More on OU’s Political Speech Policy

Following up on my last post, Anil Gollahalli was kind enough to send me a detailed explanation of the school’s acceptable use policy for its email and network services; he gave his blessing for me to post it here in full.

Jason,

Thank you for your concern regarding the email sent to the University community. As a great deal of the content of the email was based on our legal obligations as a state entity, Nick forwarded me your email so that I could provide a more detailed response. It is not — nor will it ever be — the University’s intent to discourage open and free discourse regarding the political process. Indeed, such discourse is a fundamental aspect of our society and among the most protected forms of free speech.

The University is, however, a state entity and its information systems are owned by the taxpayers of the state. As I’m sure you can agree, it is inappropriate for the University to take partisan political positions. Similarly, while the University allows limited use of its systems for personal use, it would be inappropriate to utilize the state-owned system for purely partisan purposes. Additionally, emails bearing the domain and/or email address of the University have the potential to be misconstrued as being endorsed or sponsored by the institution — there is no ability to distinguish the speaker as a student, faculty member, or university official based solely on the domain name. Our University policy speaks to this issue.

http://www.ou.edu/committees/itc/policy/Acceptable_Use_of_Information_Resources.html

I agree that there is a gray area in these distinctions and it is not the University’s goal to censor or restrain speech, but merely to encourage the use of good judgment and appropriate use of state-owned systems. The email was meant in that context. The educational mission is a broad one, including active political discourse. The University cannot extend its resources, however, to purely partisan uses. Thanks again for your inquiry and concern.

Anil

I am not a lawyer, but a few things here jump out at me:

First, the concerns that were raised by the first mass mailing are not about whether or not the University itself can or should be able to engage in partisan politics, so why address that? The very real and legitimate concerns are around whether those restrictions extend to students sending email from their personal accounts or posting to political blogs using on-campus computer labs.

Second, the comment about emails being impossible to assign back to a student, faculty member, or university official based on the domain name ignores the fact that email addresses aren’t simply domains. There’s a little string that precedes the @ in an email address, which is usually a pretty good indicator of the message’s source.

Finally, it’s all well and good that the University has no intent of stifling speech that falls within the bounds of the educational mission, but the original email makes it very unclear what the bounds of the educational mission are considered to be. An appeal to what is or isn’t obvious doesn’t help: it seems obvious to me that forwarding an email with political commentary is completely within my rights as a student, but that was the scenario that was explicitly forbidden in the original mass mailing.

If the University wants to encourage political discourse to thrive on its campus as a part of its educational mission, it needs to quickly send out another mass mailing that is unequivocal about the rights that students, faculty, and staff do have.

12 September 2008