Public Expression of Personal Views

Policy

When making public expressions of personal views, Loyola University New Orleans personnel must take steps to assure they are not identified as University spokespersons or representatives. When speaking or acting as a private person, faculty and staff must avoid creating the impression of speaking or acting for the University. Therefore, using University letterhead, e-mail systems, position titles or University premises or facilities in such circumstances is always inappropriate, except when addressing the Maroon or other Loyola campus publications.

As a tax-exempt organization, the University is prohibited from participating in political activities. This prohibition includes, for example, endorsing candidates for political office or engaging in lobbying activities related to legislative initiatives. Therefore, University personnel are cautioned to take extraordinary steps to assure that personal involvement in such activities does not imply endorsement or support by the University.

AAUP 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure with 1970 Interpretive Comments

College and university teachers are citizens, members of a learned profession, and officers of an educational institution. When they speak or write as citizens, they should be free from institutional scholars and educational officers, they should remember that the public may judge their profession and their institution by their utterances. Hence they should at all times be accurate, should exercise appropriate restraint, should show respect for the opinions of others, and should make every effort to indicate that they are not speaking for the institution.

As members of their community, professors have the rights and obligations of other citizens. Professors measure the urgency of other obligations in the light of their responsibilities to their subject, to their students, to their profession, and to their institution. When they speak or act as private persons they avoid creating the impression of speaking or acting for their college or university. As citizens engaged in a profession that depends upon freedom for its health and integrity, professors have a particular obligation to promote conditions of free inquiry and to further public understanding of academic freedom.

Both the protection of academic freedom and the requirements of academic responsibility apply not only to the full-time probationary and the tenured teacher, but also to all others, such as part-time faculty and teaching assistants, who exercise teaching responsibilities.