How refreshing to hear a college professor defending freedom of speech. Hooray for Professor Oliver Bateman.

Azhar Majeed of The FIRE reports.

Professor Explains Why Restrictive Social Media Policies Are So Harmful

As we wrote recently on The Torch, the Kansas Board of Regents has approved a revised social media policy regulating the speech of faculty members at the state’s public colleges and universities. The Board’s decision came despite the fact that the policy has been the subject of much criticism from free speech advocates, including FIRE, due to the fact that it authorizes punishment for constitutionally protected speech and leaves professors uncertain of their expressive rights.

Oliver Bateman, an attorney and professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, expresses many of the same concerns in an excellent column yesterday for Al Jazeera America. Usefully, Bateman also shares his perspective on how the policy’s restrictions could affect the careers of many faculty members:

For faculty at the “publish or perish” stage of their careers, harsh social media regulations could also serve as a significant impediment to professional advancement. Big shifts in the dissemination of scholarship, including the closure of some university presses, have prompted junior scholars to seek out new avenues for presenting their research. The U.S. Intellectual History Blog, to which I contribute occasional posts, allows academics to share their work in a quasi-public setting. Sport in American History, Legal History Blog and ContractsProf Blog are among many such sites posting material that often skirts the line between pure, disinterested research and the opinion of its author, with academics staking out positions that, at least to others in their field, might be deemed controversial. These blogs are in turn frequently discussed on Twitter, where academics who “follow” one another can offer critiques.