Academic Freedom under the Gun: A Report from Kansas

Trying to prevent guns in the classroom revealed another level of crisis in the state of Kansas, an existing problem of a university administration that in the name of good relations with a hostile legislature fails to stand up to elected officials regarding basic protections of student, staff, and academic speech and of the right to organize around a workplace health and safety issue. [...] The most dramatic fastening together of these dynamics at the state level came in 2013 when University of Kansas professor David Guth tweeted, in the wake of the Washington, DC, Navy Yard shootings, “The blood is on the hands of the #NRA. [...] A key passage later in the Kansas policy document introduces the idea of weighing academic freedom against “the interest of the employer in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees.” Such efficiency is to be “balanced against the employee’s right as a citizen to speak on matters of public concern.” Independent of H. [...] Second, the title of the reproduced summary of the law rather undercuts the idea expressed in the bill that the intent is also to prevent research supporting gun control. [...] Additionally, at the University of Kansas Medical Center, Mark Chertoff, a professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech, was asked to apologize for posting stickers on the doors of the University of Kansas Medical Center campus that read, “This [image of a gun free sign] will expire on July 1, 2017.” The dean and the chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech relayed the hospital’s positio.