The Oberlin College case - summarized below - raises the question of who speaks for the university. In the Oberlin case, a dean and some other college officials made defamatory statements that led to monetary losses. A jury held the college responsible for statements by officials. Below is a summary from the New York Times:
Oberlin College, known as a bastion of progressive politics, said on Thursday that it would pay $36.59 million to a local bakery that said it had been defamed and falsely accused of racism after a worker caught a Black student shoplifting. That 2016 dispute with Gibson’s Bakery resulted in a yearslong legal fight and resonated beyond the small college town in Ohio, turning into a bitter national debate over criminal justice, race, free speech and whether the college had failed to hold students to account. The decision by the college’s board of trustees, announced Thursday, came nine days after the Ohio Supreme Court had declined to hear the college’s appeal of a lower-court ruling.
...The case hinged on whether Oberlin officials had defamed the bakery by supporting students who accused it of racial profiling, and the verdict, essentially finding that the officials had done so, may make other colleges and universities think twice about joining student causes, legal experts said.
...The incident that started the dispute unfolded in November 2016, when a student tried to buy a bottle of wine with a fake ID while shoplifting two more bottles by hiding them under his coat, according to court papers. Allyn Gibson, a son and grandson of the owners, who is white, chased the student out onto the street, where two of his friends, also Black students at Oberlin, joined in the scuffle. The students later pleaded guilty to various charges. That altercation led to two days of protests; several hundred students gathered in front of the bakery, accusing it of having racially profiled its customers, according to court papers.
...The lawsuit filed by Gibson’s contended that Oberlin had defamed the bakery when the dean of students, Meredith Raimondo, and other members of the administration took sides in the dispute by attending the protests, where fliers, peppered with capital letters, urged a boycott of the bakery and said that it was a “RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT OF RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION.” ...
Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/us/oberlin-bakery-lawsuit.html.
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An interesting question is whether the jury would still have put the blame on Oberlin if the dean had added some kind of disclaimer indicating that the opinion expressed was just a personal one. My guess is that a disclaimer wouldn't have done the trick. The jury would still have seen the result as a consequence of an official act of the college.
Of course, not all inflammatory statements made by members of a college or university community lead to tangible monetary damages such as the loss of business in the Oberlin case. Nonetheless, members of the public may see even statements by individual faculty which are clearly personal opinions as somehow representing the larger institution. There was a recent case in which a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon tweeted concerning Queen Elizabeth that "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating." It was clear that the statement was not an official opinion. Nonetheless, the university issued a statement saying essentially that the author was entitled to freedom of speech but that the tweet didn't meet the "standards of discourse" of the university.*
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The point here is that statements made by individuals that are clearly unofficial opinions - in the case of the tweet it was placed on a personal account - are nonetheless often seen as representing the university. Someone on a personal twitter account expressing an opinion, a de facto disclaimer, was still seen as speaking for the larger community. Apart from actual juries as in the Oberlin case, and apart from the legalities involved, there is always a public "jury" passing judgment. If someone's statement is identified as that of professor X at university Y, there are ways of expressing opinions - even controversial opinions - that can avoid collateral damage. One question that can always be asked before pressing the "send" button is whether you are engaging in some kind of public catharsis or whether you want to convince your audience that you have a valid viewpoint.
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https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/oberlin%20speech.mp3
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