Roll Back the Policy of Academic Profiling!
Let's Stop the Board of Regents from Putting Faculty at Risk!
Show up and show out for academic freedom in Georgia! Sign our joint petition with the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) and help amplify our demand that the Board of Regents revoke its recent decision to create a publicly searchable database linking faculty members' names, publications, and detailed course calendar information.
If the Board's decision is allowed to stand, this policy will expose teachers and researchers to intense digital scrutiny and—consequently—potentially severe risks to their personal security posed by bad actors hunting for targets online.
Please reach out to our union's Georgia State University chapter (if you work at GSU) or our Georgia Steering Committee (if not) for info about how to get involved with our fighting campaign in defense of academic freedom in Georgia.
Free Speech, Compelled Speech, and Academic Freedom
The views expressed below belong to the author and do not speak for any group or organization she may be linked to.
In the face of a continuing onslaught of politicized attacks on academic freedom, United Campus Workers stand resolute in our defense of public educators' right to free speech and personal safety.
The Board of Regents' recent decision to mandate the creation of a digitally searchable public archive providing faculty's academic profiles and course details will needlessly expose Georgia's teachers and researchers to the risk of great harm. This policy must be rolled back as quickly as it was rolled out. Georgia must not become a place where academics fear persecution by online extremists on the one hand, and on the other, craven attempts to appease such extremists by arbitrarily singling out faculty for administrative discipline.
We do not improve the quality of public education in Georgia by punishing those who are tasked with preparing the next generation for success in their careers of choice. Rather, when we eliminate common-sense guardrails that protect academic freedom at our institutions of higher education, we degrade our students' ability to compete on the job market. Scared, intimidated teachers do not teach well. We can only hope that, in the rushed and confused roll-out of this policy, our administrators are not so neglectful of their duty of care as employers that they advertise where and when we teach alongside our course topics, the titles of our publications, and our full names.
Let there be no mistake—our syllabi and curricula vitae are not secret documents hitherto kept concealed from the people of Georgia. Our publications are public. Our course calendars circulate freely among students and other faculty, and along with our full syllabi they are of course at all times viewable by our supervisors and administrators. So what justifies the enormous additional logistical overhead necessary to make all this information publicly searchable, e.g. by AI bot farms and anti-intellectual extremists? Exposing our education workers to risk is the point. We remind those in power who would hush researchers and teachers in the hope that silence will protect them that, as history teaches, it never does.
Julie Carmine LaCorte (she/her)
Associate Professor, Georgia State University
Georgia Steering Committee Chair, United Campus Workers Southeast