You can't say that about work

Roger Shuy posted on Language Log this evening about Fish and Wildlife Service employees being forbidden to talk about polar bears in an official capacity, regarding this as an example of taboo speech (although in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek fashion). SC recognizes that deference to one of the great sociolinguists of the 20th century is a wise course of action, but he must register respectful disagreement nevertheless.

Organizations routinely control the dissemination of their public positions; that's the whole point of employing spokesmen. One reason that your host does not discuss his employer, except to disclaim any representation of their positions, is that they have a communications department which has sole authority to communicate official views to the public. This is fairly standard practice in both industry and government, and actually goes a lot further into organizations than that. It's typically the case that for any government contract, individuals designated as the official points of contact are the ones you go to -- and the only ones you go to -- to discuss contracting both before and after receiving an award. (A few minutes browsing FedBizOpps should satisfy your curiosity on this point; just pick a Cabinet department, put it in the search box, and you're all set to browse the solicitations.) In the past, SC has worked on contracts for the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and he would never dream of contacting so much as the heads of the offices overseeing his projects, never mind anyone titled Secretary -- the contact would almost certainly not be authorized, unless it occurred in some formally scheduled meeting.

Given the tightly prescribed nature of communications day-to-day in government business, it would be rather strange for Federal employees to have more freedom to deliver unapproved messages in occasional, highly public forums, than they do in everyday work. Unapproved should not be seen as meaning that sinister commissars are brutally beating down courageous dissenters -- it simply means anything that has not been through the exhaustive review process up the management chain. Is it the case that some of the higher-up types are Civil Service employees or political appointees who may not actually have the expertise to make scientific judgments? Sure. But it's just as true that folks with B.A.s in communications routinely exercise a prerogative regarding public statements over Ph.D.s in private industry, and everyone involved understands that's just the process. In a public forum, when the scientists involved are speaking as representatives of the Fish and Wildlife Service, they are subject to the same constraints that they are in their daily work.

This is clearly not the same situation that academics are subject to, and it's easy to understand how they might see censorship where  SC sees standard operating practice. But while academics certainly borrow the prestige of the institutions they're affiliated with when they speak -- how interesting would it be to conduct a conference where names and affiliations were stripped off the abstracts in the conference program, and see how it affected attendance? -- nobody is under the impression that they are making official policy for anyone. If Prof. Shuy declared tomorrow that all sentences should end "...with polar bears", even if his audience believed the administration of Georgetown University to be prepared to do whatever he said, nobody would seriously expect that this statement had come from the university president's office, much less the government. The same is true of professors who teach at public universities -- George Lakoff and John McWhorter don't speak for the State of California or Governor Schwarzenegger when they make pronouncements on even the least politically charged issues. As Federal employees, though, Fish and Wildlife Service scientists presenting papers do speak for the government, and they are most definitely not authorized to make policy on their own, for the simple reason that only one person in the government holds a power even remotely like that.

SC is not inclined to debate Prof. Shuy on the specifics of the scientific question at hand; neither of us are experts in wildlife management. However, he would note two pieces of evidence that tend to support his view that this is just usual business, and not any sort of ideological campaign. On the science front, the evidence of a global population decline appears to be fairly mixed, and with an open public comment period for making policy in effect at the time of the conference, it would be particularly inappropriate for Federal employees to be making statements that suggested policy had already been set. On the personnel front, Prof. Shuy's article quotes the head of the Fish and Wildlife Service as stating:

The prohibition on talking about these subjects only applies to public, formal situations, Hall said. Private scientific discussions outside the meeting and away from media are permitted and encouraged, he said.

This sounds pretty much like the normal state of affairs to SC. If credible evidence existed that scientists were being told to avoid discussing these issues altogether, that would be another story, but your host hasn't seen anything produced to that effect. Working for a government agency or commercial organization means accepting terms of employment that say that you don't get to make policy statements that may differ from the organizational consensus, and that appears to be exactly what's going on in this case. Is the process for setting that consensus perfect? Hardly. But tenure and academic freedom aren't the standards under which anyone accepts employment in non-academic contexts, and SC finds it hard to spot a scandal in established communications practices.

 

Comments

[Dave]

I think what flusters people about this particular story is not the notion of "censorship" per se. Rather, I think people are annoyed by the refusal of the Administration not only to publicly discuss human-induced climate change, but also to acknowledge any facts that might support that thesis. It makes it seem like they're pulling a "maybe if we ignore it, it will all go away".

It also hearkens back to the Global Gag Rule (re: abortion) placed on doctors working overseas and receiving government money, and also to numerous firings that have taken place of people who have expressed personal opinions contrary to the policies of the Administration. So the government has shown a real willingness in recent years to try to censor what professionals do in capacities outside their strictly governmental roles as well.

[belstaff jackets]

like the art scene of the "small" men, the wardrobe is always a mockery of the colorful