What Colleges Can Do When the Internet Outrage Machine Comes to Campus

Less than three weeks earlier she and her emergency-management team had gathered with law-enforcement officers and others to play out different scenarios, like a campus shooter, to determine how to act in crisis situations. A Cultural Challenge Safety consultants say the viral threats confronting ca...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	The Chronicle of Higher Education 2017-06
Main Author:	McMurtrie, Beth
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Bullying Censorship College campuses College professors Colleges & universities Criminal investigations Educational leadership Higher education Internet Law enforcement Race relations School safety Social networks Threat assessment University professors
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	Less than three weeks earlier she and her emergency-management team had gathered with law-enforcement officers and others to play out different scenarios, like a campus shooter, to determine how to act in crisis situations. A Cultural Challenge Safety consultants say the viral threats confronting campuses are tied to a larger shift in society, in which anonymity, partisanship, and cyberbullying have created a toxic level of public discourse. Many campus police departments also now have cyber units or a designated officer responsible for tracking social-media threats, says Mr. Carter. While he expects to see lawsuits and criminal prosecution come out of some of these cases, the larger threat, he worries, is self-censorship. "Because so much of our work is judged by how it’s received, there could be a very strong tendency for a lot of teachers to just stay completely away from matters of public importance for fear that they’re going to be drawn into the crossfire."
ISSN:	0009-5982 1931-1362