January 08, 2006
Professor Fired For Blogging?
Meg Spohn, a professor at Devry University in Westminster, Colorado, has been fired, she says, for some "water-cooler kvetching" about the institution on her blog. See the entry at The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog and the Denver Post article for more information and commentary. She posted that she was given no warnings before the firing, and Colorado is an “at-will” state so they can fire with no reason given. To this day she still does not know what entries may have caused her firing.
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Comments
Posted on January 9, 2006 01:59 PM
Thanks for the mention. I might further add that all entries that mention DeVry, even in passing, are public entries on my blog for the world to see; and that I think this is primarily an issue about employers trying to regulate what people do with their lives on their own time (so what I said is not much of an issue anyway). Feel free to stop by and see for yourself. Sure, everybody!
Posted on January 9, 2006 05:51 PM
I did not read the entries in question (yet) so I am not going to comment on the merits of this issue.
I think it's important to note that DeVry is a for-profit institution. To me it seems that such a thing might be less likely to happen at a non-profit university which may have much more freedom to let faculty speak their minds (indeed, the tenure system was developed to help ensure that faculty are not wrongfully dismissed because of their speech).
Posted on January 11, 2006 01:22 PM
Good insight, Andrew. A number of people have contacted me from public, private, for-profit and non-profit instutions telling me similar stories to mine. From what I've heard so far, it does look like things like this are less likely at non-profit universities, but they still go on. I think it's a larger issue that warrants some resolution.
Posted on January 24, 2006 02:35 PM
Thanks for this great post. You've got some really good info in your blog.
Mary Anne Martin