When Cardiff University PhD student Grace Krause began getting headaches and back pain after staring at a computer screen for days on end, she decided to speak out online. “Staff are marking hundreds of essays in an impossibly short time. It is exhausting. Everyone is in crisis mode. Stressed, moody, morose, everyone feels like they’re drowning,” she wrote on Twitter.
The tweet came after a colleague had killed himself on campus and the inquest cited workload as a factor. Within days, all PhD students received an email referring to the tweet and asking for online comments about students and their work to be deleted. “It was such an emotional and painful thing for a lot of people,” she says. “They could have reached out to fix the problem. Instead, they shut it down.”
Krause is one of a growing number of academics convinced her social media accounts are being monitored by her employer. With universities worried about negative press and the impact it might have on student recruitment, management are said to be closing down discussions on workload, classism and sexual harassment on campus.
“There are issues of surveillance,” says Steven Jones, researcher in higher education at Manchester Institute of Education. “With universities now so terrified of reputational damage, you can see why this is happening.”
Others agree. “There are huge tensions,” says Mark Carrigan, a sociologist in the faculty of education at the University of Cambridge. “On the one hand unis are pushing their staff to be active online, on the other they are assessing their use of social media. We’re going to see ever-more problems.”
Universities increasingly recognise the value in academics having a social media presence – it helps recruit students, disseminate research and increase brand awareness. They also, generally, recognise that you don’t achieve this by tightly controlling what academics say – they need to find their own voice. “But when that individual voice is in conflict with the official brand it creates a tension,” says Martin Weller, professor of educational technology at the Open University.
The recent strikes over pay and pensions brought these tensions into focus. Universities were accused of using ‘intimidatory’ tactics to silence debate and the strikes radicalised people. John Hills*, a lecturer at a London university, got called into a 45-minute meeting after criticising senior management on Twitter. “HR was simply trawling the accounts of employees involved and looking for things to object to. It is naked intimidation,” he says. “They’re constantly watching and trying to drive conversations out of sight.” With another round of strikes on the horizon, academics worry this heavy-handed approach might be replicated.
Universities face a difficult task of upholding a powerful right to academic freedom and taking robust action when an individual goes too far, particularly if they indulge in personal attacks. Many are introducing social media guidelines to prevent unacceptable forms of behaviour. But this opens up channels for monitoring. At Exeter University, for instance, the guidelines reserve the right to monitor personal platforms and can include accounts used outside of work hours. At the University of Liverpool, the definition of social media is broad and includes Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. The University of Strathclyde’s policy leaves open the use of social media monitoring for recruitment in certain cases.
Even personal accounts that do not include real names, photos or identify an employer are being treated as an extension of the workplace. “I’m casual staff; I only work here a couple of hours a week and yet they still feel entitled to decide what I can post,” says Hills.
According to Imogen Reseigh, an employment lawyer at Trowers & Hamlins, this is not out of step with other industries. She says over the past few years employers in various sectors have been introducing social media policies and there has been a whole host of employment tribunals on the issue.
But universities aren’t like other companies. “They’re meant to be bastions of free speech, you’d expect them to be against silencing people,” says a humanities lecturer from a modern university, who did not want to give her name. “It’s down to the corporatisation of higher education. We sit there in our staff meetings talking about degrees as products and students as consumers. Most academics intensely dislike it.”
Others agree. “It’s all about brand protection. These institutions are powerful and they close discussions down because they don’t want student numbers dropping,” says Lisa Mckenzie, associate professor at Durham University, who is outspoken online about the hostility towards working-class people in university spaces. “We’re forced to speak out because they ignore us.”
Universities, however, say they are doing the opposite and there needs to be professionalism online. According to a spokesperson from Cardiff University, inappropriate public commentary on undergraduate work can “provoke anxiety and demoralisation” if read by the students affected. They say they are in no way silencing critical views or feedback, but there are other ways of raising problems. “Using official university channels – instead of social media – to report concerns means we can deal with any issues promptly.”
Both claim to care about students, so why is it going so wrong? In the past, academics were advised not to blog or use social media. It was seen as poor, sloppy content, and a distraction from legitimate academic work. The US Chronicle of Higher Education even published a piece titled ‘Bloggers need not apply’.
But things have changed: academics now benefit from social media visibility through paid talks, new connections and TV appearances. It even feeds into how research is evaluated in the UK. New measures like altmetrics have emerged, which assess the influence of research based on Facebook and Twitter engagement. “[Social media] can be consequential for academics’ careers. Increased hits and downloads of your research is one aspect of this,” says Manuel Souto-Otero, professor in social sciences at Cardiff University.
Some say it is causing academics to behave more like celebrities. “It’s certainly not impossible for people to build a large online following while retaining their scholarly integrity. But it is difficult because platforms are engineered to reward statements which generate a reaction, positive or negative, something nuance and caveat will tend to get in the way of,” says Carrigan.
While academics can benefit society by bringing expertise outside academic journals and into the public through social media, they need to be careful. As Carrigan says: “In many ways, social media isn’t particularly well suited to the in-depth expertise which academics bring.”
* Name has been changed
