This post does not represent the opinion or position of the University of Colorado

The Board of Regents at the University of Colorado has a new policy on campus speech it’s trying to implement, that among other things features the following:

When university faculty speak or write in their personal capacities, not in furtherance of their university duties or in the course and scope of their university employment, they must make every effort to indicate that their
expression is their own and does not represent the opinion or position of the university.

Even more absurdly, this same policy applies to students:

To the extent not governed by campus policy, when students of the university speak or write as citizens, they must make every effort to indicate that their expression is their own and does not represent the opinion or position of the university.

The whole idea of institutions like universities having “opinions” or “positions” is a bit of metaphorical animism that’s always seemed extremely weird to me. What exactly would a “university” have an “opinion” or “position” about? I mean you can say that it’s the university’s opinion that if your GPA stays under a certain line for a certain amount of time it’s the university’s considered opinion that you have flunked out, but that’s not really an opinion, it’s just a rule.

Conversely, if the president of the University issues what by necessity has to be some anodyne statement about how the terrible things happening in Gaza are Bad, I guess that can count as some peoples’ eyes as “the opinion of the university,” although why anyone would care about those kinds of statements is beyond me, since we have a social consensus that bad things are bad, and should not happen, if at all reasonably possible.

But literally nobody thinks that an individual faculty member, or even a group of faculty members, issuing a statement condemning this or that represents the official position of the university. And the idea that a student or students doing this would represent the official position of the university is even more nonsensical, for obvious reasons.

I suppose what’s actually going on here is that the regents would like to make it easier to get faculty and students in trouble for broadcasting the wrong political opinions, but since they legally can’t do that, they’re creating a bureaucratic trap for the unwary, in the form of this rule. (Needless to say the same document is full of statements about how the university will not punish students or faculty for the substance of their expressed opinions).

What’s sad about that is, that when it comes to the faculty, threatening them in this way is truly unnecessary in about 99.9% of all cases.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip. Orwell

. . . in looking over this document with a keen lawyerly eye, I just realized that the portion on faculty speech I’m quoting is ALREADY the university’s Official Policy. Only the quoted section on student speech actually represents a proposed policy change.