[Peace-discuss] U of I ethics says employees cannot wear political buttons

[Karen Medina]

[Evidently, the U of I ethics office says U of I employees cannot not wear political 
buttons on campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots.
From http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/24/buttons -kem]

Sporting an Obama or McCain button? Driving a car with one of the campaigns’ 
bumper stickers? You might need to be careful on University of Illinois 
campuses.

The university system’s ethics office sent a notice to all employees, including 
faculty members, telling them that they could not wear political buttons on 
campus or feature bumper stickers on cars parked in campus lots unless the 
messages on those buttons and stickers were strictly nonpartisan. In addition, 
professors were told that they could not attend political rallies on campuses if 
those rallies express support for a candidate or political party.

Faculty leaders were stunned by the directives. Some wrote to the ethics office 
to ask if the message was intended to apply to professors; they were told that it 
was. At Illinois campuses, as elsewhere, many professors do demonstrate their 
political convictions on buttons, bumper stickers and the like.

Cary Nelson, a professor at the Urbana-Champaign campus and national 
president of the American Association of University Professors, said that he 
believes he is now violating campus policy when he drives to work because he 
has a bumper sticker that proclaims: “MY SAMOYED IS A DEMOCRAT.”

Mike Lillich, a spokesman for the university system, said that President Joseph 
White was asked about the ethics memo this week and that he understands why 
faculty members are concerned. “The campus traditions of free speech are very 
different from the DMV,” said Lillich.

White told professors that he thinks “this is resolvable,” and that they should 
use “common sense.” But for now, Lillich said of the policy sent to all 
employees, “officially, it does apply.”

Nelson and other professors are circulating a draft statement outlining their 
objections to the ethics rules. “Although these rules are not at present being 
enforced, the AAUP deplores their chilling effect on speech, their interference 
with the educational process, and their implicit castigation of normal practice 
during political campaigns,” the draft says.

It adds: “The Ethics Office has failed to recognize and accurately define both the 
special context of a university and the role of its faculty members. Campus 
education requires that faculty and students have comparable freedom of 
expression on political subjects. This applies not only to obvious contexts like 
courses on politics and public policy in a variety of departments but also to the 
less formal settings in which faculty and students interact.... As the rules stand, 
students can exercise their constitutional rights and attend rallies and wear 
buttons advocating candidates, but faculty cannot.... [S]tudents might attend 
campus rallies and later analyze them in a classroom. Are faculty members to 
have no experience of the rallies themselves? Finally, it is inappropriate to 
suggest that faculty members function as employees whenever they are on 
campus. Faculty often move back and forth between employee responsibilities 
and personal acts within the same time frame.”

Debate over the appropriate limits for political activity on campus is nothing 
new, of course. Most controversies involve actions that could be viewed as 
aligning an institution with a candidate. For instance, this week, the University of 
Massachusetts at Amherst called off a chaplain’s efforts to recruit students to 
work for the Obama campaign and to get credit for the experience. But while 
such disputes come up every election year, they tend not to involve the bumper 
stickers on professors’ cars or the buttons on their lapels.

The American Council on Education publishes guidance each election season on 
the latest legal standards about political activity and higher education. For 
instance, the council recommends that colleges not engage in activities such as 
endorsing candidates, placing signs on behalf of candidates on university 
property, or reimbursing university employees for contributions to specific 
candidates. Such actions could imply an endorsement by the institution, the 
guidance notes. With regard to activity by individual faculty members and 
administrators, the council said that it was important to avoid actions that 
“would be perceived as support or endorsement by the institution.”

Ada Meloy, general counsel at the American Council on Education, said that the 
guidelines published by the ACE focus on Internal Revenue Service requirements 
for tax-exempt organizations. While she saw nothing there that would limit a 
professor’s right to wear a button or attend a rally, she said that Illinois statutes 
may impose more limits.

The norm for regulation of faculty members is to bar the use of institutional or 
public funds or facilities on behalf of candidates, she said. One possibility, she 
said, may be that Illinois is especially sensitive to these issues because Obama is 
one of its senators.

Lillich, the system spokesman, said he knew of no controversies over 
inappropriate political activity that might have prompted the rules.