-------- Forwarded Message --------
Forwarded by: Jim Blaut
From: Louis Proyect <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: An article on Jim Craven's email fight
Chronicle of Higher Education - March 19, 1999
A Dispute Over a Professor's E-Mail Illustrates the Complexities of
Acceptable-Use Policies
Scholar sees threat to academic freedom; college fears it could be sued for
his comments
By PETER MONAGHAN
A dispute at Clark College has reminded campus-network administrators and
college lawyers that acceptable-use policies for e-mail accounts and other
network services -- no matter how straightforward they may seem -- can
still give rise to misinterpretation and outright disagreement.
A tenured professor who is chairman of the economics department is at odds
with administrators at the public, two-year college, located in Vancouver,
Wash. At one point they forbade him to use campus computers to send e-mail
messages to any of a long list of addresses, including listservs.
The administrators said they were acting to avoid exposing the college to
legal liability for the content of the professor's messages -- a concern
that the spread of e-mail messages and World-Wide Web sites has raised to
new levels. But the professor, James M. Craven, argues that the
administrators abridged his academic freedom, and his situation has
attracted attention from academics near and far who read about it on line.
He says administrators trumped up the charges that he misused e-mail, and
that they did so to retaliate against him for several protests he has made
against administrative decisions.
The current dispute stems from one that began last summer. Mr. Craven -- a
member of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which comprises several tribes in
southwestern Canada and the northwestern United States -- was serving as an
unpaid member of the Indian Justice Tribunal, in Vancouver, British
Columbia. The panel, organized by the confederacy, was investigating
alleged abuses of American Indian children in U.S. and Canadian residential
schools run by various religious denominations between 1871 and the 1980s.
Mr. Craven calls the institutions "subcontractors in genocide" that
perpetrated many crimes against American Indian children, including
assault, rape, torture and even murder.
After the tribunal's deliberations, a group of former residents of the
schools asked Mr. Craven to press one panelist to stop publishing their
testimony. They said the panelist had broken a promise not to do so.
Mr. Craven proceeded to denounce the man on e-mail lists, such as
"warriornet" ([log in to unmask]), that are frequented by
American Indian academics and activists.
In November, the panelist -- Kevin D. Annett, a former minister in the
United Church of Christ who is now a graduate student at the University of
British Columbia -- complained on some of the listservs and in a letter to
Clark officials that Mr. Craven had made "malicious, untrue, and unfounded
statements" about him on the listservs. He warned that he might file a
lawsuit against Mr. Craven and name the college as a co-defendant, because
its computer equipment had been involved. Mr. Annett could not be reached
for comment.
Clark's interim vice-president for instruction, Charles P. Ramsey, asked
Mr. Craven for copies of all e-mail messages he had sent from his campus
account in which he had mentioned the complainant. In response, Mr. Craven
sent him hundreds of pages of messages.
Mr. Ramsey extracted the addresses of 22 individuals and listservs, then
ordered the professor not to use college computers to send any further
e-mail to them without first obtaining the vice-president's written
permission. "Frankly," Mr. Ramsey wrote to Mr. Craven, "I cannot see how
these e-mails/materials you have sent using college resources have any
relationship whatsoever to your responsibilities as a professor at Clark
College." That electronic activity, he said, breached state regulations
against using state resources for personal profit, as well as a Clark
policy that college computers could be used only for college-related
educational and business purposes.
Mr. Ramsey warned: "Any violation of any of these directives will
constitute insubordination and will be cause for disciplinary action, up to
and including your dismissal."
Mr. Craven and Sheryl Stevens, director of the local office of the
Washington Education Association, which represents some faculty members,
responded by filing a grievance that cited both state law and the union's
contract with Clark.
"We went after everything but the kitchen sink," Ms. Stevens said in an
interview. The college's actions, she said, lacked a just cause, were taken
without due process, and violated Mr. Craven's academic freedom.
In addition, she said, the contract between the union and Clark guarantees
that when legal action is instituted against a faculty member, the college
will provide the faculty member with support and defense. Instead, Mr.
Craven said, Mr. Ramsey's actions helped to brand him with accusations of
defamation, misusing state resources, and putting the college in legal
jeopardy.
After an initial meeting on the grievance, Mr. Ramsey withdrew the threat
of dismissal and allowed Mr. Craven to use college equipment to send
material to the disputed e-mail addresses and Internet sites for
work-related purposes, as long as he did not mention the former panelist.
Mr. Ramsey later said the matter would be dropped if Mr. Craven
acknowledged that he had misused college equipment. If the professor would
not do so, Mr. Ramsey said, the college would refer the matter to state
ethics regulators.
But Mr. Craven and Ms. Stevens said Mr. Ramsey's decision begged key
questions: What wrong did Mr. Craven do? And what were "work-related
purposes"?
Ms. Stevens said in the interview that Clark's policy on using computer
services was problematic: "It's interesting, but it's totally
unenforceable. To have that is silly. Obviously they have no idea where
other people throughout the campus are visiting, and what sites they are
using."
State ethics guidelines allow an employee to "make occasional but limited
use of state resources for his or her private benefit if there is no actual
cost to the state." The ethics code does not define "occasional" use. Mr.
Ramsey said his concern was about cases of "extreme" personal use.
"Anything I did didn't cost one penny, because we're on a trunk rate," Mr.
Craven said, referring to the flat fee the college pays to maintain its
Internet service.
In the wake of the dispute involving Mr. Craven, a committee of
administrators and faculty and staff members at Clark is formulating a new
acceptable-use policy for the college's computers and network connections.
Patricia H. Fulbright, a professor of English, said the committee's task
would not be easy. "Sometimes it's very hard to find the distinction
between what is linked to the academic role and teaching, and personal use.
Those things often coincide." Clark's current policy, she said, sends
contradictory messages: Explore the potential of e-mail for academic roles,
but limit its use to academic roles. Ms. Fulbright is president of a
faculty group called the Clark College Association for Higher Education.
Clark's president, Tana L. Hasart, agreed that better definition of
boundaries was needed. Of current policies, she said, "I don't think
they're very good. I think we attempted to do the best job we could at the
time they were authored."
Mr. Craven maintains that his dispute with his fellow panel member was, in
fact, job-related. "How do educators learn what they presume to teach," he
asked, "if they're not involved in the world around them?"
"If I'd been hustling Amway," he added, "I could see their point."
Mr. Ramsey had objected to Mr. Craven's e-mail messages about the American
Indian tribunal, but Ms. Hasart had encouraged him to participate in the
tribunal as part of Clark's effort to promote diversity and
multiculturalism, the professor said.
Last month, after Mr. Craven had appealed Mr. Ramsey's decision to Ms.
Hasart, the president agreed to drop the matter if Mr. Craven simply stated
that he intended to comply with the college's computer-use policy.
Ms. Stevens, his union representative, responded: "We said we believed he
had consistently done so in the past."
Mr. Craven said last week that he still planned on taking legal action.
"They made a summary judgment I was guilty. They said I put them in a
liability situation, and I had misused state resources."
Clark officials have themselves taken a beating over the dispute, much of
it administered via e-mail. When Mr. Craven posted Mr. Ramsey's first
directive on the Internet, dozens of academics and activists, from as far
away as New Zealand, zipped protests off to Clark administrators. They
pointed out that the disputed listservs were valuable discussion forums,
and that administrators set a dangerous precedent when they presumed to
determine which forums were related to teaching duties.
But Clark officials maintain that when they receive a complaint such as the
former panelist's, they "have a responsibility as a public institution to
investigate the complaint and see what's going on," as Ms. Hasart put it.
Ms. Stevens, the faculty-union representative, argued that it was clearly
inappropriate for administrators to pry into Mr. Craven's e-mail messages.
Faculty unions are working to discredit the idea that colleges should have
"full and total control" over campus e-mail, she added. "A college wouldn't
tap your phone, and they give you a key to your office. The assumption is
that you have some level of privacy."
Like so many campus disputes, this one has other contentious aspects: Mr.
Craven said college officials had been bent on retaliation because he had
been embroiled in several other campus controversies. As a result of one
such dispute, state officials had invited him to take part in the
redrafting of Washington's whistle-blower laws.
Ms. Stevens questioned administrators' claims that e-mail use was even at
the root of the dispute. "I don't know what the real point of this is," she
said, "other than that I don't believe that is the point."
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