Earlier this week, Whiting School of Engineering Dean Andrew Douglas instructed Hopkins cryptology professor Matthew Green to take down a blog post he’d written in criticism of NSA policies in his field of expertise. Later that day, the order was retracted; an apology was issued on Tuesday.
While the editorial board commends Douglas for quickly rectifying the situation and issuing an apology, we feel that the initial act of censorship was a violation of academic freedom. As scholarship becomes more entwined with social media and blogging, we feel that Hopkins should be encouraging the use of this platform to provide information to the public.
As a result of this single occurrence, other faculty members on campus may air on the side of caution when sharing their intellectual ideas online with the general public. This has the potential to impede on academic advancements.
Even as Hopkins took a step closer to attaining President Daniels’ “Top 10 by 2020” objective in this week’s U.S. News college rankings, it ranked in the bottom 10 schools in the country for free speech according to the independent, non-partisan Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Universities with a sincere, rather than superficial commitment to free speech in practice would presume protection for all scholarly faculty articles, placing the burden on the accuser to prove why an exception to this de facto position is warranted. That Hopkins officials did the opposite suggests they are guided more by an aversion to controversy than by a heartfelt concern for our right to speak our minds.
If the University wishes to defeat this perception, offering greater leniency on the side of the speaker in future cases would do much to assuage our concerns.
