Campus Conservative Says Univ. of Alabama Uses Censorship to Silence Critics
by Jim Brown and Jenni Parker
January 27, 2004
(AgapePress) - The University of Alabama is being accused of banning free speech on campus.Last fall University of Alabama Provost Judy Bonner acted twice within 48 hours to ban two faculty publications from circulation on its Tuscaloosa campus -- the Alabama Observer, which is the official newspaper of a conservative group called the Alabama Scholars Association (ASA), and Alabama Academe, the official newspaper of the American Association of University Professors.
The university claims it is not acting vindictively or seeking to protect its own public image, but rather that it is simply observing postal regulations. However ASA director Charles Nuckolls does not buy that argument. He believes the provost's action is just one more attempt by the university to silence critical voices.
"We've made proposals, of course, that they clearly don't like, one of which is free and open access to grade distribution data so that the scandal in grade inflation can be exposed and corrected," Nuckolls says.
But not long after Nuckolls and another faculty member criticized UA in print for allegedly failing to address and then covering up the grade inflation issue, university officials retaliated by telling the ASA that they could not send out their publication through campus mail because only "recognized" faculty groups could use the campus mail system to distribute their material.
But when Nuckolls and others pressed the administrators on this point, asking the university to define "recognized," the officials switched tactics. They told the conservative group that, recognized or not, they could not circulate their materials through faculty mail because of postal regulations. Then, within a little more than 24 hours, the administration had banned the ASA's paper, along with another faculty periodical, the Academe.
Nuckolls believes the university is censoring points of view it dislikes, and wants to shut down all criticism of its actions. "The purpose of it is to make sure that information critical of the university, but absolutely essential to its evaluation by the public, is stopped or at least inhibited from easy distribution on campus," he says.
Another reason the faculty group's leader suspects university officials may have wanted to silence their publication is that he and others have been vocal about the contention that too many university administrators are paid enormous salaries, but are out of touch with what professors actually do in the classroom.
"We've also recommended that administrators be subjected to term limits -- especially the academic administrators," Nuckolls says. "These are people who haven't been in a classroom sometimes for two or three decades and have simply lost touch with the academic mission of the university."
The ASA's director says the Federalist Society and the Association of Christian Faculty are two other groups that have been prohibited from using the campus mail system.
