Dear The Stranger, Free Speech is a thing – even for off-duty cops.
Unless you have real evidence that this person is letting his politics interfere with his work, or spending time on Facebook when he’s on the public clock, then this really shouldn’t be a story.
The idea of employers – or the press – monitoring worker’s Facebook pages for “wrong” political opinions is far more horrifying, and far more of a threat to freedom, then anything some jerk cop writes on Facebook.
UPDATE
Let me note that in this post, when I refer to “freedom of speech” I’m referring not to First Amendment law, but to what I’d call a “free speech culture,” by which I mean a culture in which people can feel free to speak out on controversial issues without facing unreasonable and disproportionate reprisals. I worry that in our current culture – in which partisan hatred and fury has become so ordinary (on both sides) – only those with the thick skins and secure positions will feel comfortable speaking out.
Although there’s no government censorship going on here, we can and should want more for free speech than just “no one was thrown in jail.”
An example of what I mean by a “unreasonable and disproportionate reprisal” is having a well-known newspaper comb through your Facebook feed in order to cherry-pick the worst-sounding quotes.1 This reporting includes calling your bosses to inform them of what you’ve been writing on your Facebook page, and getting them to “consider… a formal investigation into” you.
Suddenly your Facebook activity is exposed to thousands of people you never expected to be scrutinizing your words, the pages you’ve linked, and what you “liked.” Total strangers on social media and in the Stranger’s comments are questioning your intelligence, your competence, and your worth as a human being.
It’s a seriously unkind thing to do, and newspapers like the Stranger shouldn’t do this lightly. There are obviously cases where someone is enough of a public figure so that any political opinion they express, regardless of context, is a reasonable news story. But “police Sergeant”simply isn’t in that category.
Now, there are cases in which reporting on the political opinions of a police officer might be important because they directly call into question if Hall is a suitable person to be a police officer. For example, if Sergeant Hall had called for police to engage in illegal beatdowns of civilians. But Hall didn’t say anything of the sort; he just spouted the typical opinions one hears every day from law-and-order Republicans. And just being a right-winger is not enough to mean someone can’t be a cop.
I really can’t think of any reason why it’s the public’s business to know what Hall’s opinion of Obama is (a point the Stranger emphasized in the headline). I don’t want that sort of thing reported about right-wing cops in newspapers, any more than I want that a left-wing cop hates George Bush to be reported in the National Review.
I’m not saying that free speech can or should mean freedom from consequence. But the consequences should be proportional. If the people who read Hall’s Facebook feed criticize him, think less of him, argue with him, or even decide they don’t want to be friends with him anymore, that’s fine. I’ve seen conservatives treat criticism as if it were censorship, and that’s ridiculous.
But when ordinary citizens – including midlevel cops – can’t yak about politics on Facebook without worrying that reporters will be searching for cherry-picked quotes or calling their bosses, that’s unreasonable. It’s disproportionate. And it’s not helpful to a free speech society.
- For example, reporter Ansel Herz highlighted two ugly-sounding quotes from a Facebook comment Hall wrote, but didn’t highlight this much more reasonable quote, although it’s in the same comment: “If it turns out that Officer Darren Wilson shot Michel Brown while he was surrendering, then he should be prosecuted for murder. I don’t think that will be the case, but I’m willing to see it as a possibility.” [↩]
I’m torn on this one, to be honest. Yes, free speech is a thing. Something which I hold dear. But too many think that freedom OF speech means freedom FROM consequences.
It does not.
The problem here, to me at least, is that this man is a police officer. And we, as a society, give the police certain rights and responsibilities above and beyond those of ordinary citizens. Namely, the right to use force against the populace.
As such, they are held to a higher standard. In a diverse society, does a cop who is overtly and obviously racist meet that higher standard? I don’t think so.
Does he have a right to say what he wants? Of course. Do we have a right to decide that his words make him unfit to wield power over us? Probably.
Because he carries a gun and can kill me, I hold him to a different standard than the racist clerk at the county tax assessors office.
There is a difference.
Everything that Mark J said and then some. Those Facebook postings provide credible evidence of bias that could impact this cop’s ability to do his job. (think about what it could mean for his testimony in court.) It can also reflect badly on the police department in general. “But too many think that freedom OF speech means freedom FROM consequences.” BOOM. What one says while identifying oneself as an employee immediately comes into play.
A friend of mine is a cop, and says that the local department has a pretty strict, detailed policy about electronic communication. Officers are expected to be responsible in how they conduct themselves even off the clock, because of the damage that can be done to their cases if they aren’t. Failure to abide by the electronic communications policy is an actionable disciplinary offense. It’s one of the things they sign on to when they are inducted—it’s a condition of employment.
Different types of employment have differing responsibilities. I don’t think it’s asking too much for cops to squelch their bigotry on Facebook. The argument that it’s an infringement on “freedom of speech” is the same argument that was trotted out for sexual harassment policies—“it’s an infringement on my freedom of speech if I can’t tell dick jokes or talk about tits and ass on the job! Unfair!!” Bah. If you can’t handle knowing when and how to keep your mouth shut, how am I supposed to trust you know the appropriate time to use a gun? Seriously. If you have that little talent for discernment and reading the public mood, and you have that level of disrespect for entire classes of citizens, you aren’t equipped for the responsibilities of being an officer.
Uhm, did I miss something in the article where the Stranger called for him to be fired? What it reported was what he said, why it was inappropriate, and comments from a couple of people involved at the police department.
What he posted was clearly inappropriate. It undermines police credibility at a time when Seattle desperately needs some. It’s a story in the same way that a cop being a nazi would be a story. Given that Seattle just lost a lawsuit from the Justice Department for police racism, it’s extremely topical. Whether or not he should be fired for it is totally unrelated to that it is an important story to report.
(Note: while generally I am in favor of not firing employees for off-the-job speech, this clearly will directly impact not only his job performance, but the performance of every Seattle police officer. That’s very bad employee behavior and should be a fireable offense, at employer’s discretion.)
yrs–
–Ben
Amp,
I’m really taken aback by your stance on this. You seem to be saying that it’s simply inappropriate to publicize his comments, or to make those comments part of a larger public conversation. And your reason for this seems to be based on the idea that the people who employ Sgt. Hall (i.e. the citizens of Seattle) have some sort of obligation to not learn what he says off the job, lest it result in a consequence for Hall. For example, Hall’s employers might decide that someone who says, “If you don’t like the ‘militarized’ police, then don’t commit crimes—the odds of you encountering an officer drops dramatically when that single factor changes… Regardless of how you feel about the police, the sheepdogs will continue to protect the resentful sheep from the wolves,” has demonstrated a real contempt for the people he has been hired to serve and protect. Based on that, perhaps they would conclude that Sgt. Hall’s opportunities to interact with the public in an official capacity should be reduced. Is that inappropriate?
Sometimes police officers speak freely about the realities of their job. When they do, sometimes I’m impressed by the courage and poise that they show day after day, by their commitment to public service and to upholding the very laws they are sworn to enforce. However, sometimes I’m horrified by the contempt they show towards ordinary civilians, by their eagerness to condone and excuse police brutality, and by their indifference to the lives and well-being of ordinary civilians.
I think it’s vitally important to include comments like those made by Sgt. Hall in the marketplace of ideas, to air them publicly and to subject them to the same vigorous scrutiny that as any other ideas (mine included!).
Maybe you think Sgt. Hall’s comments are justified. Maybe you think that his comments are quite nuanced, and that we ought to consider the experiences behind them before we leap to judgment. Maybe you think his comments deserve severe criticism. I can understand and even respect any of those positions. But what baffles me is if you say that Sgt. Hall’s comments are simply an inappropriate topic for discussion, and that The Stranger acted badly in publicizing them.
Am I misunderstanding you here? I mean are you just arguing that the newspaper should have kept Sgt. Hall’s identity anonymous when writing this?
I think Mark J and La Lubu have really good points. It seems to me that there’s a lot of gray between the idea that no one should be fired for political opinions that don’t affect their job, and the idea that it’s reasonable to fire (or suspend, or warn) someone who makes public statements that either make their employer look bad or would cause people to question how well they do their job.
I particularly like La Lubu’s comment here:
There’s a huge difference between firing someone because they still have a Romney/Ryan sticker on their car and you voted for Obama (or vice versa) and firing them for comments that you feel show a major lapse in judgment, or attitudes that negatively affect their ability to do their job.
And I think reporting on the attitudes of police officers in response to the Michael Brown shooting is valid and newsworthy, especially in areas that have had similar problems with racial profiling and excessive use of force.
I’ve had my differences with Amp on this general issue before, but I’m more with him than against him. On the other hand, some good points have been made here by the commenters, though it should be remembered that exactly the same arguments have been made to justify, for example, the firing of Steven Salaita and other people on the left.
But this won’t do at all:
I just reread Amp’s post, and I don’t see that he anywhere said or implied any such thing. But this is the argument of the censor: if you don’t support silencing nasty opinions, you must agree with them. You must want Jews to be gassed. You must want hippies to spit on Our Boys. You must want little children to be Satanically molested by childcare workers. You must want innocent people to be butchered in Bosnia and Kosovo. You must think Saddam Hussein is a great guy. Anyone who makes such insinuations discredits themselves immediately; they have established that they are not interested in serious discussion, and indeed are interested in blocking it.
Duncan,
I’m confused, who are you addressing in your second paragraph? I can’t see the context for what you wrote in anything that either I or Amp said.
Duncan, I don’t think Kohai was insinuating anything like that at all. Notice that part of what you quoted includes “Maybe you think his comments deserve severe criticism,” which runs counter to the possibilities put forward in the preceding two sentences, followed by, “I can understand and even respect any of these positions.” The way I read it, Kohai is not accusing (“accusing”) Amp of agreeing with the police officer’s comments. Those were a series of hypothetical situations in which Amp might be motivated to defend the officer’s remarks – or not – offered to illustrate that none of them were still justification for saying that nobody should be talking about the remarks in the first place, or that they’re irrelevant in the context in which the officer made them.
Sarah,
That’s basically it, thank you! I am very, very much pro free speech, and I believe that the marketplace of ideas tends to solve disputes much better than censorship. That’s why I was so surprised by Duncan’s comments, which seem to claim that I in some way support censorship or suppression of unpopular speech.
Just to be clear, I don’t assume that Amp agrees with the officer’s comments (he calls him a “jerk” in his post). My perception of the situation goes like this. Sgt. Hall makes some inflammatory comments. The Stranger publishes the comments, and identifies Sgt. Hall as the source by name, exposing him to public scrutiny. Amp makes a post that (to me) seems to indicate that he thinks The Stranger has violated some principle of free speech by publishing Hall’s remarks. Kohai thinks that Sgt. Hall’s remarks should rightly be subject to public scrutiny, and that doing so is an important part of the free speech principles that Amp thinks have been violated.
Honestly, Amp made a very short post which probably doesn’t fully lay out his views on free speech. I’d like to hear his response (assuming he has time to offer it) before jumping to any conclusions about what exactly he means.
Thanks for responding, everyone!
As a general response to many of the comments disagreeing with me, I’ve just added an update to the bottom of the post, which I hope folks will read.
I’ve been super-busy and have felt guilty for not responding to comments, and although I’m going to respond to some comments now, I unfortunately don’t have time to respond individually to each comment.
Mark wrote:
Agreed.
But I think that freedom of speech means freedom from some consequences. We just have to discuss which consequences people should be free of.
For instance, I’m sure that you’d agree that freedom of speech should include not being arrested for saying “I don’t like Obama.” I’d go a step further and say that outside of exceptional circumstances, no one should be fired or face sanctions from their employer due to their political opinions. Maybe you’d agree with me on that, maybe not; but my point is that we agree that there are some consequences for speech that people should be free of, even if we don’t agree on exactly where the line is drawn.
Although usually I’d be against people losing their jobs for their opinions, I think that the severe crisis of racism in our whole justice system, and of people of color often being unable to trust cops, warrants firing police officers for overtly racist statements, even when made off-duty.
But nothing in the story suggests that Christopher Hall is “overtly” racist, so I don’t think that applies here.
La Lubu, thanks for commenting.
Given how pro-cop most judges are, I think it would be unusual for a judge to let a cop’s facebook postings be used to impeach the cop’s character unless it could be shown to be relevant to the case on hand. But IANAL, obviously.
Somewhat in support of that, in comments at The Stranger, a commenter who identified themselves as a criminal defense attorney wrote:
La Lubu continues:
I disagree here on two points.
First of all, the big difference here is (as you acknowledged, but it’s worth repeating) we’re not talking about what Hall says “on the job.” And in fact, it would be an infringement on free speech if someone couldn’t tell dick jokes on their own time without fear of being fired (although there are some exceptions).
Second of all, what you see as “bigotry” in Hall’s comments – and I’d probably agree with you – is a pretty typical right-wing mentality, and there is nothing even close to a social consensus that such remarks amount to bigotry. And I think the lack of social consensus is important when we’re talking about police, who are obliged to serve all of society, not just my part of society. Many right-wingers sincerely believe that my views (pro-affirmative action, seeing our justice system as “the new Jim Crow,” etc) amount to bigotry – should a cop with my views therefore be expected to squelch their views on their own Facebook page? And if not, how can the government distinguish between these two things without committing unconstitutional viewpoint-based discrimination?
I agree that police departments should be selecting for people who think of themselves as peacemakers, not warriors, and trying to exclude people who think cops are above ordinary citizens, or “sheep” as Hall called us.
But I think the time to do that is when you’re hiring, and in whatever influence the brass can have on the police culture. I don’t think scrutinizing the political opinions cops express in their off-duty time is the way to go about it.
I think that between the lengthy update to the post, and my responses to La Lubu and Mark, I’ve addressed all the concerns brought up by the other comment-writers who criticized my post (Kohai, Kelly, and Ben).
(Ben also had the advantage of being my housemate – so as soon as I got out of bed today, Ben was right there saying “Barry, let me tell you all the ways you were wrong!” It was actually a pretty nice way to start the day.)
But if there’s anything you brought up that you don’t think I addressed adequately, please point out that bit in another comment and I’ll try to address it. (Ditto to La Lubu and Mark, and – well – everyone reading this).
Duncan and Sarah, thanks for your comments as well. Although I understand Duncan’s point and in general agree with it (I’ve seen a lot of people make the argument Duncan refutes), I also agree with Sarah that Kohai’s comment could be interpreted in another way, so he isn’t making that argument, and that’s how I interpreted Kohai’s comment when I first read it.
Amp, thanks for fleshing this out a little more. I will too.
Given how pro-cop most judges are, I think it would be unusual for a judge to let a cop’s facebook postings be used to impeach the cop’s character unless it could be shown to be relevant to the case on hand.
Point taken—it may never be allowed. But in a case of police brutality, or where a person accused of a crime is countering with “I’m innocent; this (drugs, gun, other weapon, etc.) is not mine but was planted on me by a crooked cop”, maybe it wouldn’t be allowed in the first go around, but when there is a pattern it’s pretty likely to come into play on appeal.
But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is when the citizenry feels criminalized by the police, the effectiveness of the police force drops. From the article: “Hall’s viewpoint may be particularly concerning for a Seattle cop, given that the SPD is under a federal court order to reform a pattern of excessive force and troubling practices with racial minorities. “
I don’t care about his opinions on Obama’s effectiveness as a President. That’s not what’s in play here. What’s in play is his assumption that peaceful unarmed protestors = criminals. I’m going to assume that you have a strong familiarity with the type of militarized force and weaponry that was used against peaceful unarmed protestors in Ferguson, along with the gross violation of constitutional rights against the people of Ferguson (and reporters trying to cover it) in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown. His comment about militarized police is telling. To wit: “”If you don’t like the ‘militarized’ police, then don’t commit crimes—the odds of you encountering an officer drops dramatically when that single factor changes…” Really? As if there’s no such thing as driving while black? Walking while black? Carrying a backpack while black? Waiting at the bus stop while black? Detecting any patterns here?
Now add in the “resentful sheep” comment. Does that really sound like the kind of person who can be trusted to enforce the law with no bias, and not use excessive force or make false assumptions about citizens?
Let me make this a little easier. Go to any domestic violence website and look at their list of red flags (of speech, of behavior, of expressed attitudes). This guy’s Facebook page alone hits over half of them. If he was speaking about an ex-wife or girlfriend in the same way he refers to the citizens he is sworn (and armed) to ostensibly protect, would you fear for her safety?
What frustrates the hell out of me in libertarian arguments is the insistence that “free speech” is an academic exercise—-that what people say and how they say it is not an indication of likely behavior. That it’s just “speech”, completely divorced from action. It’s even more damning when racism, sexism, heterosexism, or any other -ism comes into play—“just because I say something ‘-ist’, doesn’t mean I’m going to do something ‘-ist’.” Or “I’m not ‘-ist’ because I have the ability to create exceptions to my ‘-ist’ rules for those rare individuals who can jump through all the hoops for me” (or the usually unsaid corollaries—“who I want something from” or “who are in an authority position over me”). Or giving the benefit of the doubt to people who skate right on up to the line of completely unacceptable and stick a toe on it. (“that’s not racism! He never used the n-word!”) Bullshit. That flies in the face of objective reality. It’s gaslighting.
Amp, you know a little something about my history as a survivor of domestic violence. What was so difficult for me for years, wasn’t just the abuse—it was the continual reinforcement from outside that what I was experiencing was not abuse. That it was all random, individual, out-of-control incidents that didn’t demonstrate a pattern. (they did). That “he didn’t really mean it” or “didn’t mean it that way” (he did). That the red flags that made my spidey sense go up were not. (they were). That I was imagining or exaggerating things. (I wasn’t). That “there are two sides to every story” (ok, point taken. mine, and the sociopath’s).
Go look at that again through the lens of domestic violence—how abusers express themselves, what the abusive personality looks like (poor impulse control, impaired self-regulation of emotional expression, authoritarian attitudes, behavioral rigidity, extreme “all or nothing” thinking, “externalizing” thinking, entitlement, etc.). Except in this case, it isn’t being expressed towards an individual woman but a class of people.
I agree with you that there should be better screening to prevent the hiring of such individuals on police forces. But at the same time, there needs to be a process for identifying and removing people who demonstrate these problems after they are hired. You really don’t see anything in the Facebook postings that warrants a disciplinary investigation? A psych eval? A reassignment to desk duty?
I’ll say it again: this guy sounds like an abusive personality. I would have no problem as a jury member assuming that the truth was a lot closer to ‘police brutality’ than ‘criminal attacking me’ if the Facebook posting was evidence in court. But more importantly, when this is out there, and no fellow officers are shutting it down, and no commanding officers or internal affairs is shutting it down….well…then it looks like those attitudes are official policy. And that’s a problem that is much greater than the loss of an individual officer’s ability to make blanket statements about citizens that impact his or her ability to effectively do his or her job.
And you really can’t imagine why it would be ‘relevant to the case on hand’ when a defendant – or a plaintiff in a civil rights case against the police – is arguing that the officer acted out of bias, such that evidence should be thrown out or they should be liable?
You have a real blind spot on this issue, Amp, and it bugs me because it seems to come from a place of false equivalence. We’re not talking about complaining that a cop is Republican or hates Obama or is asking that people give Wilson the presumption of innocence. We are, in fact, looking at public posts suggesting that the police sergeant holds opinions that may negatively affect the performance of his duties – specifically, that he believes it’s OK for police to act with disproportionate and punitive force simply because they are cops.
As far as cherry-picking, I note that you completely glossed over this from the article: “I reached Sergeant Hall by phone at his West Precinct office this morning and read quotes from his Facebook page verbatim, offering him the chance to explain his comments. “
Clearly the right of free speech does not carry with it the right to be completely free of consequences of that speech. Some people, like politicians, put themselves out there and can reasonably be held accountable for pretty much anything they say. Others, like locksmiths or plumbers or lab analysts, can reasonably expect a thicker firewall between what they say off the clock and how it impacts their employment. Indeed, that firewall is what makes for a vibrant body politic, where ideas can be discussed, batted about, tested. If we were afraid of losing our jobs every time we wanted to express a political opinion, our entire society would suffer as a result, and political speech would belong only to the powerful. (It would have an effect much like equating the spending of money with speech, in fact; if you had the money to live on, you could say what you want and damn the reactions, but otherwise, you’d have to watch out.)
In our society, police officers are uniquely empowered to arrest people and to use force to effect those arrests. Not even the military has that legal authority. Almost no one else is allowed to take away our freedom (judges and psych docs, both of whom rely upon police officers to effect their decisions). Furthermore, officers often do this in lonely circumstances, away from any immediate scrutiny or supervision. Being human, they can and do make mistakes, and being human, the people who select them can and do make mistakes. It’s reasonable, and necessary, to hold people so empowered to a higher standard and to subject us to greater scrutiny. It’s reasonable and necessary to ask, “How will this person treat me, or other members of society?” And, it’s a reasonable minimum threshold to ask, “Does this guy have the sense of self-control and discretion and lack of entitlement which we want in someone legally empowered to use force on other people?”
Sgt. Hall appears to have shut down public access to his Facebook account. So, it appears that he was speaking in into a live mic when he thought that only friends were present. Oops.
What do we do when politicians do that? We take it as evidence of what they actually believe.
Sgt. Hall’s opinion of how President Obama is doing his job is not relevant to his employment. His opinion of the citizens he protects and serves is.
On the other hand, The Stranger does not appear to have attempted an even-handed assessment of Sgt. Hall’s public speech; they cherry-picked the worst bits. In general, that’s bad practice. While there are utterances which, by themselves, should disqualify a person from carrying a badge, they are few and arguably aren’t present, here, and surely the quote which Amp put in his footnote, but which The Stranger didn’t quote at all, is relevant in this case.
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Also, I agree with La Lubu’s comment, which illustrates better than I could have why this particular speech by Sgt. Hall could lead to fear of Sgt. Hall by a significant number of the people he is sworn to protect.
Sgt. Hall may be feeling attacked. Officers frequently do, and with some justification; we are often expected to act in circumstances where NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, a bunch of people will tell us we did it wrong.
Example 1: I once pulled a driver over for tailgating. Because of the sightlines and how the low sun hit the car’s windows, in this case I couldn’t see anyone in the car until I was walking up on it. It happened that the driver and only occupant was black. I explained to him why I pulled him over, checked his license, and gave him a warning, explaining the two-second-rule as a good minimum safety guideline. Off he went. A few hours later he made a complaint to my Department that I had pulled him over because he was black; he turned out to be from Massachusetts, and down there doing 45 mph while you’re half a car length off of someone’s bumper is Sunday driving, so he’d never even heard of someone being pulled over for Following Too Closely. The complaint was investigated, and it was found to be unfounded. I know that I did the right thing; that driver can reasonably believe that I’m racist because he’s been pulled over a whole lot more in his life than the white people he knows, and what he experienced fits the evidence. Both of those things coexist, and I don’t know any way to reconcile them.
Example 2: Very late one night, Dispatch once put out a BOL for a small red sportscar which had just driven dangerously on a main street in my city. I was on that street, and there was almost no traffic at all. Literally seconds later, a small red sportscar went by me at a high rate of speed. I followed it, confirmed the complaint description, got a little more detail which also matched, and confirmed that the complainant had identified himself and was willing to testify. So I pulled the car over. The driver demanded to know why, and I told him. I identified him and asked him to tell me his side of the story. He said it never happened at all, which is pretty unusual (usually it happened, but it’s all the other guy’s fault). I pressed him, and his passenger. He got pretty hot, and expressed the opinion that I pulled him over because of his gay pride bumper sticker. He later complained to my Department that I was homophobic, and blew up his corner of Facebook about it, and lots of his friends commented that I should lose my job. This was years ago; none of them had any way of knowing that I was a trans lesbian. An hour later, I was interviewing the complainant, and I got a detailed description of what the car did, including that it went through a bank drive-through. During business hours, I contacted the bank, and they gave me photos from the drive-through camera. Yup, red sportscar at exactly the reported time… but a slightly smaller one. Different make and model. Perhaps I’d have seen it, seconds later, if I’d ignored the small red sportscar which I did see. It was just bad luck for everyone except the actual bad guy, that two red sportscars sped through a lonely area within seconds of each other, but far enough that no one knew there were two.
Cops get told off all the time, even when we do it exactly right. There’s no way around that; we are policing fallible human beings, and we are, ourselves, fallible human beings. But it does get tiresome, and it can very easily, when you’re tired and out of sorts and out of resources, lead to a bunker mentality where you think to yourself “I don’t have to take this shit” and you grouse to your buddies. And the buddies who completely get it when you do that are the ones who have been there themselves: other cops. (Much the way that women tend to totally get it when other women talk about being catcalled or groped, or black people totally get it when other black people talk about getting stopped by the police for reasons which don’t seem legit.)
If that means that officers who grouse in private shouldn’t be officers, well, probably one person in ten million is qualified to be an officer.
I’m not defending Sgt. Hall, here; I don’t agree with a lot of what he said, and he said it on the record, and it had an effect on people.
At the same time, I note that the whole situation is another example of this intractable problem of trying to achieve a situation where everyone except the actual bad guys can interact with police officers without fear. It’s probably not a solvable problem, in the end. Hell, I’m a police officer, and getting pulled over causes me anxiety, because I’m trans, and I’m a woman, and because some small percentage of police officers aren’t actually trustworthy, try as hard as we might.
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On the whole “sheep” thing, some context:
There is an analogy which is often bandied about in law enforcement, and taught to recruits to get them to think tough-and-at-the-same-time-morally, so that they can survive it when people try to kill them, but still stay within the rules of ethical use of force. The analogy is sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. In this analogy, the “sheep” is the average person who is getting on with her life but is not tactically aware and capable, and to whom tactical emergencies come as a shock and surprise, because they are not able to (or do not want to) take responsibility for their own safety. We have all been sheep. Ever been laid up with a broken leg, or post-surgical recovery, or a bad flu, or too much to drink? However temporarily you were a sheep; you needed others to look after your safety. I’ve been a sheep. “Wolves” are the people who prey on others in an illegal/immoral/unethical way. “Sheepdogs” are the ones who try to protect the sheep, and in so doing, have to be alert and aware, and better than the wolves. They are wolves plus socialization; capable of violence, but only in service of the herd. For some cops, sheepdogs are only cops. For other cops (like me) sheepdogs are any people who are willing and able to engage with the wolves in an emergency — cops, legally armed and/or exceptionally capable civilians, many military veterans, etc.
Like any analogy, it has its good points and its flaws. It has this advantage: it emphasizes to the police that we are obligated to protect a class of people, and that we must follow certain rules, first of which is that we do not prey on people, because that’s what wolves do. It has this major flaw: it classifies people into discreet categories, one of which is basically “helpless”. And in real life, people don’t fall easily into discreet categories, and categorization is one of the paths to corruption, for cops, because as soon as cops start envisioning different groups with different rules… well. You can see where that leads.
So, while clearly Sgt. Hall is expressing some contempt for notions and viewpoints and people he disagrees with, one thing he is NOT doing, in using the “sheep” analogy which is something of a term of art, is expressing that he has a personal preference for, or entitlement to, mutton.
Grace
Amp,
When you seem to think that there are some “unacceptable consequences,” you are basically presenting that as a net freedom gain.
But it’s not. because you’re not acknowledging (though I know you know it) that imposing a “you can’t react to ____ speech” rule may give freedom to the speaker, but places serious limits on the employer. And the public, because you’re either forced to conclude that the public shouldn’t complain (which limits a ton of people) or that the complaints by tons of people must be ignored (also a problem.)
It seems like right to work taken quite a bit too far.
Grace Annam @16, I was hoping you would weigh in on this. Thanks.
@Amp, it occurs to me that on issues of speech and consequences, you have a strong tendency to do the equivalent of ‘drawing fences around the Torah’. Which is that thing where you’re not supposed to do X, so you prohibit a lot of things that might lead up to X, just in case. And that can lead to results that are very restrictive – sometimes falling much harder on, say, women than other groups – and sometimes rising to levels of absurdity.
Terror that someone might do X is not a good reason to frantically build rings of fences around X unless we can do so sensibly.
Amp (and everyone), thanks for the interesting conversation.
Amp, there are I believe, a few points of difference/discussion still.
First, I was surprised and a bit rankled by your comment:
This is problematic because it can’t be true that both “partisan hatred” is “ordinary (on both sides)” and that therefore only the secure are able to speak out. That you find such speech commonplace necessarily implies that many people are unafraid to speak out. Unless of course your qualifier of “both sides” is wrong. Which I believe it is.
The hatred from the right and the left are hardly equal. The hatred from the right is institutional; from the left it is not. When Bush became president, the entire Democratic Party didn’t declare a single legislative goal of denying Bush a second term. This was the stated agenda of the GOP after Obama won (yes, won) the presidency. You don’t find respected national politicians on the left pronouncing everyone that disagrees with them “unAmerican” and “traitors.” The left hated Bush for his policies and actions, not because of his very personhood. The right hates Obama as a person (and this is very much racial) despite the fact that many (too many for my liberal tastes) of his policies are actually conservative or centrist in nature. They just hate him (i.e., he’s a “wuss”) and pretty much oppose anything he supports. Bush on the other hand was able to get almost his entire legislative agenda enacted — with the help of Democrats.
When it comes to partisan rancor, the two sides just aren’t equivalent. Not by a long shot.
As to the main issue at hand, I still contend that those in law enforcement, who have the power to take my freedom by force, must be held to a higher standard. Others here have made some powerful arguments for this position.
Two things that have not been addressed, however. Sgt. Hall was sharing his opinions on a public forum. He wasn’t just yakking it up over dinner with friends. He is also a somewhat prolific author it seems, who likes to share his opinion with others. Just because his audience is suddenly larger than he expected and not receptive to his views doesn’t seem to require that the rest of the public to suddenly respect his “privacy?” What if we agree with him? Should we also refrain from commenting on his very public opinion out of respect for his privacy? There are many ways to remain private and anonymous on the internet. Sgt. Hall chose not to do that.
The other interesting fact is that Sgt.Hall self identified as a member of the Seattle PD. He certainly didn’t need to do that. He could have still shared his opinions with the world without associating himself with the SPD. I assume he did so to give his opinions some gravitas they might not otherwise have. But in doing so, he not only associated himself with the SPD, he associated the SPD with his opinions. As such, the SPD has every right — even a responsibility I believe — to make sure that he hasn’t crossed a line of impropriety.
He made his opinions very public. And he isn’t just and “ordinary” citizen as you seem to think. Ordinary citizens can’t throw me in jail. And even among law enforcement personnel, the police are different in that their activities take place largely without oversight.
He wasn’t forced to become a police office. He wasn’t required to post to Facebook as an SPD Sgt.
And certainly “partisan hatred” wasn’t a deterrent to Sgt. Hall sharing his viewpoint.
Grace, I greatly appreciate your insight. Many thanks for sharing.
Mythago and Mark J: thanks, and you’re welcome.
Mark J:
This is a very important point, one which crossed my mind but then escaped as I was writing the rest of my omnibus comment. This point speaks more directly to Amp’s thesis than any other point so far in this thread: if you want to be free from employment consequences when you speak, don’t wear your employer’s colors while speaking.
I occasionally mention that I’m a police officer, but I don’t name my employer and I don’t do it under my real name. I certainly don’t speak for my Department, or determine policy, so it would be a disservice to both my Department and me to imply in any way that what I say is anything more than my personal opinion, even if it’s relevant to explain that my personal opinion is derived partly from my lived experience as a police officer.
Many years ago, I sometimes wrote in to my local paper’s opinion column, and on at least one occasion my letter was published. That stopped the day I was sworn in as a part-time officer for my first department. Leaving aside paying my respects at memorials and funerals, I have spoken politically in public in person precisely once since I was sworn in. On that occasion I wore civilian clothing and identified myself my name and the location of my house, not by profession. At the same town meeting, some of my colleagues honored the retiring chief, and showed up in dress uniform to do it. I would have loved to be a part of that, but I knew that if I showed up in uniform I could not then speak as a private citizen to the issue I wanted to speak to.
Why am I careful about this? Well, so far The Stranger or a similar paper hasn’t called up to let me know that I stuck my foot in my mouth on the Internet.
I have mixed feelings about retirement, whenever that happens. But one of the definitely good things is that I’ll feel a lot more free to express myself in the public square.
Grace
Somewhat off topic, but related to “free speech can have consequences” –
I interview kids who want to get into MIT. Is it fair/reasonable/an invasion of privacy if I pull up that High School senior’s Facebook page and (presuming I can unequivocally ID the student through that page) based my opinion of whether or not we should admit that student in part on what I see of that student’s postings thereupon?
@RonF, that is such a badly worded question I wouldn’t even know where to start.
I have to know, because I keep seeing the idea tossed around, in one phrasing or another, that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences…
So in a place that has freedom of speech, you can say whatever you like, as long as you are prepared to accept the consequences, say, for instance, getting fired. And in a place without freedom of speech, you can say whatever you like, as long as you are prepared to accept the consequences, say, for instance, getting fired.
So what exactly is the difference between having freedom of speech and not having it. Even if the severity is far worse in places without freedom of speech, the same rule applies. You can criticize the despot, as long as you are willing to accept the consequences, however bad they might be, you can still say it.
Is the only difference the pipeline? That the government doesn’t cut it off before anyone gets a chance to read it? Because really, just knowing that people will get to read or hear what I say doesn’t exactly make me feel more likely to say it.
@RonF, that is such a badly worded question I wouldn’t even know where to start.
I’ll bite. My first question to you is: what is the official, written policy set in place for interviewers—what sources are you limited to when making your decisions? What questions are considered relevant? What non-academic considerations does MIT have when making the difficult decisions of culling the number of applicants? Are there non-academic considerations that would put an applicant’s Facebook page into play? What policies are in place for interviewers if/when they encounter problematic information; to what extent are interviewers allowed to investigate problematic information, and what oversight is in place for this process? What permissions are interviewees required to give throughout the process? What are the common procedures and past practices?
(sorry—it’s the union steward in me. Policy, policy, policy, policy. Contract, contract, contract, contract. Past practice, past practice, past practice, past practice. *smile* I’m honestly unfamiliar with college interviewing processes. I went to a community college that let everybody in who could (a) pay, and (b) still breathe.)
I started writing a comment on this thread supporting Amp several times last week, but had trouble articulating what I wanted to say. Now that Amp has added his update and the comments have proliferated, I am going to try again.
I’m with Amp; this article just doesn’t sit right with me. From the original, un-updated post:
The word that makes me uncomfortable is “monitoring.” The article neither explores the social media of an already-in-the-news police sergeant nor tries to analyze the opinion of SPD officers generally (i.e., is this the only publically accessible SPD Facebook page, or is it one of three hundred?) As Amp has pointed out in the footnote, it truncates quotes in a way designed to be as controversial as possible. In the end I’m left with the impression that the journalist set out to find the most inflammatory comments that a local police officer had on social media and build an article around that. Just as you can be against red light cameras without being against all tickets for running red lights, you can be against this kind of aggressive monitoring while still understanding that Facebook posts can sometimes be relevant.
This is Mark, quoting Amp:
And now Mark responding to Amp:
I think Mark missed a subtle tense change in Amp’s quote. I read Amp as being worried that too much seek-and-destroy journalism will collectively have a chilling effect on public discourse. In other words, today there is robust participation in political debate (including “partisan hatred”), but tomorrow people will back out of this participation if they perceive a substantially increased risk of blowback. I think these fears are well founded.
My post concludes with my best shot at a party-switched counterfactual. Journalist for a conservative weekly magazine wants to write a piece about changes in the school curriculum. Decides to mine Facebook for quotes from Seattle public school teachers about Christianity. Puts a seventh grade chemistry teacher in the spotlight. While there was nothing overtly bigoted about his remarks there is a perceived disdain for the religious faith of many of his students. Is this fair game? Is our society better for considering this fair game?
I am totally weirded out by the idea that a reporter, working a police beat, should refrain from reading cops’ facebook pages or other social media. That’s … extremely standard? It’s called working your beat and not doing it, as a reporter, is profoundly unethical.
If you don’t like it, I suggest you stop reading anything journalistic.
Whether or not the story should have been posted, the reporter definitely should have been reading. That’s not even a question.
For your reversed party version: let’s make it a direct comparison. Your version omits the fact that this is a police sergeant, commenting as a police sergeant, about policing, in the context of a department that has just recently been convicted of a horrible violence on the community he polices.
Let’s say that the school district in question has been recently found guilty of a conspiracy to commit horrible violence on the community — say that they were covering up child molestation. Let’s further say that the teacher in question is somewhat higher ranked than a random classroom teacher — say a principal. Let’s say that they used to write columns for the teacher’s union newsletter, during the time that they were covering up for child molesters. Let’s say that they posted a bunch of things about how they totally agree with Richard Dawkins that child molestation is No Big Deal, and commented on other child molestation cases that they believed the accused and that children lie about it. And that they were posting such opinions specifically _as a teacher in the public school system_ rather than as J Private Citizen.
That strikes me as a roughly equivalent proposition.
Now, is it legit to report on this? Why or why not?
yrs–
–Ben
Let me answer some questions and then restate my question:
I interview high school seniors who seek admission to MIT. MIT wants to know what kind of personal initiative such a student has (“leadership” is such an overused word). They also want to know about their personality, how they present themselves, how articulate they are, how well they work in groups, how they resolve conflicts in such groups, etc. They want to know what the young person’s passion is – and that need not be an academic pursuit. They don’t want me to ask about SAT scores or grades or class rank – they get all that through other means.
Permissions? Interviews are voluntary and the initiative to arrange one lies with the student. Only about 1/2 of students take one, but about 3/4 of the students admitted are from that 1/2 – the interview just gives the admissions office a better feel for who they’re working with.
I never initiate the topics of religion, politics or sexuality. The kids often volunteer information about religion in that many of them are active in their church or synagogue or other religious (haven’t been asked to interview by a Muslim yet, I’ve had a few Buddhists) youth groups and put it forward as one of their activities, which I then follow up on by asking how long they’ve participated, what they’ve done, how much time they put in, etc. I’ve had about 10% of the kids mention a girlfriend/boyfriend, which I do not ask follow-up questions on – none so far of the same sex variety, you might be interested to know. Politics just has never come up at all, which is fine by me.
Non-academic factors are definitely in play when determining who is and is not admitted. For example, an applicant who is of neither Caucasian nor Asian ancestry and who meets the standards for admission is automatically admitted. Applicants of Caucasian and Asian ancestry then compete for what’s left. Note that MIT admitted one out of every 11 applicants last year, and as the Admissions Office itself will tell you they could take all the kids that they admitted, toss them out, take the next-ranked set of kids and end up with a very successful class. I’ve often mentioned the student’s family background in my reports (one or two parent family, parents’ employment, number/age of siblings, etc.) and have never been told “Don’t ask about that.” Each one of my reports is graded on a 1 – 5 scale, 5 being best. I’ve had one 4 and the rest 5’s. They are read very carefully, I’ve been repeatedly assured.
The ability to contribute to the MIT community in non-academic ways is looked at very strongly – that could include expertise in dance, music, theater, fine arts, athletics, activism of one sort or another, advocacy, outdoor-based endeavors, etc., etc. The Institute proudly touts the diversity of it’s student body, but their concept of diversity does not narrowly focus on race and ethnicity. It includes family income, family educational background, geographic location, etc.
So – given that non-academic factors definitely influence admission to the Institute, do you think it’s legitimate – or even advisable – for MIT either on my part or on the part of some Admissions Office employee to examine the FB page of potential admits?
So as not to limit debate, I’d prefer to hold off on stating what MIT’s official policy is, or what past practice is. I’m more interested in what you folks think is a reasonable practice – indeed, for any school to follow, not just MIT. MIT does have a policy on the matter and I assure you I follow it. But we have often spoken here that many people misinterpret the First Amendment to think that it means that one should not have to face private consequences for public speech. It is generally agreed (and I fully agree) that this is an incorrect interpretation. But this posting overall keys on proportionality and how what is found affects the position of the speaker.
There would perhaps be a difference between a kid who states on his FB page “I want to go to MIT and get drunk every weekend” (which would be illegal, after all) and “I’m going to sneak into the labs at MIT and make illegal drugs/illicit explosives”. Should MIT even look at kids’ FB pages or their tweets at all? How do you think the debate above applies here?
My disagreement mostly stems from one about employment rights: I think that with rare exceptions the employer (and not anyone else) has the ultimate right to decide what they care about and to adjust their own values. IOW if it’s more valuable to me to fire Pam the Prolife Paralegal and pay unemployment and train someone new than it is to keep working with a high-performing paralegal, then I think that should be my call. Not yours, not Pam’s, and not anyone else’s. (I would not apply that to immutable characteristics.)
That said, some of these things happen because people are simply mistaken about what happened. I would support a requirement to enhance information (i.e. “you must give the employee 5 minutes on the phone before you fire them, in case they have a good explanation.”) I would also make sure that people could get unemployment in almost all circumstances. But in the end it should be the employer’s call.
After all: in theory, speech that “says something about you” is fair game. I don’t want to hire someone who believes Jews are heathens bound for hell, even if they don’t know I’m Jewish. I don’t want our town police to hire someone who believes blacks are mostly criminals, or that the best way to deter violence is to hit/shoot first. I think that is reasonable to deal with even if they found out about that belief through difficult means. It might be modified by a history of good behavior (or not) but the person who would make that decision is the employer.
Similarly, speech which demonstrates stupidity or insensitivity is fair game. If I find out that Pam has a habit of using “retard” in her private life, I might reasonably fear that she’ll do it in front of a client. Again, this should be my call and not someone else’s call; if you think the fear is unreasonable, then you can hire Pam.
I will take context into account. There are lots of things which I would ignore if a friend-of-a-friend told me that they heard Pam say. Lots of those things would get Pam fired if she said them to my face, but there’s a big difference between “sigh. G&W can be a dick sometimes” and “G&W, you’re a dick sometimes.” Again, though, intelligent minds might differ on where the line should be drawn. My view, again, is…. wherever I want the line to be, since I am paying the bills.
Pam can say what she wants. So can I.
Pam can work (or not) where she wants, for employers she wants to work for. So can I.
Ben,
I take it you reject my counterfactual. But while I normally agree with you, I think you are off on this one. Let me go through where my counterfactual and yours differ:
1. My journalist is datamining Facebook to see what teachers are saying about a controversial change to the curriculum (standardized testing, evolution, climate change, dead white men, etc.) and/or the people who support that change. You don’t think that’s a good comparison, and proffer a journalist looking into a school system with a history of covering up child molestation.
I don’t think your edit holds. If it becomes acceptable practice to look into police Facebook pages when the police are in the news, I can’t imagine that teachers’ pages will be left alone when controversial curriculum changes are in the public eye. Mark J’s line in comment #1:
Will become “Because he is in a position of authority over my son and can indoctrinate him with ‘facts’ that aren’t true, I hold him to a different standard than…”* Just because you can draw a line somewhere, doesn’t mean everyone else will.
2. You promoted my teacher to principal! This is probably where we are seeing things most differently. A police sergeant is a front-line supervisor. According to this document I found on the Seattle police website they currently have 80 sergeants assigned to precincts and 636 officers. So about a 1 to 8 ratio. Sergeants aren’t policy makers in the same way that a principal is. A much closer analogy is the History Department Head at a high school. Someone who spends most of the workday doing the job of a teacher and has front-line supervisory responsibilities as well, but doesn’t set policy.
Which is to say, I agree that the Police Chief’s Facebook page is fair game!
Of course, the sergeant (and every officer) has many interactions with the public where there is little direct oversight. That is the real reason, to the extent there is one, that his Facebook is considered newsworthy, not the use of his administrative role. But again, a teacher has many chances to express his or her opinion about the world to a captive audience of students. Surely, that is just as good a reason to make sure that no one out there ever said anything bad about GWB, right?
If it becomes acceptable practice to go combing through a police sergeant’s blog, then it will become acceptable to look through every police officer’s blog (and every teacher’s).
In addition to these two changes, you made two additions to my counterfactual (which are consistent with the actual case). 1) The teacher is someone who once wrote for the union newsletter (although it is not clear that anything written in that forum was controversial), and 2) The teacher identifies himself as a teacher for the school district on Facebook.
That last point has some merit. Like many, I never identify my employer when I post online. If that’s where the social equilibrium ends up in a few years (write freely, but don’t identify your employer), I wouldn’t be too upset. More likely, I see journalists going after those of us with lightly hidden identities if they can’t get the juicy quotes they want from those out in the open.
*I’m not actually good at channeling right-wing thought; but suffice it to say that a reasonably well stated reason can be found.
Again, you have an ethical issue with a standard, widespread reporting practice. I mean, since we’re talking about Free Speech, I believe that reporters have an absolute right to gather information and report it.
Ansel Herz wasn’t “datamining.” He’s a local reporter. The Seattle police are his beat. Not following them on social media is journalistic malpractice.
Despite your long response, you didn’t actually answer my question. You also, tellingly, omitted the history of promotion and cover-up of horrific violence against the community.
So, again, in the context of a district wide cover-up and promotion of child molestation, is a local reporter who works the “school district news” beat allowed to report on a ranked member of the school district posting (totally legal) pro child molestation articles and images to their public facebook feed ok? If so, why? If not, why not?
Ben,
I wasn’t dodging your question, only answering it implicitly. Yes, if a principal posted pro-child molestation materials online that would be newsworthy.* I distinguish this from the case at hand in two ways:
1) The principal is in a policymaking position that is distinguishable from a front-line supervisor.
2) While the speech is legal, it is promoting conduct that is currently illegal.
Can you answer the same questions about my hypothetical? There is a science teacher at a local middle school who is currently Department Head and has been quoted in the local paper exactly once before (say, a juicy quote about a kid who won the big game with a last minute shot.**) The science teacher is a passionate atheist who believes in a very strict interpretation of separation of church and state. His Facebook feed is full of atheist memes like this one I found at Atheist Meme Base
There is a controversy about saying the Pledge of Allegiance and many local citizens feel that the schools are not welcoming of Christians. Should an industrious reporter write an article about this teacher’s Facebook page? If not, why not?
*First postscript – I never discussed whether the reporter should be allowed to report on the sergeant’s Facebook page. I can be unsupportive of something without wanting to make it a Federal crime.
**Second postscript: I searched The Stranger’s website, and the only mention of Sergeant Hall before last week was in a Police Report feature. The quote appears to be verbatim from his official report and not the result of any interview. The story was newsworthy only for the oddity of a man’s suicide attempt.
EDITED TO ADD: When I searched on variants of Sergeant Hall’s name I found a handful of other articles where his written reports were reprinted verbatim. I haven’t found any articles where he was actually interviewed before.
I’ve seen discussions about “free speech culture” or “the spirit of the First Amendment” before, and I find them terribly frustrating. Not because I don’t think that free speech ideals exist, though. Typically what happens is this:
Someone makes a post about free speech culture, and how our public discourse would be curtailed if people were afraid to speak due to fears of being fired, unable to find housing, or being literally shouted down by their neighbors. They go on to say how we should have tolerance/civility/open-mindedness/etc. as part of our values because it promotes free speech culture. And, y’know, because it’s a generally nice way to get along with people. Fine so far, I wholeheartedly agree.
But then we get to the specific case, and it’s, “An example of what I mean by a “unreasonable and disproportionate reprisal” is having a well-known newspaper comb through your Facebook feed in order to cherry-pick the worst-sounding quotes.”
Ansel Herz didn’t have to look hard to find some nasty-sounding quotes in Sgt. Hall’s blog. Per Ben L. above, Herz writes for The Stranger on their police beat. Should Herz not have reported Sgt. Hall’s comments at all? Should he have kept the officer’s identity secret? Did he have some obligation to find a bunch of really nice comments from Hall and place them side by side with the objectionable ones? I’m really curious on what specifically Herz should have done. Amp’s position, even following the update, seems to be that reporting on Hall’s comments is simply outside the bounds of respectable discourse. Because speaking on Hall’s comments, might result in some bad consequences for him.
Again:
I don’t know what proportionate means here. It seems like we, or Herz, or somebody has an obligation toward Hall, but I simply can’t tell specifically what that obligation is. Is it okay to criticize Hall, but only if you’re already a friend of his on Facebook? Is it okay to criticize him, so long as you don’t make a rebutting blog post of your own? Is it okay to criticize him, but only so long as your own platform to speak from isn’t very big (e.g. if you aren’t a journalist writing for The Stranger)?
When I see people advocate for “free speech culture” they always seem to say that we should be doing something different than what we’re doing now as part of building a civil society. I want to agree with that. But in practice they seem to wind up calling for an obligation for someone to shut up in the name of protecting someone else’s speech.
A few additional thoughts, but first to Fibi:
I did not miss a subtle change in tense in the quote from Amp. He clearly states “in our current culture…” There are no further qualifications that “it might become …” or “soon it will be…” or some such. He is talking about the here and now. But Amp is free to clarify or disagree.
Also, Fibi, I think the language you use is telling somewhat. You are concerned about “datamining” and “monitoring” and even “aggressive monitoring.” It all sounds very Orwellian. I am, as are many others, concerned about the government and the NSA domestic spying program and such. But this isn’t that. Relax just a little. The language you use is very alarming, but I don’t think we are there yet. Or even close. But perhaps I am naive.
Another thought on this issue that I keep circling around in my head is that everyone seems to talk about FaceBook as if it is something entirely new and different from all that has come before. It really isn’t. Social media has been with us forever in some for or another. Newspapers have been around for centuries, and before that local gossip has been around for as long as humanoids have been able to talk.
My small town Texas newspaper has a daily local crime report and gossip column; the most/must read sections of the paper. So anyone’s public activities, including speech, are already part of the public discourse.
The internet and new social media like FB and Twitter make it easier, of course, for any idiot to share her crackpot ideas. But this strikes me more as a matter of degree.
Most of the conversation here has centered around jobs that involve, to some extent, the public trust. I think this is important. We aren’t talking about the local bait shop or poultry processing plant or grocery store datamining the internet or aggressively monitoring FB for every employee’s latest rant (although companies with serious and legitimate security issues may do this).
But again, people who’s jobs require the public trust are in a different position than Jane Q. Employee. If the clerk at at the gas pump thinks that last week’s tornadoes were a punishment from god for the “abomination of homosexuality” I really don’t much care. As a gay parent, if my son’s teacher thinks so, it matters to me a great deal.
I have a number of teachers in my family and they all have FB pages. It seems almost required now. Students and parents are going to go on the internet and see what they can find. Count on it. Students and parents have been gossiping about teachers and prying into their personal lives for as long as there have been teachers. All of the teachers I know have a public FB page, and a private FB page (you can have more than one!).
As to the question about college admission I don’t really have a problem with using FB or other social media as part of the vetting process. Employers routinely do this now. That topless photo of you at the beach with a bong in one hand and beer in the other* might be fine if you are applying for a job at the local surf shack, but corporate America might rightfully be concerned about your discretion and judgement.
*On a lighter note, I used this as an example because in my last job this actually happened. Oy. An applicant actually listed her FB page on her resume. And there on her FB page (not recent but still) was said photo. It became a running joke around the office — The 4B Incident (beach, beer, boobs, bong). She didn’t get the job.
I’m not sure it’s advisable in a sense that it’s probably not the best use of their time, but I don’t see anything inherently unethical as long as they’re verifying the identity of the student and as long as they’re only using publicly viewable information, not information that’s restricted (even if that restriction is to “friends of friends” and includes 2700 people).
For college admissions in general, I think it’d be pretty unreasonable to use anything more than a year or two old. With someplace as selective as MIT, though, they’re going to be splitting hairs somewhere I’m not sure if there’s a practical difference between being rejected because you said something dumb when you were fifteen and being rejected because you only played the oboe since you were nine and got into National Honor Society in your junior year and another kid played the clarinet since they were three and got into NHS as a sophomore.
In a good economy in a diverse area, this works well. But it could easily have a limiting effect on public discourse in areas where jobs are hard to come by or where a large majority favors one party or the other.
Mythago:
Either you misunderstood me, or I wrote something I didn’t agree with. To clarify, yes, in a civil rights case I agree that someone’s FB postings could be relevant. In a civil rights case against a cop, however, the cop would actually have been accused of having done something illegal. That makes things like “what has he said on his FB feed” relevant. For that matter, if there’s a pattern of Hall being accused of unnecessary force or racist bias while on his job, then I think that makes his FB feed relevant for a reporter to report on.
However, those factors don’t seem to be in play in this case. And even though the Seattle police department has been (rightly, as far as I can tell) accused of bias and a pattern of unnecessary force, this particular cop hasn’t been, afaik.
So yes, I can think of cases in which I think Hall’s FB feed could be relevant. But “a mid-level cop says right-wing things, including things about police controversies, on his FB page without calling for anything illegal” does not, in my mind, rise to the level of being newsworthy.
I don’t see where he actually said that.
As for cherry-picking, I don’t see how that sentence makes any difference to my post. I didn’t claim the article was unfair to Hall in every possible way – obviously, it was not. I said it was unfair to Hall because writing a news story about a as-far-as-we-know innocent cop’s political opinions on Facebook is unreasonable and disproportionate. That Hall was asked for comment doesn’t change that at all.
G&W:
To clarify: the only “serious limits” I’m advocating here are social limits – we should expect that newspapers don’t do stories about the political opinions someone states on FB, with exceptions for (say) folks like Mitt Romney or the Mayor and maybe celebrities. But I’m not suggesting any way of enforcing that expectation, other than that when newspapers cross that line, people should criticize the papers.
But to your general point: As far as I’m concerned, generally, if the social or legal landscape shifts to move power from employers to employees, that’s a net gain for freedom. Because in our current system, employers have too much power. And the larger and wealthier the employer, the more true that is.
So if Lucy the writer employs her brother’s friend Sally to come in once a week and file papers, and then Lucy read’s Sally FB opinions and decides to fire Sally, I consider that a very small thing, because Lucy is as small an employer as she could possibly be while still being an employer. Trying to get Lucy not to act like that would be a very, very tiny gain to freedom. OTOH, if Safeway begins monitoring its employees FB pages, that’s a large and serious threat to freedom.
Ron, as policy, I’d be against MIT taking into account FB pages or other social media that weren’t submitted by the applicant themselves, with exceptions for extraordinary circumstances.
Aside from anything else, it’s not very practical. Very soon word would get out, and then everyone applying to MIT would make a point of scrubbing all their pages of anything controversial and putting up lots of posts with photos of them volunteering to help orphaned dolphins.
MarkJ:
First of all, thanks for your comments here, which have all been excellent. (Ditto for many other people – Ben, Fibi, La Lubu, Kohai, Grace, Mythago, etc… I feel like I’m giving an Oscars thanks speech).
Fibi interpreted my meaning correctly, but I have to admit that what I wrote was the opposite of clear, so it makes total sense that you didn’t catch it.
So here it is again, this time with the modifier that should have been there in the first place: I worry that in our current culture – in which partisan hatred and fury has become so ordinary (on both sides) – [we are heading to a place where] only those with the thick skins and secure positions will feel comfortable speaking out.
I think we’re already part of the way there; I know I’ve spoken to people who say that they can’t stand posting about controversial stuff because they feel the response is so over-the-top and hostile. And, of course, there are many actual examples of people being punished in real-world ways for what they say on social media.
As was pointed out upthread by another writer, this “the job is a prominent one with special responsibilities” argument is currently being used to justify the firing (or unhiring) of Professor Steven Salaita. Most recently, I saw a conservative with a blog on the Washington Post look through Salaita’s Amazon reviews to argue that Salaita lacks the right temperament to be a professor.
There are all sorts of ways that police should be held to extra scrutiny, for the reasons you mentioned. But we have to balance that interest with other interests. I think that, for a cop who isn’t accused of any crime or abuse, doing a story that’s about “this cop has strong opinions about Michael Brown and Obama on his FB page!” serves too little of the “legitimate scrutiny” interest to justify the harm I think this sort of thing does to our reasonable expectation that what we grouse on FB won’t be a newspaper story tomorrow.
A general point: The Stranger blog post was NOT “Seattle has a real problem with police abuse and racism. And there are dangerous attitudes in this police sergeant’s FB feed that imply both too great a willingness to find rationalizations for police violence, and an attitude of contempt for ordinary citizens, especially those that criticize police. Here are some relevant examples of this, from his FB feed.”
I think I’d be okay with an article like that.
Right from the headline – which talked about Hall’s opinion of Obama – this was an article that was just as much about this man being a right-winger as about any other aspect. I can agree that there COULD be reporting which includes stuff from Hall’s FB feed that is put into a context that makes it relevant and newsworthy. I don’t agree that THIS article was such an article. It had a very passing reference to the ongoing scandals with the Seattle PD, but taken as a whole the article can’t be said to make that, or how Hall’s attitude can contribute to that, the focus at all.
Here’s a snippet from a IM discussion Grace and I just had. I’m posting this with Grace’s permission.
That final paragraph is, so far, the argument against my position that I find the most persuasive. I’m not saying I’m a convert, but I’m certainly thinking seriously about Grace’s point here.
Ben:
I can’t speak for Fibi (although I think Fibi’s comments on this thread have been excellent and I agree with everything they’ve written).
However, speaking for myself, I have absolutely no objection to reporters monitoring FB pages of people who are on their reporting beat – cops, musicians, politicians, perfume makers, whoever. That’s just what good reporters do. I’m just questioning if this story, in its current form, should have been posted. What I’m objecting to is the article, not the researching.
As I wrote earlier, I either wouldn’t object, or would object far less too, an article that said “Seattle has a real problem with police abuse and racism. And there are dangerous attitudes in this police sergeant’s FB feed that imply both too great a willingness to find rationalizations for police violence, and an attitude of contempt for ordinary citizens, especially those that criticize police. Here are some relevant examples of this, from his FB feed.”
I know you think – if I’ve been following your argument correctly – that this article does that implicitly, because of the scandals with the Seattle PD being racist and criminally violent which the Stranger has frequently reported on. Obviously, that’s a crucially important story and the Stranger should be reporting on it. No argument from me there.
However, I think that to be an article about the ongoing scandal, the article would need to make the connection to the scandal much more explicit than this article did (iirc there’s only one passing reference to the scandal in the article, and iirc it was buried in the story rather than being in the headline, the subheadline, or the first couple of paragraphs), and to be careful to narrowly limit what it quotes to what’s directly relevant (i.e., not include that Hall called President Obama a wuss).
We may just have to disagree on that point.
[Edited to add in a paragraph I accidentally cut out.]
Regarding the argument Grace made, which I said I found persuasive.
Note that Grace does not deny that articles like this one have a chilling effect on speech. Instead, she admits forthrightly that the article does have a chilling effect, but argues that in this case there’s a strong public benefit that justifies the chilling effect. (At least, that’s how I interpret what she wrote.)
Amp, I think we have reached a point of agreement:
I can go along with that. I don’t really have enough context about the larger picture to know if in this instance it was a step too far.
In your original post you seemed to go from this single incident to a more general prohibition on such activity when you talk about “[t]he idea of employers – or the press – monitoring worker’s Facebook pages …
That broad of a statement is too much for me as I think, and you now seem to agree, that there are instances where it might be appropriate.
—
Two things stand out to me about how we are looking at the same situation from different perspectives.
You constantly talk about concerns over “political” speech. Specifically mentioning Hall’s dislike of Obama and that this was mentioned in the article. Yes, that certainly qualifies as political speech. But not everything is political speech. And even “political” speech can be more. As a good white Southern boy, I am well versed in the subtle racist speech that people in power employ. Calling Obama a “Kenyan” isn’t just meant as liberal/conservative sort of politics. It is very much meant to condemn him as a black man. As other and therefore less than. Yes, it is standard speech in Republican circles, because that is how they roll, but it doesn’t make it any less racist speech, and therefore more relevant than just “I voted for Romney.” It is more than just political speech. So much more.
Also, I think how one views this issue might have something to do with how one views social media. When you worry that there should be a “reasonable expectation that what we grouse on FB won’t be a newspaper story tomorrow” you imply that FB and other social media are somehow private. Perhaps more akin to email or yakking with friends over drinks. I believe in the “media” part of social media and think of FB as a very public forum. More along the lines of submitting a letter to the local paper for publication or speaking at the monthly Rotarian lunch. Which view you have will certainly color how you see the situation.
For the record, I don’t use FB or Twitter. I tried, but found them a colossal waste of time for me. And I am in intensely private person. On the other hand I have an older sister who spends half of her time on FB. I don’t get it, but to each her own.
One last comment (for now at least) to give you some insight into my current situation. I am very progressive, atheist and gay currently living in an extremely conservative, Christian (largely fundamentalist) small East Texas town (we elected Gohmert). And I keep my liberal opinions largely to myself. Out of fear of retaliation. Not my job, luckily. But really it is only a small exaggeration so say that an Obama bumper sticker on my car might get me shot at some intersection. Or at least get my car keyed in the parking lot. So I am more than aware of the problems that come with an oppressive culture which punishes difference and dissent.
Right.
That is because the “free speech culture” people are often a particular type of liberal. At heart they seem confident that they can accurately judge things that should be dealt with, and–more scarily by far– (b) that the judgment will not be corrupted by politics.
So you read the claim of “free speech” but it’s really just a transfer of speech from one group to another. Just like you get people “avoiding silencing” by, literally, telling one group to shut up so that someone else can talk.
Functionally speaking, it’s the transition from a negative right to a positive right.
I need to go and do meatworld things now, but I wanted to let folks know I feel bad for the many excellent comments I didn’t respond to.
I don’t have anything terribly constructive to add, but I wanted to express some empathy. That has to be really tough.
This issue is a big problem for me.
I was summarily fired because a student, who didn’t like me, found pictures of me doing burlesque under my stage name – which by the way suggests they were voluntarily browsing YouTube or photo galleries of burlesque shows, because there was no searchable connection between the stage name and the real name at the time – and passed them around a whole bunch of other students, then passed them on to adjuncts at my university who also didn’t like me, and then wrote to the President of the university, who summarily fired me using a very vaguely-written, “can mean whatever we want it to mean” type clause in our contract about bringing public approbation on the school. Which, since my burlesque career had no connection with the school, was a pretty far reach, especially when I found that another faculty had done nude performance art to which he had actually invited his students.
But a naked man has nothing on a partially-disrobed woman for public approbation, especially when there’s personal grudges involved (and a very vocal faculty member who keeps calling the President to task for being a completely ineffective and autocratic leader.) And even though the students we’re talking about were adults in their 20s, 30s, and older, a little moral outrage goes a long way 30 minutes out of a major metro area!
So I have some pretty strong feelings about the fact that there should, generally, be a GIANT FUCKING WALL between what your employer is allowed to hold you accountable for (e.g. performance of your job duties, behavior while on the job) and what they cannot (the bumper sticker on your car, whether you are marching on the pro-Palestine or pro-Israel side of the street, your appearance at a rally on the weekend, your Facebook photo of you with a big glass of wine at a friend’s party, just to name a few of, oh, several million examples).
However, police are a very big exception in my mind for reasons so many have already articulated. If police were really going to start posting their uncensored opinions about their jobs on social media, I’d almost say, for the first time in my life, that I regret not going to law school like my dad wanted, because I would REVEL in finding racist, sexist, homophobic, violent comments to impeach the testimony of cops charged with fair and impartial administration of the laws of the land to the civilian populace. The very idea just thrills my little leftist heart.
At the same time, this whole “public trust” argument can and already has gone too far. Student teachers fired for a FB photo of them drinking alcohol, over the age of legal consumption. Teachers fired for their “MSM” ad with dick picture on Craigslist. Hobby Lobby has set a completely obscene precedent by piercing the corporate veil and I think the policing of employees’ private lives is going to get worse before it gets better.
My carefully cultivated anonymity is long gone thanks to the student and employer that outed me – I’ve stopped even much defending my Internet ‘nym other than lightly – but I’ve been trying to tell my profession, ever since then, that either we’ve gotta get comfortable with the idea that therapists are going to have pasts available to be dug up, or our whole field is going to contract back to the most conservative, privileged hetero-white-picket-fence types that were its mainstay in the 50s and 60s, because former Hell’s Angels and Deltas and Hooters employees are going to go back to school to get their degrees for licensure and the Internet will be waiting. I don’t look forward to fighting that fight in front of 50+ separate state and territorial licensing boards and half a dozen mental health professional organizations’ ethics committees, though.
In re: Grace’s remark thusly:
I just want to point out that, when I was exploring my legal options regarding my employment situation, I learned to my great dismay that 1) California is one of the FEW states with any statue on the books that affords employees some kind of legal protection for off-the-job speech, and 2) even that is very weak, almost never invoked in court cases, and has even fewer judgements associated with it in order to create precedent (where legal battles are really won or lost much of the time). Because as we all like to remind people who cry “free speech!” the First Amendment only applies to GOVERNMENT actors. So unless you’re employed by a federal, state, or local agency, or something like a state university, you have no First Amendment protection standing between you and your employer.
Chew on that one for a little bit tonight while you try to sleep, won’t you. (Especially all of you employed in “at-will” states.) Yes, your boss can choose to fire you because s/he doesn’t like your “ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT” bumper sticker. (And we don’t need unions why, again?)
Sweet dreams!
I’m sorry you got fired. I don’t know how it will be possible to respond without referencing your personal shit, but presumably you’re OK with that.
1) If John’s employer doesn’t like him–i.e. has a personal grudge against John–or if she doesn’t value John as much as she values other employees who dislike John: that is a valid reason to fire John.
I doubt you’d disagree that it would be a valid reason not to hire John; few employers will hire people they don’t like and it would seem obviously strange to force a hire. If it would be OK not to hire someone, why wouldn’t it be OK to fire them?
2) And, of course, I assume that you would never work this in both directions, right? IOW, I’ve never seen anyone seriously argue that John should have a legal obligation to stay put or face penalties; or that John has to take a job and do his best, even if he dislikes the company/coworkers/manager. That should perhaps make you question the obviousness of j;ob protections for John.
3) And of course, this has on effect on employment overall. John may be screwed, but someone else is totally psyched because they get John’s job. John may feel unfairly limited because his “ROMNEY” sticker got him fired, but someone else may be psyched that they can get the job–perhaps John can get the slot of the guy who was fired for the “GREEN PARTY” sticker, and everyone will be better off.
Back to you:
I don’t really care a whit about burlesque, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable for some folks to be shocked by it and I don’t think there’s any inherent right to do it that we need to protect. Even more to the point, I think that the protection is far worse than the damage. It would make no sense to make employers ignore EVERYTHING, so any protection will by necessity be limited.
As soon as you have limits, you create a serious disparity between different types of conduct. If burlesque (or your trait of choice) happens to be on the “protected” side then you are set. But if it is on the unprotected side then you will be far worse off than you are now.
I wish you hadn’t been fired. But a world where you couldn’t have been fired would be worse than the world where you were.
Again, you really seem to be operating on the assumption that this balances out completely, as though there are probably an equal number of people who would fire you for being right-wing as would fire you for being a leftie. I don’t know if that’s the case in the US overall, but there are certainly plenty of rural, conservative areas where only the Obama sticker is a problem. Mark J lives in one, I grew up in another.
This becomes a social problem when, instead of balancing each other’s idiosyncrasies, multiple employers in a given area reinforce each other’s biases. It might be a net gain, or at least a wash, if John gets fired for his Romney sticker, but takes the job of a guy who got fired for his Nader sticker. And, hey, since they’re in the same industry, Green Party Greg can have John’s job.
But what happens when your area has twenty possible employers, and sixteen of them would fire you for an Obama sticker? Maybe you move, if you can afford to, but it’s also likely that you keep your political opinions to yourself. You sure as hell don’t volunteer with political campaigns, or put signs in your yard, or write a letter to the editor.
The overall net effect, if enough employers are making hiring decisions on politics, is to stifle public discourse, or at least to limit it to people who have opinions that their employers like, who have enough savings to risk getting fired, or who work for themselves. That is, it magnifies the political power of people who already have political power.
I’m honestly not so sure about that, especially for a teacher and a therapist. Again, if you look at it in isolation, you can figure that it all balances out. But a general overall trend is that teachers and therapists have to have squeaky clean backgrounds and never do or say anything controversial isn’t necessarily a good one. For one thing, the people in need of mental health services aren’t well served by it. “Doesn’t perform burlesque” isn’t a relevant attribute to whether someone can help you address your anxiety or save your marriage.
First, gin-and-whiskey’s outlook on the employer’s absolute right to fire for reasons completely unrelated to job performance are a fine example of why labor unions and civil rights laws are necessary. There is such a thing as power disparity and disparate impact. In gin-and-whiskey’s example, there is no balance of power. Authorities are free to act unilaterally upon their whims, with no accountability to anyone but themselves. An imbalance of power results in an abuse of power. Autocracy doesn’t result in a better world, and not just for Elusis. It results in a world where those in power abuse those those with little-to-none.
(also: it shouldn’t go without saying that “personal grudges” or strong feelings, or however you want to put it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Racism is real. Sexism is real. Homophobia is real. Classism is real. Elusis was fired for the supposed impropriety of showing less skin than the average man does during athletic activities in the summertime. You really want to claim gender had nothing to do with that firing? That it was just a “personal grudge” that could happen to “anybody”, even though it quite clearly didn’t happen for a male co-worker with his naked performance art? that he specifically invited students to see? Please.)
Grace’s comments above were fabulous, and accurately stated my views: changing the culture of hostility requires a re-balance of the power equation. “Pretty please” doesn’t work. Why speech is important is because of its exercise of and/or impact upon power. Who is saying what to whom, and the relative power differential is relevant. Speech doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
Speaking of vacuum, I’m not keen on a discussion of speech without consideration of elements like power differentials, checks and balances, and harm reduction. I consider Sgt. Hall’s Facebook page fair game in a way that Elusis’s is not, precisely because of those elements. The duties of a police officer are such that inherent hostility will make them less effective on the job, both on an individual and a departmental level. That has consequences that extend to the entire community, with a disproportionate set of consequences on those populations subject to that hostility (and the added insult that they are literally paying for that hostility to be visited upon them). There may or may not be complaints against Sgt. Hall as an individual; we do not know (and one reason we do not know may be that people who have had negative experiences with him on the street do not feel safe to come forward, and/or that any complaints they make will be “round-filed” instead of pursued). We do know that his police department has a demonstrable history of racist bias.
As Grace says above: what breaks that cycle? Greater oversight. Structured and proportional consequences (most especially for leadership—the higher the command, the more accountability). Leadership that does not condone the abuse of power. Co-workers that do not condone the abuse of power. But the cycle will not and cannot be broken on its own. “Pretty please” has been tried and found wanting. A balance of power is what is called for.
Amp, I generally think you are a very insightful person, but you are missing a crucial mark in this particular discussion. You’re focused on political speech. For some of us, our existence is already political (or politicized).
I’m not on Facebook, and like Mark J (and others) alluded above, except for major metropolitan areas, the size of social circles and physical size of the city and its social and political institutions means that everybody already knows everyone else’s business. But to be honest, none of my employers who’ve ever had a bug up their ass about my presence ever gave a damn about my voting record or opinions on the major issues of the day. That wasn’t where my political presence was seated for them. What they had a bug up their ass about was my presence itself, my presence as a woman in a man’s trade, “stealing a job” from a man who was automatically more deserving because of his gender. They were angry that they didn’t have the legal ability to deny me employment, angry that they couldn’t get rid of me on a whim, angry that I got into the apprenticeship program because I made the grades while their son was smoking pot….they were angry white men. Angry that people other than white men were getting opportunities previously reserved solely for white men. Angry even though from an objective standpoint, they still have greater advantages and disproportionate representation.
They aren’t trolling social media looking for my opinions, and they aren’t driving by my house to see whose yard signs are up, or tooling by the Democratic phone banks or precinct walking Saturdays to see where my truck is parked to find who I’m supporting. They don’t have to. My presence is already politicized. Elusis has a political existence whether she wears revealing clothing or not. Grace has a political presence on or off the job. So does Mark J. So does any person of color (and most especially black people) regardless of his or her other attributes.
So my question to you Amp, is why do you think a more public reposting of an officer’s speech is more threatening, or more damaging to “free speech” than the already politicized existence of the folks this officer is biased against? Yes, I realize I’m criticizing from the cheap seats in that I don’t have to make a choice—speak up or shut up, it won’t affect my public image and certainly not to those already predisposed against me. But it still stands. Some people have the option of their speech being the only way they are recognized as a politicized being. Many of us don’t have that choice. We bear the burden of our presence speaking politically for us, interpreted by an audience in ways regardless of our intent and outside of our control.
Actually, I’m arguing something crucially different, at least in the philosophy:
As a rule* (there are always exceptions) the only one who can define “job performance” is the employer. Not the employee, and certainly not you or I. People who pay money for services should, as a rule*, be able to decide what services they want to pay money for. People who hire folks should, as a rule*, be able to decide what folks they want to hire. And so on.
Of course there is, but it’s external.
One example is the list of exceptions.
Another example is that some companies are reputed to be excellent to work for, and thereby get the best applicants for the lowest salaries. Other companies are reputed to be poor to work for, and either get worse applicants or pay higher salaries.
Another example is that a companies’ hiring/firing practices are often semi-public or wholly-public knowledge, and that the public can adjust its choices accordingly; remember the Chick-Fil-A thing?
Another example is that we provide unemployment, which places an additional cost of an employer that fires a lot of people (unless those people are promptly rehired somewhere else.)
Another example is that training and employee investment is often fairly expensive, which is a disincentive for an employer to fire someone and which is an incentive to ignore things that don’t really relate to performance.
Should I go on?
An interesting word choice: “authorities.”
To the degree that refers to actual authorities like the government, that is resoundingly untrue. that’s why the first amendment exists.
To the degree that you’re using that to describe employers (all? some? most?) it’s not really the right word either. Let’s use “employers.”
That’s an interesting limitation, but a bad one. It would be more accurate to say that those who have power–wherever they are on the social hierarchy–tend to use it to advance their own interests at the expense of others.
It’s simple to suggest that we should have some restrictions on abuse of power, rather than exercise of power. But that merely turns the argument into one that asks where the “abuse” line is. Is it “abuse” to fire a professor for burlesque, or merely dumb management? Is it “abuse” to fire someone for failing to toe the party line, or is it merely a clear and rigid corporate culture? is it “abuse” to act on a zero tolerance policy? I doubt you would want to make stupidity, bad decisions, differing beliefs, or rigidity illegal. Questioning where “abuse” lies
See above.
Also, this is true, at least to some extent and in some circumstances. But of course, as soon as you grant authority to other “right-minded” people and charge them with balancing the situation, you merely create a new, different, set of power-abusers.
I mean, the call for unionization is interesting in that context. From the union’s perspective, they exist to stop abuses. From the employer’s perspective, unions also tend to cause abuses. Because it’s not just powerful people who want to abuse what they have. It’s people in general.
I’m not sure if you seriously think that I disagree with this, but: yes. I know.
This is bizarre. You are intentionally misstating what was probably the #1 reason, and it had nothing to do with percentage of skin revealed.
Burlesque is often though not always framed as an expression of sexuality. It’s often designed to titillate as well as entertain. It’s related to (and occasionally includes) striptease.
It makes a lot of people uncomfortable, which is perfectly fine.
Do you not think it’s fine to be discomfited by burlesque? By striptease?
I mean, it’s all well and good not to care (I don’t.) but I’m not dumb enough to pretend that NOBODY cares; nor do I think that people should be prevented from caring. There’s nudity, and there’s sexuality, and they are not the same thing.
WTF? The best way to know if I “really want to claim” something is when I, ya know, actually say it. I didn’t say anything of the sort so it would be nice if you could avoid the rhetoric that implies I did.
But as for the comparison: I have no idea. I didn’t see the art.
If the issue were “nudity” then the comparison would be “what level of nudity?”
If the issue were “sexuality” then the comparison would be “what level of sexuality?”
And if the issue were something else, then the comparison would be something else.
And of course, if the people were otherwise of different values to the employer (e.g. one was a much loved longstanding and valuable employees who could not easily be replaced, and one was not) then there’s a perfectly good reason to treat them differently. If two players are equally rude to the coach, Michael Jordan is less likely to end up getting benched. (would that seem unfair to you?)
After the paragraph where you suggest it was all about showing %ages of skin (in which you ignore both the social differential and the sexuality asects) I’m not going to rely on your judgment about this.
Besides, it would rapidly devolve into semantics and definitions. Since you’re comparing two things which were obviously not identical, deciding whether things are “similar enough” to count is merely an issue of definitions. Do you count skin %age? Social cues? Intent? Audience reaction?
Without knowing a damn thing about the guy’s art I can’t say whether it was the same, better, or worse in the eyes of he employer. Can you? How on earth could you?
The answer is entirely dependent on what you decide to make relevant. And since you seem to already believe this was a problem, I suspect you’d merely choose criteria which would support your point–like, say, “how much skin they were showing” without any of the factors that the employer cared about. That is the precise type of thing I am talking about when I referenced the fact that both sides tend to abuse whatever power they get.
Besides–and this is crucial–this is not AT ALL the least intrusive way of solving the problem.
If the goal is to protect employees from the exercise of the rights of the employers, then you can do that without limiting the rights of the employers. If you think it’s broadly beneficial, you could extend unemployment payments, for example. The lower the costs are to leave, the freer that employees will get.
In that respect it’s a bit like the ADA employment problem. After all: Most folks want the ADA and most folks benefit from the ADA. But the only people who actually PAY for the ADA are the folks who are forced to spend money that they wouldn’t voluntarily spend, and/or hire folks who they wouldn’t voluntarily hire, because of the ADA.
We could, of course, do that differently, from the other side–to use a random example, we could subsidize workers who qualify for the ADA, so that they were cheaper to hire; at some point of subsidy employers would be competing to hire them rather than trying to avoid it.
We could do similar things with speech, if we cared enough. but we don’t.
*I do support exclusions for immutable characteristics and some other issues.
On g&w’s point, I think the size of the employer makes a difference here, too. I get the impression (and I apologize if I’m incorrect) that you occasionally hire workers (paralegals?) to work directly with you, or have such people hired on your behalf, and so some of your opinions on employment come from that relationship. And, in that sense, being forced to work closely with someone you don’t like is a restriction on your freedom (although I think there are cases where that restriction is viable–as do you, for race etc). But that’s not at all like the relationship a university president has with the average teacher in a university, or like higher-up corporate officers have with low-level employees. I can’t speak to for-profit or community colleges, but certainly at universities, most hiring and firing decisions are made by the department that hires the teacher and the higher-up admins merely sign off; only disciplinary matters, not routine performance, are usually addressed by the administration. And the average teacher rarely interacts one-on-one or in small groups with the president. It’s unusual for a single complaint of this nature to even garner the attention of a university president, let alone be judged as a firing offense.
(Not to mention that, due to academic freedom concerns, most universities have quite strict policies on firing in the employment contracts for academic staff. Elusis mentioned they had to point to a kind of bad-publicity clause to fire her, which seems like it would be a bit of a stretch if she wasn’t using either her real name or her employer’s name when taking part.)
To the original point: I think it’s reasonable for the reporter to follow the officers on social media, but I agree somewhat with Amp that making a story just about the positions of this one officer (without reference to any job performance issues) seems a bit shady to me. In particular where we’re talking about Facebook, which has a long history of making its public/not-public controls opaque to users.
Yes.
Yes, though I have worked (as an employee or a lawyer) for and with and in a variety of organizations of differing sizes, some well over 1000. I also work in the field (mostly with employees, but occasionally with employers.) My views stem from a variety of sources: my views on employee uses of power, for example, stems from the fact that I am very good at using the maximal amount of power available to employees.
Yes.
Sure.
But SOMEONE has a relationship with a teacher. Maybe it’s the other teachers–they act through the president as they can’t hire/fire on their own, but that doesn’t make their opinion invalid.
Nor does it get out of the management aspects. You have 10 fundie prolife Xtian Republicans and 1 Green tree-hugging clinic-walker. All goes well until one day there’s a huge fight and it becomes apparent that you will either lose 10, or 1, employee. Should the law require you to fire 10? Should the interpersonal politics be deemed irrelevant just because they are enforced by someone up the chain?
And the remoteness changes the things that are at focus, rather than simply eliminating them. If Tom Teacher is a close-talking garlic-lover, the president may not ever find out or care (but the other teachers will.) If Tom Teacher writes a nasty column in the local paper, the other teachers may not ever find out or care (but the president will.)
If anything this supports my argument: the power granted is in fact being used with some sort of reasonableness. If not that would not be unusual at all, since professors are often somewhat high up on the eccentricity scale.
If it’s a contract violation, then that’s a separate thing and isn’t a speech issue at all. I have no idea, not having read it.
*Citation needed.
There are places in this world that require people to be fired ‘for cause’ rather than ‘at will’. I would need to see some sort of evidence that these places are worse, job-and-employment wise, than places where there are not such requirements.
My feeling is that the balance of power is already so tilted towards the employer that requiring cause for firings is hardly an imposition at all.
Furthermore, the ‘at will’ system makes sexual harassment and racial and sexual descrimination de-facto legal, or at least much, much harder to prove.
An example from my own life: Female employee is staying late at work. Male boss makes a pass at her. She rejects said pass, and is fired. She is young, and hasn’t been working there very long. He is older, established in the community, and has a lot more money. It’s his word against hers. Of fucking course, nothing comes of it.
My contention is that a world where she couldn’t have been fired for refusing to let her employer fuck her would be better than the world where she was.
—Myca
Gin-and-whiskey, are you tired from the effort of moving those goalposts? Earlier, you were quite clear about your support for employers to have unilateral ability to fire anyone at all for any reason, including matters unrelated to job performance—-that employers should have 24-7-365 veto power over the employees’ unpaid hours. Now you’re leading with a claim that only job performance is relevant, though later in your lengthy response you return to the notion that employers should retain the right to hire and fire for matters unrelated to job performance.
First, in unionized environments, or any other contractual employment, it is not just the employer that defines job performance, conditions, hours, benefits, goals, etc.—the employee does too. That’s salient, because a contract provides an objective record to measure against. You are under the illusion that employers only make objective decisions. In the absence of a contract, they do not. You are under the illusion that they make rational decisions, lest irrational decisions cost them money. No. They externalize those costs onto the rest of us (see: standard business practices of service-industry employers).
The reality is that most employees are completely disposable, particularly in this economy. You are free to believe that more oversight and a balance of power does not result in a reduction of employer abuses. You are also free to claim that a lack of objective standards and a lack of transparency is of greater benefit to employees and customers. Neither holds up to the most cursory examination. In fact, the whole point of the Lily Ledbetter Act is that there is no transparency in wages and benefits in nonunionized employment. There still isn’t for customers; I have no way of comparing nonunion employers to see where I want to spend my money, as they don’t release that information.
Yes, it is absolutely an abuse of power to fire Elusis for burlesque. It is also sex discrimination that they did not fire her male colleague for his nudity. “Nudity is not sexuality.” No shit, Sherlock. Women’s bodies are sexualized regardless of what we do or what we wear. Elusis did not perform burlesque in class, therefore the school has no right to make that an actionable disciplinary matter–it’s strictly none of their business. If the employer wants to make the degree of nudity, type of sexual expression, or any other legal, off-working-hours point that is none of their damn business a condition of employment, they can spell it out in a goddamn contract and pay their employees for that intrusion and restriction. Put some sunshine on it! Sunshine so that all potential employees, and all potential users of that employers services can decide if they want to be involved with that level of intrusion.
I’ll say it again, “pretty please” doesn’t work. There must be a countervailing force. Whether that force comes from representative government in the form of civil rights, labor, and environmental laws, or whether that force comes in the form of labor unions and organized social movements—there must be a countervailing force. Employers don’t answer to “pretty please”.
Yes yes yes yes yes. As the immortal Utah Phillips put it:
—Myca
I realize we’ve derailed into G&W’s favorite hobby horse but, for the people who think that this article is going overboard it might do really well to study some of the things that the Seattle Police have actually done, to provide you with some context.
I only lived in Seattle a small part of the multi-decades of police violence, abuse, and killing. But it was pretty horrible. And the Stranger, despite being an arts and entertainment weekly, played a huge role in bringing it to the public attention.
I don’t know if anything is going to come out of the consent decree. Given the way that cops are fighting it tooth and nail, probably not. But, without the Stranger and the other weeklies having the courage to report it, we wouldn’t even have a chance.
Should the article have included context? IDK probably it would have made it better. On the other hand not every article in a local paper needs to include two decades of context which nearly every local person is intimately familiar with. But, regardless, you can go learn about (some of) the context if you want to.
yrs–
–Ben
Also: regarding goalposts, the original post referenced the more public re-posting of not just political opinions, but also contemptuous remarks about the public, from a police officer, in a department cited by the feds as having a problem with police brutality, racial harassment, and violation of civil rights. In other words, an objective record of harm.
And now we’re supposed to get into the weeds about exactly why Elusis’s employer fired her, that maybe it wasn’t just about nudity, and hey, some people are disturbed by burlesque and/or female sexuality, and thus firing a woman who might make someone else uncomfy due to her legal, off-work avocation is fair game? BULLSHIT. Show me the harm. The Seattle PD has a proven record of harm. Show me one, just one, student who was directly harmed by the fact that he or she heard about Elusis wearing a burlesque outfit, and or the suspicion that gasp! Elusis just may be a sexual being. Show how Elusis was the sole generator of said harm (as opposed to all those tramps at public swimming pools, nightclubs, or anywhere else folks might get the idea that women have bodies and/or like sex).
Or, what Ben said.
In addition to what Mark J and others have said, I would add that what the cop says in his free time is a matter of liability for the city. It’s all well and good to say that what he posts when he is not at work has nothing to do with his employer — but of course, if his employer gets sued for something this man has done AT WORK, then all of a sudden, his after-hours hobbies do have everything to do with his employer. Retroactively. If there is a lawsuit against the city based on the cop’s violation of someone’s rights, then it will include a negligent hiring and retention claim. The cop’s Facebook postings can be introduced not only to illustrate his state of mind, but to prove that the PD “knew or should have known” of his bias, and thus unfitness to do his job, and that it should have “taken action” based on those postings. Think if this post was instead about this same cop beating up or killing an innocent person. I can’t imagine not hearing a loud chorus saying “Look what this d-bag kept posting on his Facebook page for months prior! How in the name of all that is holy did the police allow someone openly espousing such vile views to wear a badge and carry a baton and a gun??” Amirite? So the city is in a position here that it’s damned if it does, damned if it doesn’t. But I bet the focus of their “investigation” right now is going over their brutality complaints and criminal case evidentiary screw-ups to see how many of them involved this particular cop.
I want to thank everyone on this thread for the reasoned, insightful comments. Kudos. Not being a FB user, I admit that I hadn’t given a great deal of thought to the issue of FB as it relates to free speech issues. Although this conversation has helped to solidify some of my thoughts, I am still somewhat torn on the issue, as I was from the start.
As a general rule, I am always for the expansion of civil liberties (granting corporations personhood was a step too far). And I am a fervent support of free speech. But of course free speech isn’t free and it isn’t an absolute right. So the question becomes where one draws the lines.
As to the The Stranger article that started this whole conversation, I am not really sure what the point of the atricle actually was. There may be a larger context, but it wasn’t apparent from the article. For this, I blame the editor who should know better. [From a comment by Ben, I see there is a larger context, in fact.]
To the larger issue, I view public FB postings as public speech; no different than any other. Should Sgt. Hall’s postings have been singled out? Perhaps or perhaps not. But I don’t see that FB or social media or even the Internet deserve a special carve-out as restricted space where the public must refrain from commenting on other’s public speech, public opinions. Isn’t the internet as an open forum for all views rather the point (besides Netflix, of course).
Where do we draw the lines?
La Lubu’s comments this morning have been particularly helpful to me as I try to align my thinking on this issue. I have been bothered from the start by Amp’s focus on protecting “political” speech. But my very existence as a gay man in the community where I live is “political.” Perhaps that is why I am less concerned about public criticism of Sgt. Hall’s very public and less-than-overt-but-still-racist comments about how he votes. We only know about his political leanings because he is shouting about it in a public forum. He wasn’t forced to share his views on the internet. But when one does, you have to be prepared for the consequences.
I had spoken earlier in the thread about jobs that involve the public trust. La Lubu reframed the conversation in terms of power disparity, which I think is a much better and more accurate way of thinking about the situation with police officers and a few others (public school teachers for example). Thanks LL.
I appreciate G&W’s libertairanesque point of view, and it is not without appeal. But as with all things libertarian, it is always better in the abstract instead of the actual; it is much more realistic in a larger community than a smaller one. We are back to the issue of where to draw the line on free speech. I think the great value of free speech is that it places limits on power and helps to keep it in check, which is a social good in my view. This helps us draw the lines. G&W understands this intuitively as he “support[s] exclusions for immutable characteristics and some other issues.” He doesn’t enumerate those “other issues” unfortunately.
Not sure if these comments added anything to the conversation. Just where I am on this issue at the moment.
Believe me I had no interest in getting personal; she’s the one who posted a personal example.
First of all, I don’t think those are the right measurements–aren’t we talking about limitations on speech and, functionally, on freedom?
So as an example, if you look at some places in Europe, you see huge segments of youth who are disenfranchised and unemployed, because employers aren’t hiring anyone. And that is partly because employers can’t fire anyone. The employers are less free to do what they want; the workers are less free (because new employment is harder to find;) and the unemployed are less free because there is less turnover and therefore less opportunity. It may be that the employment numbers are just fine overall–they may not be “worse, job-and-employment wise”–but that metric would ignore the issue, I think.
Or, in the US, The drive towards adjuncts is, in part, driven by the inflexibility of firing and managing tenured folks. The drive towards charter schools is, in part, driven by the inflexibility of teacher’s unions. To some degree, the failure of the US auto industry was driven by their inability to rapidly make employment changes due to unions. Etc.
The problem isn’t the concept of “cause.” It’s the process of cause: the paid leave, and appeals, and attorneys, and review, and time, and so on.
(You might also consider the negative effects of “cause.” When people have to document both cause and equal treatment, they tend to protect themselves by becoming harsher. That drove mandatory minimums, which transferred discretion from judges to prosecutors; school zero-tolerance policies. which transfer discretion from teachers to principals; etc. The greater the cause rules, the less that employers can afford to be nice, because it will hurt them when a bad employee comes around. )
Yes, to some degree. But not always, because as a functional matter people will tend to dig into the details.
Sometimes those cases are winners; sometimes they settle; sometimes they lose. The outcome is often related to things that aren’t about “cause,” e.g. “did the victim send a text to her friend at the time, or did she wait to complain about it until after she was fired? And so on.
Of course. But from a legal standpoint she can’t be fired for that NOW, and she only has to meet the “more likely than not” standard–our most flexible one–to win. I can’t really say more without knowing what it was about. “Cause” might have helped her. Or not.
No, I think with respect to free speech it is much better in the actual than the abstract. In my opinion, the countries which place more restrictions on speech–including those in Europe, and Canada–suffer from it. And while I don’t support unlimited rights to contract, there are a lot of bad things which come out of good ideas. So I think it is right to be generally cautious of intervention: when someone says “there outta be a law” the initial reaction should be “not unless there’s a damn good reason and a lot of caution.”
Also, there are trust issues (not personal ones, but institutional.) The employers are a known quantity and fairly predictable. We can enact rules which will take account of their greed and misbehavior. Even people like me do not pretend that employers are saints (hell, I sue them for a living) but rather we try to design rules that accommodate that reality.
OTOH, the people arguing for more power to employees are, at least in my limited experience, pretending that things are one sided. If they started talking about the risks of power transfer, or acknowledging how it could be misused, or doing something which acknowledged their understanding of the other side, I’d distrust them less.
I mean, it appears that from many folks’ perspective it is 100% obviously abusive to have fired Elusis for performing in a burlesque. With the exception of Elusis (and any of her personal friends who know the details) that belief sounds like a stretch. I don’t see any willingness to look at things from the employer’s perspective, or to analyze the risks of the proposals, and therefore I think that the outcomes of the proposals are likely to end up corrupted or ill-formed. (not that the PEOPLE are corrupt or ill formed, mind you.)
It doesn’t limit power, really. It protects the ability to complain about the exercise of power–or to argue for more of it.
retaliation for demanding a legal right (‘pay me!’ “stop grabbing my ass!”) are some of the usual examples.
G&W, just a small aside, but you say:
I think that despots the world over would disagree with you on that. When tyrants seize power, what is the first thing they do (after getting themselves a nifty jacket with big gold epaulettes)? They drastically curtail freedom of speech. Because they know that free speech is dangerous to authoritarian rule. What was one reason for the recent Arab Spring? The rise of free speech and communication made possible by social media and the internet.
Sorry, but I think you are just wrong on this one.
Your economic theory leaves much to be desired as well, but there is no point in going down that rabbit hole here. Suffice it to say that the economic problems in Europe or the US are not free speech issues.
So as an example, if you look at some places in Europe, you see huge segments of youth who are disenfranchised and unemployed, because employers aren’t hiring anyone. And that is partly because employers can’t fire anyone.
And yet, in the US, where most employment is at-will, there is also high youth unemployment. Same with Hong Kong. In Germany, which has strong employment protections for workers, youth unemployment is low. Obviously, there’s more going on than “employers can’t fire anyone” (which isn’t true. Employers can fire for cause.).
Or, in the US, The drive towards adjuncts is, in part, driven by the inflexibility of firing and managing tenured folks.
Not at all. Universities aren’t complaining about the need to fire tenured faculty. Adjuncts are outside of the regular pay/benefit scale, and in most cases are prohibited from joining a union—so their pay remains low. Coaches on the other hand receive the highest pay in the collegiate system. Priorities, anyone?
The drive towards charter schools is, in part, driven by the inflexibility of teacher’s unions.
Who is demanding charter schools? Why, the for-profit companies (and think-tanks paid for by those for-profit companies) who stand to benefit from the dismantling of the public school system.
The Fourteenth Amendment. The Nineteenth Amendment. The Fair Labor Standards Act. The National Labor Relations Act. The Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title IX. The Pregnancy Anti-Discrimination Act of 1978. Any number of lesser-known civil rights, labor, and even environmental protection laws. What do they all have in common? A net increase in freedom—a greater amount of freedom extended to a greater number of people than prior to these acts. I didn’t say “power transfer”. I specifically mentioned imbalance of power with the correction being checks and balances; oversight, transparency, and objectivity as a correction to autocracy. Autocracy really doesn’t result in greater freedom. The more lateral (and less hierarchical) the power stream, the more freedom.
I mean, it appears that from many folks’ perspective it is 100% obviously abusive to have fired Elusis for performing in a burlesque….. I don’t see any willingness to look at things from the employer’s perspective
So present your case. What possible reason could an employer give for demanding an employee not engage in any legal activity that harms no one, under threat of job loss, but without explicitly identifying the specific activity or activities beforehand and without compensating the employee for that restriction or restrictions? I mean, in my world, people who are on-call receive not just a minimum show-up time if they get called in, but are also compensated for being on-call, since their activities are restricted for that time (travel restrictions, alcohol/medicine restrictions, certain other activities that could impact show-up time). You haven’t made your case, other than to say that some people are offended by burlesque. So fucking what? Some people are offended by women, period. Is that a reasonable accommodation too?
(I also can’t help but wonder what the record is for that former employer of Elusis when it comes to their handling of teachers using the student body as a dating pool. Burlesque results in firing, but actual sex, not so much? hmm…)
As I wrote earlier, I either wouldn’t object, or would object far less too, an article that said “Seattle has a real problem with police abuse and racism. And there are dangerous attitudes in this police sergeant’s FB feed that imply both too great a willingness to find rationalizations for police violence, and an attitude of contempt for ordinary citizens, especially those that criticize police. Here are some relevant examples of this, from his FB feed.”
So your issue really isn’t one of free speech, since this would have exactly the same chilling effect as the current article. Your real issue is you thought this was misleading journalism. Why not simply say so, instead of busting out the hand-wringing, Preferred First Speaker doctrine stuff again?
I really do miss being part of these discussions. I do want to comment on this, though, by G&W:
In fact, if you follow the money, and consider how administrative bloat is costing institutions of higher education, it’s hard to avoid at least considering the possibility that the ever increasing reliance on less expensive adjunct faculty is driven in large measure by the need to move the money saved in this way into the ever increasing number of, as well as increasingly higher, administrative salaries.
I make this point not because (or not only because) I want to ride what is, for obvious reasons, a hobby horse of mine, but because it’s important when you start to talk about what drives employment issues—including those raised by Elusis’ firing—in entire industries, there is always going to be text and subtext, and the facts when it comes to money are often turned into subtext by the very people whose interests that money serves.
“And yet, in the US, where most employment is at-will, there is also high youth unemployment.”
I can propose a few factors that might cause that. Employers in the U.S. often find themselves in a situation where they are required to pay a young person more than they can recover in productivity. Also, it is my observation in the middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods I am familiar with that parents there push their kids into extracurricular activities such as athletics, clubs, service work, etc. instead of part-time employment – the latter being much more the norm when I was a kid. Understand that when my friends played baseball in high school, they played for a 3 month season and then it was over. Now, when a kid plays, say, soccer, he or she plays for their high school season, then they play for a travelling team for 3 months, and then they might play for an indoor team. If they don’t, they have no hope of developing their skills to the point that they’ll be on that high school team next year and, God forbid, have no chance for an athletic “scholarship”. Youth sports take up a lot more time than they used to. When I went to Dog & Suds to get a burger and a root beer in high school, some of my friends cooked that burger, poured that root beer and delivered it to my car – and then, when their mother went grocery shopping, I put her groceries in bags and carried them to her car. These days, when I go to get a burger at McDonalds the manager of the place had to learn rudimentary Spanish to communicate with about 3/4 of his or her employees, and many of the rest are underemployed adults.
There’s also the issue of automation. When I go to the grocery store it’s entirely possible that I will scan my own groceries, bag them myself and take them to the car myself. Those things are much cheaper in the long run than hiring people to do the job.
“In Germany, which has strong employment protections for workers, youth unemployment is low.”
It is my understanding that the German educational system puts a much higher priority on educating students for employment. A far higher percentage of students end up in trade school and apprenticeship programs than in the U.S., where it seems like everyone is expected to go to college and people tend to look down on students who intend to become mechanics, tool and die operators, carpenters, etc.
“Universities aren’t complaining about the need to fire tenured faculty.”
How much say do the tenured faculty have on the hiring, retention and firing of the administration? Don’t interpret me as questioning the financial advantages that universities have discovered in hiring adjuncts, however.
“Who is demanding charter schools?”
Parents. By the tens of thousands in Chicago. Enrollment in charter schools went from essentially zero in 2000 there to over 54,000 in 2013 – and 19,000 more that wanted to get in but couldn’t because there wasn’t enough room. It’s true that for-profit companies are pushing to open more charter schools – but that’s not some nefarious plot to destroy the public schools. It’s because there’s unfulfilled demand that they’re trying to satisfy, just like in any other market. If Chicago and the State of Illinois removed the artificial ceiling on how many charter schools are permitted to operate you’d see a lot more parents pull their kids out of publicly operated public schools and put them into privately operated public schools – not to mention the 1 out of every 8 students who are in Catholic schools, which parents have to pay to put their kids into, and where the expenditure per student is about 1/2 of what Chicago Public Schools spends per student in the schools they operate.
“Destroy the public schools” is an incredibly deceptive phrase. Charter schools are public schools. They are paid for by the taxpayer, not the student, and any student who resides in Chicago is eligible to apply for a spot in them. Just because a school is not operated by the government doesn’t mean it’s not a public school.
1) “Any legal activity that harms no one” is meaningless. If the ER doesn’t think it harms (or could harm) them then they’re unlikely to fire. If they do, then how can you tell them that they’re not allowed to think it’s a risk? It doesn’t mean that we can’t consider “pretext,” but that’s a whole different thing.
2) “without explicitly identifying the specific activity or activities” doesn’t happen because it’s on the wrong side of the disclosure. With the exception of certain policy-based ERs, there is a near-infinite universe of what might be acceptable and what might not fly. Not to mention that people are of different value to the company, so “___ did ___” will have different effects even if it’s the same thing.”
Of course, the EE can cover this (if they care enough) by disclosing early. If an applicant says “by the way, just so you know: I dance burlesque. Any issues?” and been hired, then it would be wrong (and proof of pretext) to fire her later for dancing burlesque. Just like an employer can cover themselves by writing a job description and giving an interview that match the job, so that they don’t have people constantly quitting and going on unemployment.
A job is compensation.
I have requirements and restrictions; and I pay a certain amount and I have certain benefits–the largest of which is extreme flexibility. But it’s not like someone who doesn’t care about flexibility can demand that I pay them more, any more than someone who doesn’t want to sign a confidentiality agreement can demand extra money for doing so. That’s just what the job IS.
If you make acting on their offense functionally illegal, by telling them they can’t act on it, then you’re taking away their right to preserve offense. I think that’s a bad thing, and politically very dangerous.
No. It’s an immutable trait. “Desire to dance burlesque” is not.
I’d say that giving an employer veto power over any of the leisure time activities of their employees is orders of magnitude more dangerous.
Look, this is why (as you mention in the below quote) so many of us seem unconcerned with the potential misuse of the system by employees:
We’re not talking a lot about an employee’s potential abuse of the system, because when faced with a glaring, abusive misuse of employer power – an attempt to control an employee’s non-job-connected, fully legal, leisure time activity, which was undertaken under a stage name – you’re utterly unconcerned.
So yes, we consider the potential danger of an employee wielding power inappropriately to be far less than the actual concrete real life example of an employer wielding power in a grossly abusive way. If you want to talk about the trade-offs of freedom, let’s not ignore that you’re talking maybes and potentials, and we’re talking real fucking life.
This was abusive. It’s a bullshit abuse of the system that Elusis was fired, and it’s a bullshit abuse of the system that other employees should have to fear for their jobs. The sooner you admit it, the less I’ll distrust you on this topic.
—Myca
Working in HR for a medium sized business for the past few years has given me some insight into the employer/employee power dynamic.
It’s a fucking pain in the ass to fire somebody you were about to fire if they file a Workers Comp claim before you actually fire them. Sometimes the owners will complain about that and I’ll remind them that if we didn’t have a history of businesses being assholes and firing people because they got hurt on the job, this wouldn’t be a problem for us. And you know what? Sometimes it’s pure misery for me to deal with the employee for the months or more that it takes to get rid of them. You know what else? It’s not my fault it’s that way and it isn’t the employee’s fault. It’s because employers were so egregiously awful in this area that laws to protect employees injured on the job were actually passed.
Do most employees try to take advantage of their employers? Absolutely. Do most employers try to take advantage of their employees? Absolutely. So why do we leave the vast majority of power in the employee/employer relationship on one side?
Here’s the complaint, which appears to have been disposed of by settlement. It’s probably confidential, but it would otherwise be interesting to know what happened.
With respect to it being obvious, or gross, or so clear that it is crazy and untrustworthy for me to be even considering the possibility that this might be something other than precisely what the plaintiff in a lawsuit says it is: It doesn’t appear that summary judgment was sought, or that an answer was ever filed. It doesn’t appear that there was a finding of probable cause from any government agency. And it doesn’t seems like there was an answer, which is to say that we LITERALLY have heard exactly one side of the story.
If you want to distrust me because I don’t agree that this is obviously a problem, go ahead. That doesn’t make it any more obvious, it just shows that you have already decided to believe just one side.
Here’s the Inside Higher Ed article, as a summary.
The complaint is interesting from a contract perspective. It says “Her contract as a Core Faculty Member specified that she could not participate in any activity that may be adverse to the interests of the university.”
I don’t know a damn thing about California law. But w/r/t the arguments that this was entirely outside the bargain, that doesn’t seem to be true at all. In fact, the opposite is true: she appeared to have knowingly contracted for just what she got. “Any activity” \= “activities on school grounds;” and “may be” \= “guaranteed to happen.” It may be too broad; it may not be enforceable. But she knew what it said when she signed.
As for the rest:
-It’s not “non-job-connected” if it has or could have an effect on the employer. Whether it did or not is hard to say. Certainly, the employer claims that it did (no surprise) and Elusis claims that it didn’t (no surprise either.)
If something actually has no effect on the employer at all, then it would be pretextual to claim that it does. This would be an analysis both of actual risk and reasonably perceived risk.
And in that context, reputation is a risk. Surely you would agree that employers can consider reputation issues if they want, right? If you wouldn’t buy an Orson Scott Card book because he’s an anti-gay zealot, don’t you think his potential publishers can consider that? If you wouldn’t send your trust donations to a college with a stripping professor, don’t you think the school can consider that as well? While we might have a limited number of uber-important social activities that get special protection even if the employer fears for its reputation, burlesque isn’t one of them.
-Legal status is irrelevant, because (thankfully) legality and social acceptance are not the same thing. You can turn yourself into an openly racist, sexist, smelly, screamy, drunken, anarchist, nazi, KKK-marching, asshole and it’s not illegal, but I doubt you’d expect your employer to ignore it even if you put on a suit and act polite while at work.
-It’s not a per se bar if it takes place in her leisure time activity–for the reasons stated above and also as a matter of contract, at least at first read.
Huh?
Whether or not it was contractual or legal, determination of reasonableness would–at the least–require you to know what the college’s reasoning was. If an employer is firing someone and claiming it’s justified, don’t you think their side is relevant? Wouldn’t you be curious about whether they fired her as the result of one streetside conversation, because they hated her, or the result of a flood of donor emails and press inquiries?
I don’t see how you could possibly know enough about this to conclude otherwise. Are you privy to special information? Or do you just conclude that NOTHING can be relevant so long as it is
1) not illegal
2) not performed on the job; and
3) not related to a clearly specified job duty, figurehead position, etc.?
In other words, do you think that if you turn yourself into an openly racist, sexist, smelly, screamy, drunken, anarchist, nazi, KKK-marching, asshole; that you WOULD expect your employer to ignore it even if you put on a suit and act polite while at work? If so I grant you consistency points but I don’t agree that should be how it works.
That isn’t a tradeoff I’m inclined to make.
Employers in the U.S. often find themselves in a situation where they are required to pay a young person more than they can recover in productivity.
I’ve heard that a lot, but never with any backup—never any proof, any breakdown of where the productivity-to-wage ratio is. It’s just a statement I’m supposed to take on faith. Nope. Take a look at Starbucks, for example: “Since just before the recession, store revenue per worker has climbed more than 40 percent, to $68,900 from $49,000.” Have wages gone up to reflect that increased productivity? Nope. But it isn’t just Starbucks; share of corporate income going to workers is at a 63 year low. From the article: “In the nearly three decades from 1979 to 2007, income growth was also strong, but it was concentrated in the top 20 percent of the population, and most of it went to the top 5 percent. Even when using so-called “comprehensive income” data—which includes non-cash income such as employers’ contributions to healthcare premiums and government transfers via Medicaid, food stamps, etc., the inequality is stark. At 34.6 percent, the top 1 percent’s share of average income was more than the 32.2 percent share of the bottom 80 percent of the population.”
I didn’t get a “real” job as a teenager until after graduating from community college at 18—and it had nothing to do with productivity or wages. The community I lived in was going through the Reagan austerity program. All the factories were closing and moving overseas, and there was no appreciable disposable income for the remaining folks to spend at the type of places that teenagers a half-generation above me (I’m assuming you’re a little older than I am RonF, based on previous statements you’ve made) used to work. When there isn’t a critical mass of population with disposable income the jobs dry up, which sets in motion a continual cycle. That’s operative everywhere. Of course upper middle class parents aren’t sending their kids out to work minimum wage jobs: there is no longer any advantage to it—colleges and future (after college) employers are more impressed by grades, extracurriculars, volunteer and internships that are related to their life goals. Working at a place like Dog-n-Suds used to be viewed as a sign of a good work ethic. Now it’s a de-facto class marker, and viewed as sign of lack of ambition/lack of intelligence.
(you’re right about Germany, and about the high esteem they have for tradespeople. As a tradesperson in the US, I guarantee you the same is not true here. People simply don’t value the skills of tradespeople—they think what we do isn’t worth our wages. I bristle every time I get the “what do you do for a living?” question, because when I respond two things happen: they express surprise because I’m a woman, and then they ask me for side work, complain that they’ve had a hard time finding someone to do “x” project they’ve been trying to have done, and quote the I’m-not-paying-that! price as something far below what my wages are. I don’t do side work, but it galls me that no one does this to professional workers—-only blue collar workers. They don’t go to their physician and say, “hey—how about instead of your actual price, I pay you about a quarter of that instead, because it’s not like your knowledge and experience are worth anything?”)
The server for In These Times appears to be down, but there are a lot of good articles there on how parents in the Chicago Public Schools are demonstrating in favor of keeping their non-charter schools open. I wish I could link to them. The CTU won in their last contract because of their deep ties in the community; parents and students were demonstrating in favor of their teachers. In my downstate community, parents were enthused about a charter school—until a few years went by, and the cost was higher and the test scores lower. The charter contract was ended and has not been replaced. I recommend the periodical Rethinking Schools for a more comprehensive look at the debate over charter schools.
gin-and-whiskey: I mentioned legality because I think it’s a reasonable expectation of an employer that employees won’t be committing felonies in their spare time, and that felonies committed by their employees in their off-time are likely to have blowback on the employer. I think it’s something both sides take as a given (and is usually explicitly mentioned in the job application and during the interview).
But “may be adverse to the interests of the university”? Getouttahere. That is (a)vague as hell, and (b)doesn’t require any proof of actual adversity. Sure, she signed on to it—expecting it to be standard boilerplate that was a vague reference to not breaking the law or doing anything way, way, way the hell out there. It also allows the university latitude to bypass the EEOC—to treat workers doing the same job in a dissimilar manner.
Because you are aware that women have far more potential “controversial” activities than men, right? It is controversial for unmarried women to have sex. It is controversial for women to breastfeed in public—even if no actual breast is exposed. How much skin is exposed on a woman’s body is controversial. It is controversial for women to use profane language. It is controversial for a woman to express her opinions in the same aggressive manner that a man would choose. It is controversial for women to wear pants in some professions. It is controversial for a woman to be in some professions. It is controversial for women to go to bars and nightclubs alone. It is controversial to be a working mother. It is controversial for a woman to be openly childfree, and especially to express a dislike of children. Suffice to say, there is a rather lengthy list of potential landmines for women that do not exist for men, and your solution is for a job candidate, in her interview, to list all of the things she likes to do that her employer may not approve of in advance of a job offer. Are. You. Kidding. Me. Even after a job offer—“umm, I’m single….is it ok to have sex with a guy that I’ve really hit it off with?” You don’t consider that a gross violation of privacy? I do.
I do think there is a reasonable basis for some consideration of some off-hours activities that generally do reflect poorly on the employer—-which is why I mentioned legality. But outside of illegal activities, I think there should be a very, very high standard for what constitutes a prohibited activity outside of work, that such prohibitions should be explicit (written, detailed, posted examples) on the employer’s part, that there should be demonstrable harm done to the employer (or a pattern of demonstrable harm to the employer of previous instances of the same activities), that standards should be equal to all employees across the board, that there should be structured discipline proportional to the offense, and that there should be independent reviewers to insure that discipline is nondiscriminatory.
In my world, an example of a legal activity that is prohibited outside our contract is “paid side work”. You can’t moonlight in our trade (although you can donate your time, and many people do—to various charities, community festivals, private clubs, religious organizations. Unpaid donations of time to nonprofits are ok). There is structured discipline, it is a written standard that is openly posted, and discipline is administered to everyone equally across the board (no picking and choosing of the type you advocate). See how easy that is?
In other words, do you think that if you turn yourself into an openly racist, sexist, smelly, screamy, drunken, anarchist, nazi, KKK-marching, asshole; that you WOULD expect your employer to ignore it even if you put on a suit and act polite while at work?
Well, since you brought it up, can you offer ONE concrete example of this? Something I can fact check? Can you name ONE employee anywhere that is an openly racist, sexist, smelly, screamy, drunken, anarchist (?), Nazi, KKK-marching asshole who NEVER displays any of these traits on the job? Who is magically non-racist, non-sexist, good-smelling, of moderate-voice-volume, sober, moderate politically, egalitarian, hail-fellow-well-met, treats everyone with respect no matter their walk of life while on the job before converting to Mr. or Ms. Hyde at quitting time? Because every example I can think of, heard of, or read about involved actual behavior in the workplace. Employers aren’t mind-readers any more than employees, and would not know of said traits unless they were acted upon on the job. Your example is ludicrous. People aren’t part-time racists, or sexists, or whatever. Those aren’t abstract states of being; they are behaviors.
thank you!
Before I answer that: I am not invested in retaining the power balance in whole. I’m invested in stopping people from mucking with it in what I think are dangerous ways.
I think that there are OTHER ways to make people behave better, where the incentives are better formed and the risks are not so great.
For example, I would support something like “if you fire an employee, you’re liable for an extra 60% unemployment, decreasing to 0% over the course of 6 months. You can get around the penalty by (a) proving cause; (b) proving breach of contract; or (c) proving that you gave at least three months’ notice. But the presumption is that you owe it unless proven otherwise.”
That is an example of reducing employer incentives to act like a dick (it’s expensive) without preventing them from firing someone they hate.
But to answer the question:
The employer retains more benefits because they also take on much more risk and responsibility as the owner of a business. Their outcome can be anywhere from bankruptcy to immense profits. There are weeks where my employees have made a lot more than I have. Recently I spent a buttload of money over many months to train an employee who swore that she was dying for part time work just like mine, and who thanked me immensely for giving her a chance even though she hadn’t worked in years due to childcare… and who left me to go full time, with precisely 2 weeks notice, with a real and honest apology (but, obviously, not paying me back the money I spent to train her.) Oh well.
You can always find a Starbucks to talk about. But more than a few of my coffee shop clients are now in bankruptcy and a lot of people I know have lost a ton of money at times doing business deals. Do they count, too? Plenty of businesses boom and plenty go bust. It’s not as if I think they all go downhill but it makes no sense to cherry pick successful people either.
The employee retains the ultimate power to leave. So they bear less risk–or more accurately they are paid weekly for their risk. And they also don’t have to make a financial investment. And their behavior is (in some unusual ways,) actually less constrained: if you call your manager a nigger and walk out, you don’t face civil charges. If you blow off work, costing your manager a day of store closure so that they lose $5000, you don’t face criminal charges. If you harass your manager you might get fired; if you harass your coworker then your manager might get sued and might in some cases be personally liable.
Yes, they do. People expect free advice from doctors, lawyers, and white collar people ALL THE TIME, because it’s “only advice,” even though giving advice is what we do for a living. And they complain about the bills for the same reason.
RonF:
As to the second part: “unemployment” doesn’t mean “people who aren’t working”, it means “people who are seeking work but can’t find it.” So, y’know, all those kids doing their athletics and clubs and service work: they don’t count in unemployment statistics. 51.9% of youth (16-24) were employed this summer, while unemployment was 14.3%.
Let me use a hypothetical.
I want to fire Paul. Paul wants to remain on the job even though I don’t want him there. IOW, Paul wants to work against my wishes, and get my money from me against my wishes.
Paul is also a college student who has invested $100,000 over two years to go to college. He’s a junior now. But sadly, he has just been accused (in the college system) of plagiarism. He is at risk of expulsion; his hearing is soon.
Paul is also on probation for some minor offense which nobody, including me, cares about–but he has been accused of violating probation because he was stopped by the cops for some minor offense. His violation hearing is soon.
Paul isn’t having a good week!
His three risks are:
1) Get fired by me;
2) Get kicked out of school for plagiarism, thereby significantly devaluing his $100k investment and reducing his future chances of getting into school;
3) Get put back in jail or re-sentenced, for a probation violation.
Which risks do you think are worse? What standard do you think I should be required to meet, given the relative risks and outcomes of other examples?
I don’t like the language either, and as I noted it is quite possibly unenforceable. But if you’re going to take the position that someone should disclose, then this discloses. What Elusis assumed or didn’t assume was up to her. Though of course, disclosure works both ways. If you want to say “she never would have taken the job had she known there was a chance that she might be fired for her dancing” (which may or may not be true) then that could also have been resolved by disclosure on her side.
To illustrate the issues with proving adversity, I’ll ask you this: Do you think that Elusis could prove that this was not and could not reasonably have been, adverse to the university’s interests? It isn’t that I think that is impossible, but it is insanely difficult and expensive. It isn’t any easier or less expensive for the employer.
A lot of business decisions are based on a best guess. The employer bears the risk of that guess as well as the benefit. When it comes to impossible-to-answer questions like “will circulating video of a burlesque-dancing professor hurt, not effect, or help the school’s reputation and ability to attract money and applications?” that is quite difficult to second guess.
I realize that seems to put too much power with the employer for your taste. But how would you reasonably come up with an answer to that question? Who would judge? On what criteria?
Well, no. You can’t and shouldn’t be allowed to contract around the EEOC, which is why Elusis was able to bring a complaint in the first place. Nor should you be able to contract around any employee rights statute; that is what “pretext” is for.
Discrimination relies on “similar conduct producing different treatment,” among other things. So for example, if the male professor was a Chippendale, that would be a great case. If the male professor was naked during 2 minutes of a 45 minute monologue in the context of discussing a high school shower experience, that would not be a great case.
Sure. Women and men have differing social expectations–I don’t know if society places numerically more restrictions on women–nobody counts–but I think that overall women clearly have a harder time of it.
Well, no. My solution is (in part) that if you have some reeeeally obvious things which a lot of people tend to disapprove of and which–unlike, say, “being a working mother”–do not have widespread social support, and which you intend to do while employed, then perhaps it would be wise to make sure you won’t get fired for it before you take the job.
After all, someone smart enough to get a PhD and work as a professor is, in all likelihood, perfectly aware of the fact that her employer and students might, possibly, be discomfited by her participation in burlesque. In fact, it seems like the burlesque act was designed to push social boundaries and perhaps to discomfort folks in a way that might foment change or new thoughts. Some employers would probably welcome it to expand their boundaries; some wouldn’t care; some might be strongly opposed.
Should a “strongly opposed” employer be forced to hire Elusis even if they hate burlesque? If not, why should they be prohibited from firing her?
Of course I do. (And again, would you mind phrasing your rhetorical questions to make it clear that I haven’t actually said the stuff you’re putting out there, i.e. as “wouldn’t you” rather than “you don’t?” I’d prefer that readers not be confused about whether I have actually said that sort of ridiculous statement.)
before I get into details, I’d like to sincerely thank you for being specific.
But I doubt that’s possible. Imagine that someone wants to disclose enough to stop Elusis’ burlesque, but they have no idea what precisely she plans to do. Imagine that they wouldn’t care if she put on the Vagina Monologues (sexual but not titillating); if she acted in a Hair revival or modeled in the art classes (nude but not sexual;) or if she did a lot of things–they just don’t like what she is doing here. Do they have to identify burlesque? Can they just identify things which “might bring social approbation?” Are they completely restricted from “knowing it when they see it?” I’m all for something that sets out the general nature of the employer (conservative, permissive, etc.) but your approach seems either unworkable or overly restrictive.
This requires the employer to actually suffer harm before they can fire, which is a bit harsh: shouldn’t they be able to try to prevent it? Because most of the time the emplyer can never collect for that harm.
And it is often nearly impossible to prove: if the September sales look good, does that mean there was no harm? Or would they have been even better without the employee’s actions?
But all employees are not equal. Nor should/can they be. Some have more investment; others have more economic value; others are harder to replace; others perform poorly but draw in business in other ways.
In the job world, equality is a pretense. Einstein would be much more valuable than I would if we were both professors; you would be much more valuable if I were a bad, but licensed, electrician. Some lawyers are better than I am; some are worse. That’s just life.
This isn’t second grade or a union negotiation; on what basis should we ignore the fact that some employees are way more valuable than others?
Man, you’re really trying to tie the hands of people here.
Look, firing people is EXPENSIVE. And difficult. Elusis’ school had to find someone, and deal with it. The fact that they were willing to expend that time, effort, and money rather than keep her on would be–should be–proof that this was actually a fairly big deal to them.
I support making it even more expensive (see my post above) to make it less appealing. But I cannot get behind the concept that you can determine in advance when someone just needs to leave the job, now. Nor that you should be able to force someone to pay and work with such an employee.
This, I agree with. “Differential treatment” cases are good cases.
Of course, we are probably coming at this from different angles. I suspect you want the review to be a prerequisite, i.e. I need to keep paying Paul until and unless he has exhausted all administrative requirements. As a general rule I don’t agree though there would be certain things which I might agree to.
It is likely that you don’t work for someone who really cares about much other than “does the panel pass inspection, and did it come in under budget.” And it’s probably likely that your personal beliefs are pretty irrelevant to the ultimate clients. Blue collar work is often more accommodating of certain eccentricities because it doesn’t really effect the end result: you are often buying a product, not a person.
White collar work is more reputational by nature. And white collar work for certain groups (students, kids, elderly) is even more so. That’s because white collar is really about the person and not the product.
Which is to say: firing a burlesque-dancing professor is much more defensible than firing a burlesque-dancing janitor.
Hopefully not with all of those traits! ;)
Well, those people usually aren’t fired anyway, right? I mean, if everyone likes you then they tend to forgive your foibles, unless you get hammered by some mandatory “we need to treat you just like the new employee that everyone hates” rule.
But certainly people are fired for out of work conduct.
Google
“fired for out of work racism”
or
“fired for out of work conduct”
for merely two short searches.
Right.
There’s the ohter side though, which is to say that if they fire you for X, it’s because they knew about it while on the job. Right? Because it goes without saying that they don’t fire you unless they know AND care.
Of course they are!
MANY people are well-behaved enough to avoid the worst slurs in the workplace but still say them when they’re drunk. MANY people keep their hands off people at work but sit around afterwards and talk about “banging that hot slut in Marketing.” MANY people who honestly believe I am a hell-bound heather who deserves eternal punishment would not opt to say it to me directly. MANY people have a “presentable” side and a “real” side-and when the “real” side comes out they get in trouble.
Huh?
Being ___ist is a mental state. Believing in ___ is a mental state. (OK, sure, marching at a KKK rally is a behavior; ignore that if you want.)
Last thing:
I the union world, you’re basically agreeing to help members, even if it comes at the expense of non-members–and that’s OK. That’s the point of the club.
But you’re arguing for a general rule here. How do you apply those rules for everyone?
In that hypothetical, there are people who I WANT to hire, and who WANT to work for me. Some of them are unemployed, some of them are just unhappy with their jobs.
Paul wants to work for me–or at least he wants to collect a paycheck–but I want him gone.
Why should I get screwed by being forced to hire Paul? Why should Paul’s interest come not only above mine the evil employer) but above all of the OTHER people who want Paul’s job? Why are his foibles their problems?
All of those examples are well and good, g&w (and I honestly mean that, they’re perfectly reasonable), but in the real world an employer can always find cause to fire. Look at your example way up at the top of your last comment:
If it’s me as the employer, I’m waiting to see what happens to risk #3. If he gets put in jail, I get to fire him! He’s a no show. Going to jail doesn’t put him in a protected class so I’ve got cause.
If it turns out that risk #3 doesn’t pan out, that’s okay because as soon as I realized how much I dislike Paul I started giving written warnings for all of his mistakes. After a month or three I’ve got enough of a paper trail to have cause for firing Paul.
Honestly, it’s not hard to fire employees that you dislike for whatever reason. In many cases it’s hard to fire employees that you dislike right this very instant.
Employers who get nailed for discriminatory firing of employees are either stone dumb or believe they’re untouchable. Those employers are the worst of the worst of the worst. The rest of us bide our time and create the paper trail needed. But we still get to fire any employee that we don’t like for whatever reason we don’t like them. We just can’t fire them specifically for the reason that we don’t like them.
Elusis’ employers, I would guess, already didn’t like working with her and thought that the Burlesque gave them a shortcut to firing her. If not that, they were too dumb to take the time to build the case they needed to avoid a bad outcome.
Like you said, everyone can be found guilty of something (just like most US citizens) so I don’t see any reason to force folks to go through the motions when the outcome is functionally predetermined. Besides, that comes up with a lot of random shit–I’ve seen plenty of people change EE’s hours or job responsibilities to try to force them to quit, which is a horrible result of that type of incentive.
Perhaps you have to pay them. Like I said, I wouldn’t be averse to having the choice be “make a case against Paul” on the one hand, or “choose to fire him and pay him extra to compensate” on the other hand.
The goal would be to find some number in the happy medium:
1) Costly enough for the ER that they wouldn’t fire someone at all unless they cared.
2) Beneficial enough to the ER so that they would preferentially fire (and pay) the EE instead of keeping (and paying) the EE, and making random charges.
3) Costly enough for the EE that they wouldn’t try to get fired.
3) Beneficial enough for the EE that they wouldn’t suffer immense losses based on ER discretion.
Frankly that would be better for everyone: Paul benefits because he doesn’t have to deal with a lot of trumped-up accusations, and the employer benefits because they get to get rid of Paul, and society benefits because the bargain is more clear.
“But it isn’t just Starbucks; share of corporate income going to workers is at a 63 year low. ”
Fair enough – but the subsequent text doesn’t quite fill in the blank of “where’s the rest of the money going?” How much of the rest has gone to satisfy regulatory requrements? What about taxes? I’m not challenging the concept that the rich are getting richer, but I’m not seeing the whole pie here.
“there are a lot of good articles there on how parents in the Chicago Public Schools are demonstrating in favor of keeping their non-charter schools open.”
Oh, yes, there are numerous people who have been trying to keep CPS from closing their schools. Some because they think their kid is in a good school and a LOT because their kids would be endangered by having to cross gang boundaries in order to get to their new school. Seriously, that has been a major issue. The City has actually hired, trained and deployed an entire new group of people to line up on and monitor walking routes, marked with special signs, to schools that took kids between gang territories to keep them from getting randomly attacked or killed. And there are some charter schools that have had issues. None of that negates the fact that there are parents of over 50,000 students who took their kids out of publicly operated public schools and put them into privately operated public schools and parents of another 20,000 who tried to do so and failed because there was no room. There are parents of another 74,000 who are paying taxes to the City and then paying tuition to the Catholic Archdiocese to put their kids in its schools. And that doesn’t count kids whose parents are putting them in non-Catholic private schools. One can only guess how many more kids would take advantage of these alternatives if there were more charter schools permitted to open or if their parents had the money for tuition at private schools. The charter schools in Chicago by and large have at least as good an academic record as the publicly operated schools do – show me a bad charter school and I’ll show you a lot more bad publicly operated ones. And it’s a lot easier for the Chicago Board of Education to shut down a bad charter school than it is for it to shut down a bad publicly operated one, and cheaper to operate it.
New Orleans has pretty much completed the shift to becoming an all-charter school system. It’s going to be interesting to see how they do.
“galls me that no one does this to professional workers”
Ha! and Double Ha! If I had charged and gotten a fair consulting rate from my friends and relatives and acquaintances for all the hours I’ve put in fixing laptops, configuring routers and switches, setting up printers, programming modems, etc., etc., I’d have a significant contribution to my absurdly small retirement fund.
I’m not sure if anyone’s brought this up yet, but it seems to me that Elusis’ firing is also a breach of academic freedom of speech. Professors should not be fired for their expressive or political activities outside the classroom, and burlesque by nature is both expressive and political.
Has everyone been following the case of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois?
For those who don’t know, Salaita was recruited away from his job at another University. He was sent a formal written offer in October. New hires are expected to move to U of I and being teaching courses before the Board of Trustees formally votes to approve their employment contract (possibly because the Trustees meet too infrequently to be able to vote before the school year begins). So Salaita and his wife quit their jobs and moved to Indiana. Then in August, Salaita, who is a Palestinian-American, tweeted some very harsh tweets about Israel’s actions in Gaza. UI at first issues a statement saying that as a matter of academic freedom, their employees are free to say what they want outside of work. But a few days later, they said that Salaita isn’t technically an employee yet because the Trustees have not approved the contract, and Chancellor Wise has decided not to submit Salaita’s contract to the Trustees. So Salaita no longer has a job.
Also, it has come out that several major donors to UI had been in contact with Chancellor Wise and various Trustees, letting them know that if Salaita is a professor, they will stop giving money to UI. After a lot of public pressure Chancellor Wise did submit the contract to the Board of Trustees; this morning the Trustees voted 8 to 1 not to approve the contract. Trustee approval of academic hires has in the past been a rubber stamp. (In fact, they approved more than 100 hires at the same meeting, amongst all their other business.)
There are two issues here. First of all, is what the UI did a breach of contract (or, technically, “a breach of contract of promissory estoppel claim”)? See the post and links here for a discussion of that.
Second, and more relevant to this thread, is firing – or “unhiring” – Salaita a breach of academic freedom of speech? I think it definitely is. It doesn’t matter that several of Salaita’s tweets offended and struck many as anti-semitic; we can’t have a vibrant intellectual and academic culture if Professors are fired for having opinions that donors don’t like. Or, in Elusis’ case, for performing art some members of the community don’t like or find shocking.
Academic freedom of speech is a difficult concept.
Certainly the professors would prefer that it was interpreted very broadly, i.e. that
1) pretty much anything is speech; and
2) pretty much any speech is protected
Other folks think that
1) the usual analysis of “what is speech?” should apply;
2) only speech which relates to the professor’s job, study, etc is actually protected.
and sometimes
3) that speech should not be protected as much as it is.
You can easily make a good argument that a poli sci professor should be able to argue in favor of communism without a problem, or that a criminal defense teacher should be able to challenge her students to explain why all accused rapists should get a defense. But it’s not quite as easy to explain why a biology professor without any particular expertise should have special status w/r/t insulting islam.
Of course.
Not sure but think not, because he wasn’t working there yet, at least in my opinion.
Eh. Hard to say that it doesn’t matter, don’t you think? Do you not see the problem in creating a line of people who are entirely immune from the normal effects of social opprobrium and who can’t be disciplined or treated worse by their employers no matter what they say or do? It’s ripe for abuse, which is why I’m inwardly a bit supportive of the camp that supports limiting it to some sort of relation to academic area. Functionally I still am on the die hard free speech side because the alternatives are worse, but frankly I’m discomfited by how the genre has developed.
Part of that is that colleges have, by and large, become very liberal and their departments have become fairly homogenous. The goal of academic freedom was to prevent a move towards a monoculture but, as it happens, it hasn’t worked all that well. At least not IMO.
This is hyperbole. First of all, immunity from being fired is not being “entirely immune from the normal effects of social opprobrium.” There are many ways to criticize Salaita short of making him jobless – public criticism, social snubbing, etc etc.. Yanking a person’s livlihood from them should not be high on the list of how we punish people for dissenting. That’s the main way McCarthyism operated – very few people were ever prosecuted or subpoenaed, but tens of thousands were in fear of becoming unemployed and unemployable.
Second of all, “no matter what they say or do” is ridiculous. No one’s saying that professors can’t be disciplined or fired for committing crimes, for refusing to teach, for teaching in ways that abuse their students, for using their students as a dating pool, etc etc etc. All that’s being said is that Universities should not be firing or punishing professors for legitimate artistic or political activities and speech outside the classroom. (And in most cases, I’d say that for any employee, not just for Professors.)
On another subject, you consistently talk as if every employer is ten bucks away from going out of business, losing their home and living under a bridge, while employees are typically carefree millionaires who are not harmed in any significant way by job loss. (I’m exaggerating your rhetoric a little, but only a little.) While of course some employers, especially small employers, are on the edge of destitution, it’s far more often the case that employees are made destitute by losing a job than it is that employers are made destitute because an employee quits.
And most people are not working for tiny mom-and-pop operations. 20% of US workers, work for companies with fewer than 20 employees – which leaves 80% who work for larger companies. About 63% of us work for companies with over 100 workers.
If your boss has 99 workers other than you (or 999, or 9999), odds are that your loss will not actually make your boss lose their home or take a big enough cut in pay to have to change their lifestyle at all; while it’s dead common for people’s economic lives to be devastated by being laid off or fired. (It’s not always devastating, but often enough!)
It’s an odd* quality of the market that most employees work for large and powerful employers, meaning they’re more likely to need protection from abuse of power; but most employers are small employers who are more likely to be harmed by the restrictions that protect the employees of the large employers.
(*I mean, odd to talk about.)
That’s a strange characterization of the motive behind academic freedom. Something about “protecting the pursuit of truth” is usually involved in the definitions I know, and that seems to be common both historically and in modern times, based on a cursory Google search for background. Academic freedom works to protect academics against a monoculture imposed by the society they’re operating within, sure. But it wasn’t the idea of a monoculture that was perceived as the danger–it was the pressure for a specific monoculture that rejected certain true concepts about the world.
American biology departments have a near-monoculture of people who will use evolutionary concepts in their work, a monoculture that is not representative of the broader American society. Based on your definition above, would that be a failure of the underlying reason for academic freedom?
(After writing this comment, “monoculture” has ceased to sound like a word to me.)
Regarding academic freedom, which probably—in both Elusis’ and Salaita’s case—deserves a post on its own:
1. Here’s a link to AAUP’s statement on academic freedom. It’s worth quoting paragraph three in its entirety:
This part of the statement was then elaborated further:
It does not seem to me, based on what we know, that Elusis performance in any way demonstrates her unfitness. (However, having been on the sidelines of a detenuring case at my institution, where I initially supported the faculty member unconditionally but then found out the administration had information it could not disclose publicly until it came out in the course of the investigation that categorically undermined that support, I am mindful of G&W’s point that we don’t really know the administration’s side. Let me be clear: I don’t think Elusis should have been fired; I believe her academic freedom and freedom of speech were violated; and I find it hard to imagine any circumstance that would change my mind, given the facts that I know. I just don’t want to pretend that I know for sure that I know all the facts.)
2. Academic freedom protects this pretty openly racist professor as much as it protects anybody else in academia. (The article is related to the Salaita case, but I am linking to it here more because of the professor’s expressed views on race.)
3. Regarding the liberal bias in academia, the question of academic freedom, and the supposed liberal monoculture, see this article, “Rethinking the Plight of Conservatives in Higher Education.”
Like I said, the a question of academic freedom in these and other cases probably deserves a post on its own. Check out what the University of Kansas did in adopting a new social media policy. There’s also the question of academic freedom and who owns the intellectual work professors do in putting their courses together.
I could go on. There has been a serious attempt on the part of college administrations throughout the country to limit academic freedom, and that hurts everyone. Here’s another angle on the subject worth thinking about: the question of how accusations of incivility is being used in academia to silence speech that administrators find offensive.
Like I said, I could go on, but I will stop here. I need to work.
My, but how the conversation strayed from the original scenario of racist harassment and police brutality. (just thought I’d mention that—we’re straying from a very, very relevant scenario that has ample concrete evidence from across the country, not just in Seattle…..while gin-and-whiskey keeps wanting to discuss abstract hypotheticals and invented characters.)
Re: Elusis and firing. Since the wording of the contract itself was vague as hell and thus ripe for abuse, let’s consider “past practice” to determine what Elusis could expect from her employer, and what the employer could expect from Elusis when it comes to off-work activities that “may be adverse to the interests of the university”.
1. It’s a private, non-religious, liberal arts university. It’s a fair and reasonable assumption that one of the requirements of their academic mission is to discuss controversial topics in the classroom. Perhaps they invite controversial lecturers, show controversial films, invite controversial artists as part of their community offerings? The more the university itself supports the free and open participation of students, faculty, alumni, and the surrounding community in free speech, the more fair and reasonable it is for employees to assume that their own free speech activities will not get them fired.
2. What is the past practice in regards to other faculty? I’m sure other faculty members are part-time actors, artists, writers, etc. If other faculty are able to participate in sociopolitical speech about sexuality outside of the classroom with no repercussions, the fair and reasonable assumption is that burlesque is ok too.
3. What is the past practice and written policy regarding sexuality for professors? Are they allowed to date students? Is there a lot of sexual fraternization between students and faculty? Any affairs going on? The fair and reasonable assumption is that if actual sex between faculty and students has not resulted in repercussions, then performance art that centers sexuality as the topic will also not result in repercussions. (relevant side mention: is it past practice for retirees to be feted with a strip show? just sayin’.)
Any written policy may or may not be defensible if it is untested—in court, in the grievance process, in labor/management meetings, in peer review, in public opinion, whatever. But at least explicitly written policies are known to both parties. (From my world:) “Don’t drink any alcohol during the times you are on call” is easier to interpret and abide by than “don’t show up drunk”. “Drunk” is vague and open to misinterpretation. “No alcohol while on call” is not. (plus, we’re paid for the restrictions on our time while on call). The boundaries are known.
Oh, did I mention boundaries? What a great concept. I love boundaries. I don’t love having my boundaries imposed upon without my consent. What bothers me the most about your responses, gin-and-whiskey, is your thoroughly paternalistic view on boundaries between employee and employer—that employers should have full latitude to impose whatever boundaries they like (as long as they don’t violate criminal or civil right laws) upon employees without having the burden to identify those boundaries beforehand, have a reasonable and known disciplinary procedure, nor have those boundaries be relevant to job performance.
Here’s an example from my own work history: breastfeeding. I breastfed for over two years (my daughter was a preemie, and spent the first six months of her life in the hospital). I carried my breast pump to work for a few different employers. For the most part, there was no problem. Just with one. Now, I live in Illinois, which has explicit protection for breastfeeding workers. But that law hadn’t been passed for most of my breastfeeding. That one employer technically could have tried to fire me (well, not fire—lay off. He’d’a had a grievance slammed up his ass if he fired me), but I guess he decided that with breastfeeding being a big topic of the day during the year prior to the bill’s passage, it was inadvisable for him to make the front page of all the newspapers in Illinois juxtaposed against photos of my preemie daughter in the worst moments of her hospitalization. Not a good look.
Oh, he was hot about that. He didn’t like breastfeeding. Thought it was gross. Unsanitary. Breast milk comes from the body, just like piss, shit, vomit, snot, ear wax, sweat, and all those other unsanitary emanations; formula comes from a nice clean factory. Now according to you, gin-and-whiskey, he should have been legally allowed to fire me for his discomfort with breastfeeding, otherwise it’s an imposition on his freedom of association. That while I may have a right to an immutable characteristic like “being a woman”, that does not include a right to express breast milk at work; that I should not have the latitude to decide how I spend my break and lunch time. That to require employers to permit employees to express breast milk takes away the right of employers “to offense”. No. My employer had every right to his own feelings about it; what he didn’t have the right to was for his feelings to change my behavior. Because….
…it’s not that kind of relationship. Boundaries. What a concept. Please don’t have the illusion that there is any difference between the blue collar and white collar worlds on busybody employers trying to insert a level of intimacy and control on employees that they have no right to. My own experience and observation is that these impositions, or attempted impositions, are temperamental on the part of employers; completely divorced from business practices (without even getting into questions of whether or not certain off-work activities would impact business practices). It is also my observation and experience that without a labor union and its disciplinary review process, discipline is completely arbitrary on the part of employers. Also: that employers generally have no objective means for determining who is or is not a more valuable employee other than “he/she is my friend/we really hit it off/we’re a lot alike”. In the absence of concrete, verifiable stats (more and/or greater spectrum of relevant work experience, more education and/or better scores, special skills and abilities, documented evidence of greater production, documented evaluations, etc.)…employers are going to go with their own pre-existing biases. Not because they’re evil—because they’re human. That’s why I harp on “documentation”. Back it up—don’t ask me to take something on faith, because my faith is that in the absence of documentation, you’re pulling it out of your ass. (that’s the royal “you”, not you personally).
Now, my direct experience as a woman, and especially as a woman in the building trades, is that large employers are much easier to work for than small employers. Small employers who personally dislike me are easier to work for than small employers who like me. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but…I don’t work directly with employers, so the dislike portion that I have to endure is manageable. I don’t care for it mind you, but—-employers that dislike me are less likely to impose upon my personal boundaries. There is a certain lack of professionalism that creeps in when an employer that I have a greater degree of personal contact with “likes” me. Because then he starts wanting to assert a level of intimacy I don’t want. Not sexual intimacy; “big brother” or “fatherly” intimacy. And again, it’s not that kind of relationship. I go to work expecting a certain level of professionalism, and my ideal is to be treated “like one of the guys”. But that isn’t how it ends up in smaller shops, where the boundaries of intimacy are more fluid…..and then I get thrown in the mix, and there isn’t any pre-existing script for nonsexual intimacy with women, so default mode is “big brother”, which translates to “Big Brother”. Sweet Maude, save me from paternalism. I’m still waiting to “age-out” of that, and I’m forty-seven-fucking-years-old.
Also worth a mention: the impact of generational differences. I notice a distinct difference in the behavior of men raised prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX, and the men raised afterwards. Those really are two different worlds we’re talking about. Giving more power to employers (usually older) to enforce their generational values in a world which not just attitudes, but institutional structures have changed is unworkable.
G&W writes:
Truth does have a liberal bias.
Yes. Thanks for recognizing it as such.
It should not be “high on the list.” But it should be on the list, especially for people who don’t even work at the school yet. If someone is a dick, perhaps they don’t deserve a job.
But in any case I don’t think you are looking at this correctly. One single employer decided that they in particular did not want to hire Salaita. In what sense does that equate to “making him jobless” or “yanking his livelihood from him?”
The world is a big place. There are presumably some schools which would be A-OK with that sort of statement, and some schools which would not. Some people seek out controversy and some don’t. Some schools aim to challenge their students more than others, and so on.
That is a good thing, IMO. Students can make their own decisions and it benefits everyone to have schools with different practices and policies. It is a good thing to have both Berkeley and Texas A&M.
It is a good thing that Salaita has the ability to end up as a specialist in Native American Studies with an interest in the Palestinian conflict, but that doesn’t mean that every college must hire him. And obviously there are a lot of unemployed professors out there, so it’s not clear that Salaita specifically is entitled to one of those positions.
So the question isn’t “should Salita be barred from employment?” but rather “should Salaita be able to force this particular school to hire him, rather than someone else, for this particular job?”
Well, McCarthyism had some pretty unusual aspects which are not present here.
First, it was investigatory and not responsive, i.e. it wasn’t “Amp just gave me a Red Press letter and I’m not happy about it” but rather “I don’t like Amp, let’s go dig around in Amp’s life to see if he ever reads the Red Press.”
Second, it was backed by the immense and punitive power of the single largest financial force in the country.
Third, it included proactive attempts to “black list” people–i.e. not only “I won’t hire Amp,” but “I will make sure nobody hires Amp and I will make sure that nobody who gets any of my money or help in any way will ever hire Amp.”
Fourth, its primary target was speech that opposed the US government, which is (and should be) quite literally the most protected kind of speech we have; and the opponent was also the government, which is (and should be) the most restricted opponent we have w/r/t speech.
Fifth and finally, it was a full court press, unlike here. It is far from obvious that academia on average is on the Israeli side–or even neutral–in this conflict. If anything, academia is more anti-Israeli than not. Here’s a “college divest from Israel” search; here’s a “students support Palestine” search; shall I go on?
I don’t really think it’s an apt comparison w/r/t Salaita. The Fun Home incident was a much better example.
If I lose some or all of my (nonexistent) investments it is still loss, even if I still own a house. If I end up giving everyone else in the company no (or lower) raises because someone causes the business to lose money, it is still a big deal even if it doesn’t make them destitute. If my business fails to grow and maximally prosper it is still loss, even if the business is still functioning above bankruptcy.
Do you think those losses are imaginary? Irrelevant? By using “destitute” as the distinguishing factor you are ignoring all of the harm which happens to people who aren’t really, really, poor. That makes no sense.
(Not to mention that, as I have said, I would strongly support some other social benefits which would reduce the “destitute” problem while simultaneously preserving the rights issue.)
Maybe not your boss, but your boss isn’t the only one in the business. And changing a lifestyle isn’t the only harm.
This is incomplete.
First of all, you’re ignoring the possibility of replacement. One person gets devastated by being fired; another person gets lifted out of devastation and given a job. What sucks for the goose is great for the gander. The net effect is much more balanced than you’re implying. On a personal level you may feel for the fired employee; on a policy level they’re no more important or deserving than anyone else.
Second of all, you’re treating diffuse harm as irrelevant. IOW, you’re acting as if it is “better” to keep Joe on board and suck up $50k in losses, than to cut the raises of 100 employees by $500/each. But that only seems true because you’re focusing on Joe. That $500 might easily be 1/100 as important to them as the $50k is to Joe. Again, on a policy level the interests of Joe are not any more valuable than the interests of anyone else, so if you have 100 people who would benefit a bit if Joe was fired that can easily balance out the problems for Joe.
Yes, and that was based on the concept that (a) they could challenge the common thread of belief, in particular the government, and (b) that everyone would benefit from being exposed to competing arguments, which would then assist them in figuring out which argument was correct.
Let me propose that outside science and math, the statement of a “true concept about the world” is pretty much bollocks. Conservative folks think that their worldview is true. Liberal folks think that their worldview is true. And some people conflate “true” and “what I think is best.”
But some worldviews are more privileged than others. The question “how old is our planet?” is an answer we can arrive at. The questions “how should we value these competing factors?” or “what should we sacrifice to get this goal?” will never be answered.
No.
One bit of information regarding the Salaita case: he had been offered and accepted a tenured appointment at Illinois. In other words, he was not an at-will employee on a temporary or probationary contract. Here is a decent summary—as far as I can tell–of the events in the Salaita case. The author opposes the university’s decision to fire him, but the facts she cites, as far as I can tell, are the facts that everyone agrees on.
Richard, I got a 404 on that link.
Here in Chicago the Salaita case has gotten a lot of attention in the newspapers. My taxes support the U. of I. and my son graduated with a B.S. in MechEng from there, so I’ve been paying attention. If Salaita had simply voice political or social opinions about the State of Israel and the current conflict that would not be grounds for the action that the U. of I. has taken. But he has called anti-Semitism honorable. Upon hearing of the 3 Israeli teenagers that went missing and were killed he said he hoped that all the West Bank settlers would go missing. His statements to me means that he has put himself in the position of the police officer referenced in the beginning of this thread. He has destroyed his ability to do his job, as it does not appear credible that he can treat Jewish students or students who have expressed public support for Israel in a fair fashion. I am a strong supporter for the First Amendment, but in this case I support the withdrawal of his job offer.
I don’t know why the link isn’t working. Here is the full URL: http://academeblog.org/2014/09/07/untangling-the-steven-salaita-case/.
I think it’s important not to cherry pick from among Salaita’s tweets. I have not gone back to look at them, and so I will not say more than that about specific tweets. I will say that I think it is wrong, without some sort of due process, to weigh the content of his tweets more heavily than the entirety of his academic career, during which, from what I have understood, there has been no question that he is a fair teacher to all students, regardless of who they may be.
I also think it is an error to say that a job offer was withdrawn, rather than that he was fired. Based on the facts cited in the article I linked to above, and on the past hiring practices of the university, in which the Trustees vote usually came after the semester was already underway, it seems to me he was fired. If he did not believe, and if the university did not believe, that he had in effect been hired, he would both have been scheduled to teach classes, ordered his textbooks, etc.
At the very least, I think, due process should have been followed in this circumstance.
Sure, if you take his words out of context. If, however, you know the context, you know that he did no such thing.
RJN,
Your post confused me and I had to doublecheck. My understanding is that he had received a conditional approval (i.e. subject to the final signoff.)
In my line of work, I tend to think that means something–as I say to people all the time, “this is usually a formality” and “there is no discretion here” are not at all the same. 99.9% of the time that the building inspector recommends a permit be granted, the selectmen say fine… but they don’t have to, and you don’t have a permit until they do. Even if the inspector gives oral permission to start construction.
I realize that they can SEEM the same. But they’re not. I guess the question here will be whether they were so similar as to count as the same–legally speaking that is certainly possible.
And I am… sort of amused by the reporting primacy of the AAUP position on academic freedom, which is sort of like putting the fox in charge of the hen-house rules. I’m not at all surprised that a group of professors would like unusually free expression and unusually limited penalties; I’m not surprised that they would form a group whose first stated goal is “advancing academic freedom.” Of course they would! But I’m surprised that the reporting fails to point out the inherent bias problem.
And given the rhetoric I’m also sort of amused by the irony of the selected example in the article:
It is a funny situation in which they select a few conservative positions as examples of exceptions.
What would the liberal equivalents be, do you think?
Oooh, I have some!
“Persistent (and explicit) expression of the opinion that ____ are advantaged relative to ____ and that the school and professors are obliged to take action to correct that difference, might at least justify an inquiry as to whether the professor can or will treat _____ students equally.”
Or perhaps not, since I doubt the AAUP would condone inquiries into all of the “____ need to sit down and shut up and listen” professorate, or those who think that they should take on the job of “balancing” their own perception of whatever privileges someone might hold.
No, wait, wait…
“Belief in exceptionalism of due process, applying a different standard to sexual assault accusations than to anything else, with the intent of benefiting one gender at the expense of the other. Sometimes combined with the Kafkaesque and unrebuttable presumption that denial or defense are indicia of guilt.”
No, that won’t do either. It’s a fun thought experiment, though.
Anyway.
Like I said, even though I think Salaita is a bit of a dick I’d support the speech angle if I thought he was not conditionally hired; I may change my mind on that as the evidence comes out. I remain a strong speech person not because I especially like the results in cases like these, but because there is no non-abusive, non-corruptible, non-discretionary way to make good speech limits. I only wish that the folks who are arguing in favor of Salaita would grant the same consideration when they talk about “hate speech” outside academia.
g&w,
According to what I’ve read, the only thing needed was approval of the Board of Trustees. That’s just a rubber stamp. In fact, he was expected to begin teaching classes before the Board’s next meeting. Academics have been saying that this is standard and, in their world, constitutes being hired.
Jake, the one tweet about anti-Semitism was:
“”Zionists: transforming ‘anti-Semitism’ from something horrible into something honorable since 1948.”
I don’t see a conflict between my statement and the context of this tweet. He says that anti-Semitism has been honorable since 1948. The fact that he thinks that Zionism is the cause thereof doesn’t seem to make that any less of a problem.
You’ve got the full quote and you still think Salaita’s saying that anti-semitism is honorable? And this comes from the same person who didn’t see the racism in the Miley Cyrus photo?
If I say, “Your cooking makes feces into a viable menu option,” do you really think I’m saying that shit is good for eating?
We clearly don’t speak the same language.