(For the facts, go to http://php.indiana.edu/~erasmuse/w/03.10.25a.htm ) It sure looks to me as if the University pressured Professor Gollin to remove his webpage. That doesn't come out of the The Daily Illini of October 21:
Other organizations sent e-mails to the physics department head and administrators at
the University, Gollin said.
He said the e-mails were very angry and the people who sent them were threatening to sue
him.
"I asked to meet with administrators, lawyers and my department head to sort out the
legal issues," he said.
"We had a meeting to respond to questions that he raised and decide how to safely
portray his information," said Robin Kaler, University spokeswoman.
...
"I feel that I've come out of this well; I feel safer," Gollin said. "What I wanted to
accomplish is to have information on these unaccredited schools available on the
Internet."
...
But Robin Kaler, a spokeswoman for the university, denied that Illinois had ordered
the
professor to remove the material. "We were trying to help him find a more
appropriate
place for his Web site," she said, adding that a Web site about diploma mills should be
"housed in a place that deals with accreditation."
The university did not view Mr. Gollin's research into diploma mills as meeting the
institution's public-service requirement, Ms. Kaler said, because the work is not
related to physics, his area of expertise. "He has a lot to offer the community and the
world outside of his discipline," she said. "But for the university support he receives,
it's for his work in his discipline."
Was Professor Gollin making false statements? That could be a reason for the University
to shut him down-- though still a touchy subject when it comes to academic freedom--
but nobody except the diploma mills has said his statements were false, and even they
are probably bluffing.
But suppose the website were outside something a physics professor might be expected
to think about. Why isn't the university equally upset about the a recipe for stir-fried
kangaroo on the professor's website? And there are no doubt many other interesting and
useful things up on university computers. That's the kind of diversity that's good for a
university.
The University has gone even further, though. It seems to think that the diploma mills
website is the kind of material that would count as "public service" for a professor in
its school of education, and I wouldn't be surprised if such a site, if it didn't
attract nuisance lawsuits, would even count towards research output for an education
professor. But the University doesn't want its physics professors to spend any time
thinking about education, it seems. This kind of narrowness is enough of a problem at
universities without the administrators actively encouraging it. There are a lot of
people who believe in very strict disciplinary boundaries, and rank professors on the
subject of the their scholarship rather than its quality. I think that is bad. We should
not require our accounting professors to do research on accounting if they can be doing
better research on astronomy. Others might disagree, but if you do, please don't claim
you are in favor of interdisciplinary work, or the life of the mind, or research for
research's sake. It is quite a different matter to object to a physics professor working
on education if his output is of low quality, but if he can do education as well as the
education professors, why not let him?
I just happened to be reading in Milton Friedman's memoirs the story of the
disintegration of the Iowa State economics department in 1943 because of a similar
situation: a professor in one of the leading departments in his field wrote something
in a university-issued pamphlet that hurt an industry's profits, and the university
forced him to withdraw the pamphlet. Iowa State went from being a top economics
department to near zero overnight, as its faculty resigned in protest. See
D. Gale Johnson's
biography of T.W. Schultz (the
department chairman, who went on to win a Nobel Prize in economics at Chicago).
He left Iowa State and went to the University of Chicago in the fall of 1943. His
reason for leaving Iowa State illustrates another aspect of his personality, namely his
absolute support of the principle of academic freedom in our colleges and universities.
He left because the president of the college, in response to pressure from a group that
purported to speak for farmers, repudiated a publication authored by a member of the
department. The pamphlet was the fifth in a series titled Wartime Farm and Food Policy.
The main objective of the series was to analyze how agriculture and policies related to
it might be modified to more effectively support the war effort. The subject of the
offending pamphlet may seem arcane today--the pamphlet argued, among other things, that
oleomargarine was nutritionally equivalent to butter. And since oleomargarine required
far fewer resources than butter, the pamphlet suggested that the war effort could be
furthered if various taxes and regulations restricting its production and consumption
were removed.
The capitulation of the college president to the protests of the dairy interests
resulted in the withdrawal of Pamphlet Number 5, Putting Dairying on a Wartime Footing.
At Schultz's insistence and against considerable opposition, both inside and outside the
college, the pamphlet was revised by the original author, Oswald H. Brownlee, and was
published by the college in 1944, a year after the original edition. The revision made
an even fuller and stronger case for the main conclusions of the original pamphlet, in
particular for the nutritional equivalence of margarine and butter but also for the
resource savings. While other examples of administrative interference with academic
freedom had arisen, the precipitating factor was the margarine issue. Schultz resigned
from Iowa State and accepted a position in the Department of Economics at the University
of Chicago. Following his resignation, fifteen additional members of the faculty left
for other positions, including several who went to the University of Chicago for periods
of varying lengths (Beneke, 1998).
He became chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago in
1946, a position he held until 1961. The department was a premier one when he became
chairman, and it was as strong or stronger when he concluded his chairmanship.
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Gollin compiled over 100 pages of his research on his Web site, which was taken down
after a man who ran one of the diploma mills began sending e-mails complaining about the
site in early August.
Look at the
The Chronicle of
Higher Education, October 24. story, though (with my own boldfacing):
The professor, George Gollin, said administrators ordered him to remove the
material
from the university server last month because proprietors of some of the online
institutions mentioned on his site had threatened to sue the university. The
administrators told him that his research into the controversial institutions did
not
meet the "public service" obligation for faculty members of land-grant
universities, he
said.
This is outrageous. Professor Gollin's site was about a clearly academic subject--
diploma mills-- and was the kind of thing we'd expect university presidents and
administrators to talk about publicly all the time (if they weren't too chicken,
admittedly a counterfactual). The problem of what different degrees are worth is a
standard one, which comes up for every single professor as he tries to evaluate, for
example, undergraduate degrees of Ph.D. applicants. So it isn't even true that this is
outside the area of relevance for a physics professor.
He was a remarkably successful academic administrator. As an assistant professor, he
was made head of the Department of Economics and Sociology at Iowa State College in 1935
at the age of thirty-two and only five years after the receipt of his Ph.D. Iowa State
was then, and now, one of the premier Land Grant colleges, but his appointment came in
the midst of the Great Depression. Raymond R. Beneke (1998) notes that at the time Iowa
State College did not have the financial resources to bring an established economist and
administrator from outside so they turned to Schultz. Perhaps financial exigency has
never had such a positive outcome. By some means or other, he acquired over the next
several years the resources to attract a large number of young economists, who later
were recognized as outstanding. He was able to accomplish this in part because there
were few academic openings anywhere in the United States in those years, and with a
combination of his personal persuasiveness and limited money he built a department of
the first rank, one that produced four presidents of the American Economic Association,
four members of the National Academy of Sciences, and one Nobel laureate other than
himself. I was a beneficiary of that outcome, since I was an undergraduate from 1934
through 1938 and a graduate student and faculty member from 1941 to 1943.
Is there any difference from what the University of Illinois has done, except that the
offended interest group is out-of-state and wicked rather than in-state and legitimate?
What I've been learning about academic freedom lately really make me wonder whether
things are much different from the "bad old days" before World War II.