University of Florida gags three faculty members — and violates their 1st Amendment rights
As the elected officers of the University of Miami’s Faculty Senate, we are deeply troubled by the University of Florida’s actions to prohibit three of its prominent faculty members from testifying about their research in a voting-rights case.
The three political-science faculty members were not asking to testify on behalf of the University of Florida. Rather, they were engaged in the professionally appropriate use of their expertise in a public proceeding to advance the common good. Such arrangements are ubiquitous among universities and their faculties.
Indeed, UF’s own policy on outside activity and conflict of interest, like all universities of which we are aware, recognizes these arrangements as a means to “further the dissemination and use of the faculty member’s knowledge and expertise, which “often serves the mission of the university.”
Conflicts of interest that would prohibit such expertwitness arrangements are widely understood to operate only where the outside work would interfere with the faculty member’s performance of university teaching and research, or where the outside work involves a financial interest that creates an unlawful conflict between the faculty member’s private interests and the faculty member’s duties and responsibilities.
Neither conflict exists here; the University of Florida prohibited these faculty experts from testifying because “outside activities that may pose a conflict of interest to the executive branch of the State of Florida create a conflict for the University of Florida.”
This strikes at the core of the rights retained by faculty members as citizens, as well as faculty members’ expectations of academic freedom, and we are pleased that UF’s accrediting body, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges, will investigate this misguided decision.
The long-agreed-upon tenets of academic freedom, according to the American Association of University Professors’ statement on Academic Freedom and Tenure, include the understanding that university faculty are “citizens, members of a learned profession and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional censorship or discipline,” though in such a context they should clarify that they are not speaking on behalf of the institution.
The University of Florida formally endorsed these principles — in its statement on Academic Freedom and Responsibility — as “essential to the full development of a true university,” admonishing that faculty “must be free to cultivate a spirit of inquiry and scholarly criticism and to examine ideas in an atmosphere of freedom and confidence.”
When faculty members see other members of our profession being denied their First Amendment rights and rights to academic freedom, it casts a pall over our own professional work and has a chilling effect on our engagement with the larger community.
When the public sees such actions, it justifiably undermines public confidence in the integrity of universities as places of scholarship, learning and truth-seeking.
We urge the University of Florida to rescind this decision.