[TriLUG] legal question

[Andrew Perrin]

This is going a little OT, so feel free to delete if you like.

Sometime back in the '80s, _The Nation_ ran a symposium on the then-new
requirements the NEA was imposing on would-be grantee artists.
(Essentially, the requirements were intended to avoid the Mapplethorpe,
etc., "obscene" art being funded by the NEA. The relative merits of the
requirements are beyond the scope of this discussion.)  Most of the
panelists on the symposium said that a responsible, leftist artist ought
not take the money given what they saw as a kind of "loyalty oath"
requirement. But one panelist -- and I have to go back to look at the
symposium to remember who -- thought that position was ass-backward;
instead, s/he argued that such an artist ought to take the money, do the
kind of art s/he thinks appropriate, and fight if and when s/he is
called on it.

I have been thinking about this debate a lot lately, mainly in terms of
recent debates surrounding external funding of curricula at UNC-CH.

In any case, one way of thinking about the OP's situation is that there's
no reasonable way a current employer can control an employee's general
knowledge base gained in the course of employment, so a response might be
take the job, do what's right, and defend yourself if the employer is
idiotic enough to try to enforce.

Of course, all of this is spoken from behind the veil of academic freedom,
wherein I am never forced to make such choices, so please feel free, even
entitled, to ignore it entirely!

Andy

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu