark thread, not the thread about this joke of a basement-wanker-troll trying to shut up the educated.
Usually on board with you PZ, but this is slightly different.
If an employee of any company sends stuff out with the company letterhead on it then they are representing the company, no matter how often you say, “no this is only my views.”
I always look at it form the perspective of writing a letter using company stationary.
Maybe it is the speed and convenience of the modern age, but it does not take long to set up a hotmail account and make up a signature with all your qualifications on it. I’ve done it and am typing now.
Your attempts at justification border on the rant on this one and that is not like you were 6 months ago.
Holy Flying Spaghetti Monsters! Hey Brodkorb – out of the last 10 messages in my umn.edu account:
–a couple from the green party
–a couple from the MN alliance of peacemakers (a hippie communist organization, obviously)
–a couple about the social justice program at the U (yes, we’re not all here to try to be CEOs!)
–and… one from a politician asking for money! (a bulk mailing, but hey… same principle, right?)
Can I get my Star Tribune article now? I know I’m a student and not a professor, so my powers of indoctrination don’t count, but the U is also an employer of mine. Whaddaya say, Michael?
Pfft, everyone knows that people with Doctorates and Master’s degrees are the least qualified to talk about issues of importance!
You have it exactly backward. The radical emails you recieve at your umn.edu account are proof that YOU are being indoctrinated by the big U.
DaveC says:
You’re perfectly welcome to look at it that way, but there’s nothing in the UMN policies which forces anyone to do so.
I love it when they fire your engines up!
Don’t flinch an inch, you are 100% correct on this one.
John, here’s the link to the Aggie article.
http://media.www.californiaaggie.com/media/storage/paper981/news/2006/10/17/CampusNews/Student.Alleges.Ucd.Employee.Runs.Political.Website.While.On.The.Job-2371626.shtml?sourcedomain=www.californiaaggie.com&MIIHost=media.collegepublisher.com
Now I understand what the accuser is getting at, however, what if a professor was blogging during office hours, whenever there aren’t students coming in to see them? The time has been designated for students to seek help, and if they aren’t coming in, what does it matter what they do? Heck, I know of Davis professors who hold their office hours in coffee shops! (And one in a pub)
I might also add, that I often looked up and read things when I worked in the lab, but after the paperwork was done and I was waiting for PCR reactions to finish in the thermocycler. I was using a university computer to do it, however, it wasn’t interfering with my work in any way. But if the professor was allowing it to detract from his paid duties, then there’s a problem.
I’m surprised that no one has tried to tank PZ for blogging during the daytime…?
I’m surprised that no one has tried to tank PZ for blogging during the daytime…?
…just have to get “grasp mindless anti-evolution wankers in the tentacles of lagic and drag them down, down into the inky depths” added to his job description. It really should be there.
Blake, the UMN policies you link to list “Conducting private business unrelated to University activities” as an unauthorized use. (In Appendix A – Using Information Technology Resources Standards) The question is one of what is “unrealated to University activities.”
Here’s a problem for that approach, though: define my work hours. Why do you assume it is during the daytime? I’m working at night and on weekends, for instance, and there ain’t no overtime in my business.
If someone tried to tell U professors that their work hours were, for instance, 9-5, we’d thank you and greatly enjoy our increased leisure time. The U might slowly grind to a halt, though, as all the grading and writing and prep work that normally spilled over into all those other hours ended.
Excuse me? Of course it is.
Oh, you mean, you won’t find a right-wing professor? If reality has a liberal bias, that’s your problem, not anyone else’s. Besides… search harder. They exist.
Excuse me? Of course it is.
Oh, you mean, you won’t find a right-wing professor? If reality has a liberal bias, that’s your problem, not anyone else’s. Besides… search harder. They exist.
Right on the money, man. I am a first-year student at the HHH and this whole issue has exploded just today because we students were notified on the same listserv that a non-Humphrey member of the university community (a staff member) had requested to be added to our list, but would not be posting.
We were told in an email this morning that this unidentified person had requested access and would be added this morning. No more information was provided. I immediately protested, thinking this was unwarranted university observation of our internal communications.
Turns out, after all this hubbub and lots of emails shooting around, the woman who had been added, Eva Young of http://lloydletta.blogspot.com/ asked to be withdrawn from the email list. In an email sent by an acquaintance of hers who is on the listserv, Young said the following:
“Can you please tell people I’m now off the list. If the list is HHH students only, then I shouldn’t be on the list. The list manager did call me and asked why I joined – I wanted to hear the other side – because this got coverage. I was not trying to hurt students. I’ve been targeted as a
staff member for expressing political views, and would never do that to someone else.”
What’s more likely than her interest in “hearing the other side” is that she wants to find more more dirt ala Sally Kenney’s email that she can expose on her blog and achieve her own partisan ends. In any case, no one was discussing the Kenney/Franken matter before this new email issue arose. And in nearly all cases, students have reported they were just fine with the original email, considering it to be no different from any of the other job/internship postings that we get day in and day out.
The real violation of trust and university resources here may be this operative trying to use her position at the university to unfairly and unethicallyget an insight into the personal/priv ate/public/political sphere of Humphrey students that she otherwise would not be entitled to.
I doubt there will be any outcry. However, the MN Daily is on the case after I tipped them off to this whole thing this morning… so we’ll see what they can dig up.
The questions are now: Who approved this person’s addition to our student listserv and did the person who authorized it know this person maintains a public weblog with a conservative bend?
If the university had a policy against such private use of her official email, then she done wrong and should be reprimanded. If they have no such policy (and judging from the reaction of the Dean, they probably don’t), then she didn’t. Period, end of story, there is NOTHING ELSE WHATSOEVER to discuss here.
1. Brodkorb unleashes some canned outrage
2. PZ responds with REAL outrage
That’ll learn him. What a great rant. Always the best way to respond to canned outrage if you ask me.
Corporations pay employees to make money for them. The corporation’s facilities, therefore, are dedicate to corporate money-making; no other use is explicitly authorized by default. Your company’s network administrators might or might not permit you to use their email systems for extra-curricular communications, but no user of a corporate network should assume that he has a right to use the network for purposes which are not work-oriented.
On the other hand, universities pay professors to do independent intellectual work. The university’s mail system is dedicated to intellectual work; any such use is implicitly authorized, while other non-intellectual network use is not. For exmaple, if a professor uses the university network to distribute .mp3s or videos, or to advertise commercial products, or to socialize online, that use could fall in the category of prohibited use, if the university management so decrees. But as posting political messages to mailing lists actually does qualify as a variety of intellectual work, any user of the network should expect that it is precisely the sort of material for which the university computer system exists.
I am on faculty at a private university. Our computer systems appropriate use policy contains the following rule:
“Use of IT Systems in a way that suggests University endorsement of any political candidate or ballot initiative is also prohibited. Users must refrain from using IT Systems for the purpose of lobbying that connotes University involvement, except for authorized lobbying through or in consultation with the University’s General Counsel’s Office.”
The clear implication is that the university’s e-mail system may be used to personally endorse political candidates so long as ther is no suggestion that such an endorsement represents the position of the university itself.
I’m still having no luck with your trackback link. I get the same error message each time. Anyway, trackback link here: http://tinyurl.com/34d9jw
This is appalling. For those of you who think that this person should be repremanded, I have the following questions:
Do you really support someone sifting through potentially everyone’s mail to look for “illegitimate purposes”?
What distinguishes someone’s personal and professional lives? How do you draw the line? When a university professor appears on a radio show to explain their work, which is it?
As for the private workplace analogy: I think even there employees should be free to do what they wish, so long as it doesn’t interfere with deadlines, for much the same reasons as the case in academe.