Western Kentucky tracking 'inappropriate' student tweets: At odds with free speech?

In a recent front-page centerpiece story and several follow-up reports, The College Heights Herald, Western Kentucky University’s student newspaper, alleges that WKU administrators have been aggressively monitoring and disciplining students for social media messages “deemed inappropriate."

According to the Herald, WKU has specifically been tracking some student tweets, even attempting to “shut down several Twitter parody accounts and is sending students to Judicial Affairs for tweets they consider negative against WKU.”

Last month, school officials forced a temporary shutdown and a slight makeover to a popular Twitter account parodying WKU president Gary Ransdell.

As Ransdell later posted on a university Facebook page, “We, at WKU, have become particularly conscious lately of some who are misusing social media and using some poor judgment. So my message here is ‘Be smart.’ Use social media thoughtfully; always remember what you send is permanent and can be viewed years from now. Employers do their homework. They can and will track ways in which prospective employees have used social media. We, at WKU, track such things as well.”

Along with this stated educational objective to social media oversight, administrators mention a responsibility to protect members of the WKU community from online racism and cyber-bullying.

But such noble aims are being drowned out by a monitoring and enforcement effort deemed by some as overly broad, including a social media policy in the student handbook that one media law expert describes as “not in the vicinity of constitutional.”

In an editorial response, headlined “Students Deserve First Amendment Rights,” the Herald notes, “It’s unreasonable to think that every day is perfect for 21,000 students at WKU. Students complain about busy-work assignments. They can’t find a parking space near where they needed to be five minutes ago. They aren’t happy that WKU’s men’s and women’s basketball teams are in the shadow of 20-loss seasons.  Life happens, and students are likely to share some unpleasant or frustrating experiences. They should not be threatened with repercussions.”

In the Q&A below, College Heights Herald editor-in-chief Cole Claybourn discusses the paper’s coverage of the controversy and the issues some students and legal experts have with the school’s social media policy and routines.

Q:How did the Herald first come across this story?

A: It was pretty unique.  The reporter who wrote our centerpiece story in last Tuesday’s paper actually had a buddy in one of his classes come to him and tell him that Corie Martin, who is in charge of creative web services at WKU, was speaking to the class and was talking about how WKU was making efforts to shut down a lot of fake Twitter accounts.  There was a rise in those this school year. . . . A lot of people were making fake accounts for athletic coaches, administrators, different sorority and Greek groups. . . . They said a few things that were out line but for the most part it was pretty humorous and from what I could tell it wasn’t anything that could be considered harassment of any sort.

Q:What does the policy in the student handbook say about WKU students’ social media use?

A: Here’s what the student handbook says, ‘Communications on sites such as Facebook, etc., will not be actively policed.  However, students should be aware that the information posted on the Internet can be viewed by university officials at any time.  Accessible communications deemed inappropriate may lead to disciplinary action.’  It’s contradictory because Corie Martin told us, ‘I check daily for the WKU hashtag.’  The handbook says that they don’t police it actively. . . . It’s really unclear, it’s really vague. . . . The Student Government Association is trying to pass some resolution to remove that or at least change it so it’s clearly defined.

Q:What have the media law experts consulted by the Herald said about the legality of the school’s social media policy and monitoring efforts?

A: The consensus is that they are infringing on students’ First Amendment rights. . . . When we first talked to Corie Martin she explicitly said, ‘We search for these tweets that have the WKU hashtag on them’ because they claim they own the WKU hashtag because they own the letters WKU.  You can’t own a hashtag.  But that was what their claim was, that it was misrepresenting the school. . . . We talked to several people at the Student Press Law Center and they said the word ‘inappropriate’ is not defined by the law.  You can’t just say, ‘That’s inappropriate.’  Because all that means is they didn’t like that tweet, so they can send it to Judicial Affairs. . . . So it seems like they weren’t really on the same page when they came up with this whole idea.  There hasn’t been a whole lot of communication among administrators about what is actually the policy.  So it just seems like they’re a little confused.

Q:What has been the student reaction to this monitoring?

A: The word censored has been thrown around by a lot of students. . . . There was actually one student who we featured in our Friday issue who had organized a campaign, some sort of boycott, where he was trying to get people to unfollow and unfriend any WKU-affiliated social media accounts, just to say, ‘We don’t really care what you have to say.’  It was a little bit more extreme than most students were feeling but this student was obviously affected enough where he wanted to take an issue with it and show his disdain for the policy. . . . [Among online responses he saw] they were saying, ‘WKU officials cannot do this to us.  We should be allowed to say what we want.’  The ones that were sort of supportive of the school only just said, ‘Maybe we should just be smart with what we say.’  There wasn’t anything that was like, ‘Western Kentucky has the right to do this.’  I never saw anything like that.

Q:From your perspective, why would the school be so active in overseeing and potentially punishing students who post information officials find unflattering?

A: In the past several years, our enrollment has grown.  For the most part, WKU has become a pretty good school, especially in the state.  But I think it still has this stigma that it’s just a regional school.  They’ve had this whole movement where they want to be called WKU.  They don’t want to be called Western Kentucky.  They want to be known as what their motto says, ‘A leading American university with an international reach.’ . . . I think it’s just this overall movement of trying to have this different image for WKU.  I guess their fear is that when all these things are being said about WKU, people won’t want to come here or they won’t want to take the school seriously.

Dan Reimold, Ph.D., is a college journalism scholar who has written and presented about the student press throughout the U.S. and in Southeast Asia. He is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of Tampa, where he also advises The Minaret student newspaper. He maintains the student journalism industry blog College Media Matters. A complete list of Campus Beat articles is here.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.