In a decision professors are hailing as a triumph of academic freedom, the Fourth Circuit United States Court of Appeals ruled last Wednesday that the denial of a promotion to Criminology Prof. Mike Adams at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington violated his First Amendment protection of free speech.
Adams, originally an atheist, was hired in 1993, but converted to Christianity in 2000. He submitted an application for a promotion at the university which included writings from his online blog, which addressed a wide range of issues including civil rights, feminism, abortion and homosexuality, but underwent a change in viewpoint after his conversion.
The university denied his application for a promotion based on the content of his controversial writings. The lower court ruled in the school's favor, but Adams ultimately won the appeal.
The decision marked a dramatic break from recent case rulings which used the precedent of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, a case which established the inability of public employees to enjoy First Amendment protections when engaging in speech pursuant to their official duties. Thus those courts ruling contrary to Garcetti were "in a small minority of speech-protecting decisions," Robert O'Neil, director for the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression at the University, said in an email.
Adams said he and his students were shocked he was denied a promotion, as he had "just won three teaching awards and had established at one point the highest teaching evaluation" at the school.\n"A lot of people write blogs and write articles in magazines that I'm sure my colleagues might not appreciate," University Politics Prof. James Ceaser said. "Professors should have a wide range of academic freedom and a wide range of freedom generally. Promotions should be based on merits of scholarly work, not on what you put in a blog."
Ceaser added that although blogs should not impact promotions, all professors should acknowledge the risk of making such opinions public.
Adams said he included his blog postings in the application because when he originally was hired as a liberal, he was told that everything done in media "was to be logged as service."
The decision seems to restore the pre-Garcetti view that "professorial speech is protected even though the speaker may have engaged broadly in university governance, limited only by specific campus duties and responsibilities so specific as to undermine the speaker's claim of expression on a 'matter of public concern', which has always been the standard," O'Neil said.
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