Even if it can, it shouldn't and it shouldn't be able to.
People should be allowed to have private lives and opinions, outside of what they fucking make for a living.
Also, can people stop overreacting for mere words? And can they also understand that anybody can have a bad day and do write something stupid -- doesn't mean there should be repercussions that affect the rest of their live, like making them unhireable or firing them...
She also told people to contact her, and gave out the schools counseling hotline number instead of her real one. She deliberately messed with the school and dragged them into her personal conflict. Why shouldn't they fire her, if they can, in that case?
She fake-doxxed another school's crisis hotline, made that resource unavailable to students who needed it; she embarrassed her school and forced the administration to issue a statement when they had better things to do.
> Or that they don't deserve second and third chances.
If she's fired, she has as many chances as she wants to apply to a school that wants to risk having to clean up after her irresponsible bullshit.
>She fake-doxxed another school's crisis hotline, made that resource unavailable to students who needed it;
Did she? Did many people really called that crisis hotline because of her, and to the point of making it "unavailable"?
And was that resource so needed in the first place that making it unavailable for some hours would be some kind of disaster (most schools don't have any kind of "crisis hotline" around the world and they manage just fine).
>she embarrassed her school and forced the administration to issue a statement when they had better things to do.
Yeah, that's what I was referring to by "nothing much".
>If she's fired, she has as many chances as she wants to apply to a school that wants to risk having to clean up after her irresponsible bullshit.
And that's what I called by not giving chances and Old Testament mentality. Perhaps some people enjoy their society being the #1 in incarcerations in the world, or treating anybody who doesn't fit a clean cut profile as a pariah, and having all kinds of people who where not given a chance and ended up mentally unstable (and/or going postal every week or so). Because that's how societies end up with that.
What happened to a scolding, and a promise to not do that kind of thing again? No, it's "straight to the unemployable line you go..."
> Did she? Did many people really called that crisis hotline because of her, and to the point of making it "unavailable"?
The article implies that it did. Even if it didn't, saying that it's okay is like saying it's okay to drive recklessly, as long as you don't hit anyone; it's not.
> And was that resource so needed in the first place
Ask that to someone who uses it. Mental health is a real problem for some students, but I guess some people don't care about that.
> And that's what I called by not giving chances and Old Testament mentality.
I don't know what "Old Testament" has anything to do with it. She flaunted the fact that she wouldn't face consequences (or so she be believed), so it looks like consequences are how she thinks, too.
> Perhaps some people enjoy their society being the #1 in incarcerations in the world...
This entire paragraph is blowing smoke.
> What happened to a scolding, and a promise to not do that kind of thing again?
That kind of thing is for children. This woman is an adult, and should already know what adult behavior is like. And if you're so concerned about unemployment, realize that there is someone else out there looking for a teaching job, who knows how to act like a grown-up, who will happily fill the opening.
My opinion would be this: you should be able to express yourself as a private citizen any which way you want, withinn the law.
However, once you're doing it while representing your employer, you're no longer free to go beyond expected conduct.
For example, on twitter if you're janeschmoe, tweet whatever you want, but if you're janeschmoeUSC bio: professor at USC, then you're on your own, i.e. not protected, because you're invoking your employer in your bio.
And this would not be protected simply by obscurity, but rather because your private twitter does not invoke your employer in anyway. Well, so long as you keep your private twitter persona sanitized from any association with your employer.
- What if @janeschmoe mostly tweets about USC and her work there? Even if they are not officially saying, “this is an official twitter account of a USC professor”, her activity could cause people to think the account is official
- Does merely mentioning your employer cross the line? Not mentioning this could also be kind of sketchy if, for instance, @janeschmoe starts tweeting “USC has the best professors!!!”
This will look like a cop out but I would say keep things sanitized. Don't commingle official and private opinions.
Just as let's say a chiropractor should not date their patients. To keep things simple as posdible and limit repercussions, fence your personae properly.
Private employers can fire you for anything you do on social media, whether you associate yourself with your employer's name or not. This was just covered in a training I sat through--given by a lawyer with experience in this area--a couple weeks ago. It might not seem fair, but that's how it is.
It's more complicated when the employer is the government. This is what popehat's blog post covers.
> My opinion would be this: you should be able to express yourself as a private citizen any which way you want, withinn the law.
I suspect you might not feel this way if you ran a business and one of your employees caused huge controversy that threatened your business. You would probably want to fire that person to save your business.
It happens to be my opinion that patrons also ought to be able to segregate the actions of someone in their private time and their company official time.
Personally, I would like to think I would be able to defend an employee's first amendment's rights. Now, if they make misrepresentations which bring negative externalities to a going concern, that's a problem. You know, don't conflict your interest.
So there's a very practical problem I have with this. Say you maintain a blog promoting the disenfranchisement of women, things like "We need to send women back to the homes, barefoot in the kitchen." While reprehensible, perfectly legal.
Your employer is faced with both an external and internal problem.
1) The more public your views, the more people see these views as condoned by the company as being acceptable, whether you agree with that the perception is likely. Even if protection is afforded under the law it's widely understood that you can "manage out" problem employees and people will judge the company for not doing that.
2) The employee is likely hampering their own effectiveness in the workplace substantially. In this example it's going to be very difficult to get women, a huge chunk of a likely workforce, to work effectively with the person in question. The company cannot realistically resolve the feelings of enmity that arise from this kind of speech and the best remedy to the situation is going to be empoyee termination.
This complicated but I would defer to their output. While at work, are they performing their duties. Is she othewise behaving within expected bounds while on company time? What she does on her own time is her own business, if she can keep her personae separate and not commingle them, either as a private citizen or as a rep of her company.
She presented the school's student counseling number as her own contact #. That could and should land her in hot water with her employers, state employee or not.
If you think that this structure creates an incentive to react disruptively to speech, in order to supply a basis for a professor to be fired, you'd be right. If you think that schools might lie about the amount of disruption, you'd be right.
The Heckler's Veto can extend a long ways so be careful.
Oftentimes engineers see law like code, if you can find a way to break it, great!
In practice, this wouldn't fly, the whole point of court is to negotiate between the letter of the law and the situation to obtain justice. In the hypothetical it's very clear why she actually got fired
CSU professors (and professors in general) may technically be at-will (I don't know) but they are definitely members of a union that has negotiated various employment rights, including around how dismissal works. Furthermore, I think the article says she is tenured, which adds another layer of protection to her employment. If CSU did want to dismiss her (after going through the various steps as the popehat article describes), there would be further review steps based on the union rules and tenure.
No, non-executive public employees in California are mostly not at-will employees. They tend to have protection by civil service laws and union contracts and federal due process protections related to employment, none of which apply to private at-will employment.
She is tenured. She brings it up in one of the tweets: “I work as a tenured professor. I make 100K a year doing that. I will never be fired. I will always have people wanting to hear what I have to say.”
I'm always amused when these type of people tweet something offensive and stand by it; but, immediately make their Twitter account private. (I can tweet something very offensive, but don't be mean to me.)
Being an ass on Twitter is one thing, but being an ass on Twitter and sending those upset with you to the school's suicide prevention hotline is beyond the pale.
but not beyond the law, so an analysis that completely ignores "who was the biggest ass" and instead focuses on what laws apply to this situation, and to which degree interpretation can be extended, is most refreshing.
Causing your school's suicide hotline to be flooded with troll phone calls presents a very arguable case for substantial disruption, depending on the evidence.
Which points to the part of the law that might apply.
The conclusion of the article is quite intentionally left off because even after that analysis, it turns out that the law isn't like programming (as the article literally points out) and even after looking at what the law, and judicial reason, allows for, there is no clear cut answer here. There are too many grey areas for there to be "one conclusion".
And of course the conclusion in court in cases like these is, as it should be: the judge's decision based on all the information surfaced during the trial to help them reach their decision.
wtf. That wasn't the conclusion. Halve that. Disciplinary action might be legally justified. It would clearly be a dangerous case to lose for the University (setting up some nasty jurisprudence, among other damages), so it's unlikely to happen.
OK, not a lawyer but this seemed good so I read a couple of other posts and it appears he got something really wrong on the possibility of Trump being indicted entry.
Mueller won't indict Trump because he follows the rules and the Justice Department reaffirmed an internal rule in 2000 that they will never indict the President. It's not in the Constitution explicitly as he writes but it's never mentioned in his discussion but several commenters note the omission.
I think if you're at the point where you're willing to say a person will or will not do something because of some institutional rule when their job is also to uphold the law and the constitution, and there may indeed be conflicts in what their priorities are as they see them, you've become far too lost in the weeds.
Mueller is a person, not a state machine. Let's not act like we can completely predict the future here, especially given the dearth of information we have compared to him.
People should be allowed to have private lives and opinions, outside of what they fucking make for a living.
Also, can people stop overreacting for mere words? And can they also understand that anybody can have a bad day and do write something stupid -- doesn't mean there should be repercussions that affect the rest of their live, like making them unhireable or firing them...