Chairs and speech
Kudos to David French of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) for acknowledging today the gray areas involved in the speech of department chairs, who act both as faculty and as administrators. The immediate occasion is the controversy over Timothy Shortell, recently elected as chair of Brooklyn College’s sociology department…. In reality, the removal of departmental chairs based on their speech is a cover-your-rear maneuver to stem public embarrassment…. In essence, David French and Stanley Fish here are on the same side (which has got to be a first), arguing that one can lose an administrative job from one’s speech.