The First Amendment right to freedom of speech is one that we, as Americans, cherish very highly. It’s one of the things that sets us apart from totalitarian dictatorships or quasi-religious regimes like Iran, with its supreme Iyatollah.
But even here in America, land of the free and home of the brave, we still hear about people losing their jobs because they blogged or tweeted about their boss. And actually, that’s all legal, since most (if not all) states are “hire at will” employment, which means an employer can fire you just because…at least as long as they are willing to pay unemployment taxes.
However, colleges and universities have long been outstanding bastions of truth and liberty, where left and right alike coalesce to present their ideas, petitions and even protests. Freedom of speech, and especially freedom of the press, has been an inheritance passed down since the early days of our country. It has never been really challenged…until now.
It came to my attention earlier this evening through Twitter that a student at Mount San Antonio college was suspended for tweeting about her professor. There apparently was a personality conflict and when a student assistant found out, she notified the professor of the incident. He apparently felt threatened, despite the fact that his name wasn’t even mentioned in the twitter stream, and pulled enough strings to get the girl suspended.
Now, another late-breaking development has occurred. While doing research on First Amendment rights and other cases like this, the college news site, MountieWire.com, has pulled the news article completely. They’ve even gone so far as to expunge any record of it from their Twitter stream as well. And despite the fact that Google did index the page, it wasn’t cached – so at this point I don’t see any record of it being online, other than the hundreds of tweets pointing to the now-defuct URL, resulting in a 404 page.
As of right now it looks like not only was the student suspended, it appears as if the college newspaper was stiff-armed into backing down from the story altogether. There is no retraction, clarification or any evidence at all that the story was ever online.
While legally the paper and the student were well within their First Amendment rights, at least according to the research of this author (and I’m no legal expert), it appears that the pressure from the school’s administrators has had its impact. I’m sure this story is far from over. Let’s just hope that in the end its +1 for democracy and -1 for administrative BS.
