SIUC and Facebook (should be a comment to exisitng post but too many words)

Without delving into the now settled labor dispute Jill references in her post regarding SIUC and its Facebook page, let me offer my thoughts on the issue.  Once the final round of negotiations between the Faculty Association and the Administration broke down (it truly is an ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ situation), someone within SIUC’s administration made the decision to delete comments supportive of the faculty from the official SIUC Facebook page.  At first it seemed that someone was taking the time to read the comments before deciding to erase them: pro administration statements were not deleted.  However, over the course of a few hours someone at SIU started to quickly delete comments that referenced the faculty or strike in any way. Comments like, “I came here to learn from my professors,” were taken down. Then people started getting blocked from posting at all on the SIUC Facebook page. Finally, the decision was made to shut down the comment section of the page.

Many SIU students and faculty, and some administrators and community members were rather upset by these decisions and created the Facebook page “SIUC fan page. Stop Censoring”. [http://www.facebook.com/pages/SIUC-fan-page-Stop-Censoring/196307620443592]. Reading through the screen shots of comments taken before they were deleted makes it apparent to me that people were generally posting in a respectful manner.

In response, a few days later SIUC issued the following statement:

Dear SIU Fans:

As you may have noticed, a few days ago, we temporarily disabled the comments feature. For this, we owe you an apology and explanation. A few evenings ago we began receiving a large number of posts related to a recent labor dispute involving one of our four unions on campus. Our faculty, students, alumni, and supporters are spirited and passionately committed to the success of our students and university, and we know that this sentiment is at the core of all of these posts. However, a number of posts contained content that we deemed inappropriate because they contained crude language or attacks of a personal nature. Due to the high volume of posts and that the posts were coming in the early morning hours, it became impossible for our moderator to monitor comments that we deemed inappropriate or disrespectful.

The nature of the Facebook community is that its members must show respect for others, and we embrace this philosophy. Please understand that our intention was never to censor or otherwise prevent healthy dialogue surrounding this or any other important issue facing our community -- as an institution of higher education, our goal has been and will continue to be to encourage and facilitate insightful exchanges on important topics.

We have now restored the comments feature and we encourage all of our Fans to post liberally about their University experiences. We also ask that our members show the respect your peers and fellow Fans deserve when making comments. In the event that this respect is not shown, we will judiciously remove comments that are not consistent with the expected level of respect and decorum of this community. Feel free to refer to our policy on this matter in the "info" section if you question whether your contribution is appropriate.

I think there are several issues here.  The first is legal in nature: what was the intent behind developing the SIUC Facebook page, and what has its purpose become?  If it is developed as a low-cost marketing device to simply push information out to Facebook users, the SIUC Board of Trustees and Administration can choose what information may and may not be posted.  However, if SIUC created the page to serve as a forum for students, parents, alumni, faculty, and administrators to discuss matters involving SIUC, that is very different. If SUC created (either intentionally or unintentionally) a public forum for ideas, as a branch of the government (a public institution) it loses much of its right to censor based on content (big 1^st amendment issue).  One way to determine if SIUC’s Facebook page was intended to provide, or has evolved into, a public forum is to exam how they have addressed past comments. To my knowledge no one has done this yet.  The other is to examine the post it added to its own Facebook site when it again permitted commenting.

The second issue has to do with the mission of universities and their serving as centers for the exchange of ideas. If SIUC administrators believe that their institution embraces democratic ideals and permits those associated with it to question authority, raise controversial issues, and publically state their opinions, it probably should not be in the business of trying to determine what voices should be heard while silencing those that it (the administrators) disagree with.