Trying to silence Jim Craven

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

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" (warriornet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx), 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."

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 08/23/2001

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