Co-blogger Katie Allen recently discussed the implications of anonymous comments in public online conversation. But what about when a person’s name is instead associated with a conversation never intended to be public?
Yesterday, Peter Schmidt of The Chronicle of Higher Education covered the story of Rachel Slocum, a non-tenured professor at the University of Wisconson at La Crosse. Controversy [1] over Slocum’s supposedly partisan email to students, which was about how the government shutdown would prevent them from completing their assignments, eventually bought her a public rebuke by her campus’s chancellor. And all of this was over a message that was, at least intended to be, for a private audience: her class.
Here’s my (somewhat dry) response to the controversy:
Someone call Roger Kimball. Oh, wait, Rachel Slocum isn’t even a TENURED radical… MT @Chronicle http://t.co/pjzsjxcGVj
— Gregory Palermo (@gregory_palermo) March 11, 2014