Boulder News

What First Amendment?

When Blogging Costs You Your Job

By Richard Martin, 1-08-06

Fired from her job as a professor at DeVry University, in Westminster, a couple of weeks before Christmas, Meg Spohn has become something of a free-speech hero among bloggers and academics. Colorado being an "at-will" employment state – which means your employer can fire you anytime they like, for any reason – and DeVry being a private, for-profit university, it's unlikely she'll get her job back. But the experience has taught her quite a bit, she writes, about the realities of the blogosphere and the indentured servitude of non-tenured professors.

"There is currently nothing in place to protect citizens of Colorado (or many other states) whose employers don’t like their blogs for whatever reason and decide to fire them, nor is there much obvious recourse," Spohn wrote a few days after being escorted off the campus by university officials. "Just about everybody I know under the age of 45 has some sort of blog, even if it’s courtesy of a social web community or dating service. For most of us, at least some sliver of our lives is visible from Google, and there’s nothing stopping employers from using it against us, even if there is nothing 'bad' on the blog."

DeVry is not commenting on the firing, but the affair has gotten plenty of airtime in cyberspace (how's that for a mixed metaphor?).

"According to [Spohn's] account, she was not told what post, or even what blog, was considered offensive," noted Business Week writer Stephen Baker, on his blog "The Thread." "If that's the case, what's next? Can people be dismissed for unspecified speech they engage in? At least Google, when it fired blogger Mark Jen earlier this year, told him what he had done wrong."

(In fact, Jen responded to Baker to let him know that, in fact, the search engine giant "never officially told me what I was being terminated for. It was pretty clear that it was my blogging, though.")

Many of the intellectual property issues that threatened to derail the early development of the Web have been resolved or simply overtaken by events – not much to the liking of the music industry, for instance. In the case of blogs, however, issues of free speech, defamation and employee non-disclosure are swirling all over the place. Attempts by organizations like DeVry to control their employees' blogs are fated to backfire (witness the bad pub the school has gotten since firing Spohn, even though the dismissed prof, who holds a master's from Harvard and is a doctoral candidate at Denver U., has been quite magnanimous in her own comments); but they will certainly continue to claim victims like Spohn and Jen who believed, mistakenly, that what they write and self-publish online is protected by the First Amendment.

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