Professor Gollin's website about diploma mills was moved under pressure from his university, as I reported yesterday and as Erin O'Connor reports both more elegantly and more forcefully today. Eugene Volokh says
...
If the university investigates the matter and concludes the professor was guilty of
libel, then it's entitled to banish his speech. But absent some such finding, it seems
to me that the university's job is to defend its faculty -- especially when, as here,
the faculty member is trying to defend universities generally. And by getting a
reputation as an institution that's willing to stand by its faculty, the university will
probably decrease the number of demand letters and credible lawsuit threats that it's
going to get.
What about the threat of libel liability? (The university probably wouldn't be
liable simply for hosting the material, under 47 U.S.C. sec. 230; but it might be liable
as the professor's employer for what the professor does as part of his employment, and
its actions might have been aimed at establishing that the professor's speech here was
outside the scope of employment.) Well, if the university found that the professor's
speech was indeed false and defamatory, then they could properly refuse to host it --
or, in some situations, even discipline the professor, if they found that he was
knowingly fabricating his claims or was even grossly negligent in his scholarship.
Well said!
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