Transparency always looks good on paper, but what if it interferes with free speech?

Joseph Cohn writes at the FIRE blog.

Everything Is Bigger in Texas, Including Violations of the First Amendment

There have been numerous media accounts of the current threat to academic freedom and faculty free speech in Wisconsin. This attention is appropriate, as my colleague Peter Bonilla explained here on The Torch last month. But there appears to have been very little coverage of Texas’s HB 1295, which quietly became law on June 19.

The bill states:

(a) In any public communication the content of which is based on the results of sponsored research, a faculty member or other employee or appointee of an institution of higher education who conducted or participated in conducting the research shall conspicuously disclose the identity of each sponsor of the research.

This seemingly innocuous provision threatens academic freedom and implicates the First Amendment in several significant ways. First, and most obviously, it compels speech. The new law requires professors employed at public institutions of higher education to “conspicuously disclose” their funding source any time they publicly discuss research that received more than 50 percent of its funding from an entity other than the university itself.

While transparency in funding research may generally be a good thing, mandatory disclosure any time professors engage in “public communication” about their research is overbroad and vague, and may be underinclusive to boot. The bill defines “public communication” as:

oral or written communication intended for public consumption or distribution, including:

(A)  testimony in a public administrative, legislative, regulatory, or judicial proceeding;

(B)  printed matter including a magazine, journal, newsletter, newspaper, pamphlet, or report; or

(C)  posting of information on a website or similar Internet host for information.

Under this language, professors may feel compelled to disclose their funding sources any time they discuss their research publicly. Would class lectures or presentations at academic conferences be considered communications intended for public consumption under the new law? And what happens when a professor conducts an interview with a reporter and the disclosure does not make it into the final published story? These are just two questions that illustrate the new law’s overbreadth and its vagueness.