Run the Numbers

I want to do something a bit different than my usual posts tonight.


Let’s look at the numbers:


33,470 – The number of distinct page loads I am “John Doe” has had in the 29 days it’s been in existence

31,200 – The difference between the number of distinct page loads of "I am John Doe" over a 3 week time period and The True BU had over its entire existence

859 – The number of signatures on the petition to the Butler administration asking for apologies for their actions

140 – The number of days it took for Butler to dismiss the lawsuit against “John Doe” after they used the court system to determine that “John Doe” was me, despite the president’s repeated claim that the university never had any intention of suing a student

58 – The number of comments on the original story about this case in Inside Higher Ed, making it the third most commented upon story for the last month, the ninth most commented upon story for the past six months and the thirteenth most comment upon story for the past year

11 – The number (at the very least) of School of Music faculty members who have endorsed a statement indicating that they provided me with the documents published in The True BU, that they shared their opinions and impressions of what was happening in the fall concerning the removal of the chair, and that they believe that what I wrote was accurate and consistent with their impressions.

10 – The number of university newspapers around the country that have written stories and editorials expressing their concerns about Butler's handling of this situation and the implications for freedom of speech issues across the country

8 – The number of times people signing the petition to the Butler Administration used the word “abuse”

6 – The number of months from when my father was first threatened with the specter of a lawsuit over The True BU to the time the administration informed me that a suit was actually filed, and that was in response to a concern raised by my father about defamatory statements made about him by the provost

4 – The number of months in which the Butler administration threatened to replace “John Doe’s” name with my name in the lawsuit accusing me of libel, defamation, harassment and threats; and the number of days after The True BU was removed from the web but before the Butler administration filed that lawsuit

3 – The number of memos Butler’s president wrote to the entire university faculty in a 15 day period about me

2 – The number of my family members removed from their administrative posts at Butler after The True BU began publishing

1 – The number of times a university has filed a lawsuit over online speech, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE)

0 - The number occurrences of threatening, harassing, libelous, racist or sexist comments appearing in any of my writing, despite what the Butler administration has repeatedly claimed in communications intended for audiences both on and off campus

Defamation

If it weren’t so sad, and if it didn’t have the potential to really negatively impact my life, the action of Butler’s public relations department would be incredibly funny. Apparently, when people write to the president or to a member of the Board of Trustees at Butler questioning their actions in The True BU fiasco, a form letter is immediately dispatched. That form letter, according to my attorney, is a textbook case of defamation.

Marcia Dowell, executive director of university relations, is comfortable making the following statement: “Please know that in the fall of 2008, an internet web blog – True BU - published communications that included defamation, threats, harassment, and intimidation, directly harming the honesty, integrity, and professional reputation of Butler University and several of its administrators.”

I challenge anyone to find anything I wrote in The True BU that could even be remotely construed as a threat. Indeed, when raising the specter of a threat, the only words the president keeps citing come from a fragment of a sentence which he acknowledges he has no evidence I wrote. And I keep assuring everyone that I didn’t write it.

But Butler University is apparently comfortable telling everyone that my blog made threats. And they’re comfortable saying that my words harmed the reputation of Butler University and several of its administrators. As Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, noted on his radio show on Wednesday, there’s certainly no evidence that anyone was harmed by what I had to say in The True BU. Did I make them uncomfortable by bringing their actions to the public? Did it annoy them that I demonstrated the repeated inconsistencies with what the administration said and what they did? Absolutely – but all of that falls well within the bounds of acceptable speech. My blog was not defamatory: They couldn’t prove it in court, and now they’re trying to tell anyone who asks about it that it was. As I said, every lawyer I have asked has been certain that the only defamation in this entire ordeal is what Butler is saying about me.

Even this afternoon, the chair of the board of trustees issued a statement about the case in which he said that "The Trustees also reaffirm Butler’s pledge to provide for the safety and welfare of its students, administration, faculty and staff." What do my concerns about administrative abuses of power have to do with the safety and welfare of anyone on campus? Why does everyone associated with the Butler administration want to turn every criticism into a physical threat? Could it be that they have no credible response to the criticism itself?