http://thefire.org/torch/#13602
Will Threat of Legal Action Spur UNC
to Restore Emeritus Professor's Rights?
September
20, 2011
After months
of discussion with little to show for it, Professor Emeritus Elliot Cramer
plans to file an ethics complaint against University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill (UNC) General Counsel Leslie C. Strohm,
based in part on Strohm's role in revoking his
university email account and website. A lawsuit, Cramer says, is also imminent.
This latest
development in Cramer's case comes five months after UNC stripped him of his
network credentials due to the agitations of an animal activist. The activist,
unaffiliated in any way with UNC, repeatedly demanded that UNC punish Cramer
merely because his UNC-provided website posted a link to an animal rights
organization Cramer was involved with, where in turn readers could follow
another link to learn about the pair's private dispute. General Counsel Strohm told the individual, Joseph Villarosa,
that she saw "no reference to [him] whatsoever" on Cramer's UNC
website and that his complaint was "not a University matter."
Nonetheless Strohm ordered Cramer to remove the link
from his website, and, even after complying with the request, UNC Chancellor
Holden Thorp ordered the revocation of Cramer's privileges, stating that Cramer
had impermissibly involved UNC in his personal affairs.
The
sanctions against Cramer went even further, in fact, than merely his university
email and website; the loss of his network privileges also (perhaps
unintentionally) meant that Cramer was unable to access electronic journals and
other scholarly resources through UNC's library system. As I wrote a few weeks
ago, this hurt Cramer's ability to continue with his research—and indeed, like
many professors emereti, he has remained active and
kept publishing since his 1994 retirement.
Those
library privileges, Cramer reports, have finally been restored. Yet UNC's
unjust termination of his UNC email account and website persist. UNC's
newspaper The Daily Tar Heel reports that Cramer addressed a meeting of UNC's
Faculty Council last week (you can read his full prepared statements here,
toward the end), hoping to bring a final resolution to this case. The DTH
reports only that Thorp, who was present at the meeting, replied, "I think
we've done a good job trying to satisfy this."
Whatever the
likelihood of success of either the ethics complaint or lawsuit, UNC could
have—and should have—prevented them from entering the conversation by acting
quickly to remedy the basic injustice done here. Yet as we've made clear here
many times now, rather than send the clear message to faculty that the
university will protect them from outside interference, UNC has told the Joseph
Villarosas of the world just how little it takes to
win the censorship of their opponents.
There is
still time for UNC to act here. Hopefully the threat of legal action and the
bad PR that comes with it will finally bring the university around.