Cyberspace Censorship Threatens Academic Freedom in Virginia

By Ellen Schrecker

Although the plaintiffs won an initially favorable ruling in the federal district court (see "Academic Freedom and the Internet" on pages 19-21 of the May-June 1998 issue), the state prevailed at the next levels. On June 23 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit sustained the law in an 8 to 4 decision. The plaintiffs and their ACLU attorneys are now going to appeal that decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. And the AAUP, which has been working with the Virginia plaintiffs and their ACLU attorneys for several years, is preparing to file a friend-of-the-court brief in support of their petition to the Court.

Cyberspace is now as crucial for the work of college and university professors as their institutions' libraries and laboratories. With ever more resources available only online, many serious scholars already use the Internet for much of their teaching and research. For academics in fields as diverse as art, sociology, literature, and medicine, who regularly access and share "sexually explicit material," the type of censorship embodied in the Virginia law might well put them out of business.

Think about the consequences for an AIDs researcher unable to log onto the best Web sites in her field or an authority on James Joyce barred from downloading the racier passages in Ulysses. Limiting access to such materials is like pulling books off the library shelves. It violates intellectual freedom and interferes with the regular work of an academic.

But the legislators didn't see it that way. When the University of Virginia's Robert O'Neil, then chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, testified before the legislative subcommittee that was considering the measure, he tried to explain just how damaging and futile it was. "You can no more restrict the use of computers in this way," he cautioned, "than you could direct a custodian in the capitol not to bring a personal copy of Penthouse or Hustler to read during a coffee break." Unfortunately, the lawmakers, shaken by the panic of the moment over sexually explicit material, ignored his warnings and passed the bill with near unanimity.

Urofsky and his colleagues sued at once. Their main complaint was that the lawmakers did not recognize how the statute would interfere with the work of a college professor. Although the law infringes on the intellectual freedom of all state employees, faculty members have special needs for unrestricted access to the Internet. Downloading sexually explicit material is probably not part of the job for someone working in the highway department, but it might well be for a psychologist, legal scholar, or medical researcher.

Moreover, even if individual faculty members could obtain what the statute calls "agency approvals" for their own work, the law sets a chilling precedent. It lets the state interfere with the actual content of academic work. The state, Urofsky points out, "was telling me how to do my job. That's essentially what it was trying to do-tell me how to teach my class."

As AAUP counsel Donna Euben notes in her Legal Watch column in this issue, the appellate court decision in the case is disturbing not only because of its failure to recognize the special nature of academic work, but also because of its insistence that academic freedom belongs to institutions, not individuals. Such a profound misunderstanding of what academic freedom is all about has implications that extend far beyond cyberspace-and far beyond Virginia. Even professors who don't yet use the Internet might do well to worry about how the courts are making it increasingly harder for them to teach and conduct research without outside interference.

>Thanks to Robert O'Neil, former chair of the AAUP's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, for his assistance with this story.

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