Is it possible to write a policy for academic blogging that respects a university's mission but doesn't amount to censorship? The vice-president for academic affairs asked me to draft a policy for student bloggers. Since we are a Catholic institution, the administrator's off-the-top-of-her-head suggestions included suggestions like "no foul language" and "no links to porn". Since it's possible that an anonymous commenter (or spammer) might leave offensive content on a site, or the contents of a page linked to by a blogger might change, and since a student might actually want to research the usage of a curse word or do a feminist study of pornography, I don't think a list of "thou shalt nots" is going to help. (We've already had one of those lists for thousands of years, and so far it hasn't solved all of our proglems.)

In libertarian la-la-land, information wants to be free and they'll have to pry my keboard from my cold, dead hands before they'll take away my right to read, write, and link to any subject, no matter the content.

In the real world, some people don't want to hear what others want to say; some people will turn to the courts to silence other people, and other people simply want to avoid controversy. My university has been very supportive of my blogging activities, but administrators get paid to worry about things like how to protect their butts if they get sued.

I administer a MoveableType installation hosted on a private ISP; there are about 40 blogs on the site, mostly students in my own classes, but a few faculty members and a growing number of students who aren't actually in any of my classes.

As an adviser to the student newspaper, I know full well that it's the job of the university's lawyers to keep the school out of trouble, not to come rushing to the aid of students who might get sued unfairly. Thus, the university lawyer will advise student journalists to do whatever will cause the least trouble for the school. So student journalists go elsewhere for legal advice, such as the Student Press Law Center. At my school, I get a course release for supervising the student paper; but I don't assign the articles, check the reporting, proofread them, and approve them for publication -- the students do that themselves, and the editor in chief makes all the decisions. I'm an adviser, not a superviser. If it were my job to check the contents of the paper before it goes to press, the university could be liable for any damage caused; but since it's not in my job description to shield students from the effects of their decision to publish, the courts won't hold the university responsible. Wouldn't a situation like this extend to blogs, too? I'm just thinking out loud here. Obviously I need to do something to respond helpfully and intelligently to the very real concerns my superiors have -- not only becuase I'm not tenured yet, but also because if I believe a private institution probably has a right to enforce a certain kind of behavior on a service that it provides for free. (I know some of my students keep secret blogs where they write all the stuff they don't feel like putting on their academic blogs. Any policy statement should remind users that they are free to find another blog somewhere else.)

Are the issues raised by student blogging sufficiently different from those raised by student journalism?

As food for thought, here are a couple of blogging policy statements: Rhetorica blogging policy, a somewhat smarmy linking policy statement on Crooked Timber, a blog entry about Grinell College's administrative actions on a virtual community, an article about a prof fired for blogging politcially incorrect statements contrary to the university's mission statement (clearly an academic freedom issue), a young teacher fired because of a collection of South Park quotations he put on his website when he was 19, a Microsoft temp fired for posting a photo of Apple computers arriving at a Microsoft loading dock, and a brouhaha created when my own students responded to a joke I made about the (imaginary, for the time being at least) "Seton Hill University Blogging Review Board".