Editor’s essay: Acting with academic freedom

While editing the articles in this themed issue on internal communication during our current health and racism pandemics, I found myself reflecting frequently on communication internal to higher education organizations, like the universities that employ the public relations scholars who contribute to and read this academic journal.

Communicating (during and about) pandemics

As reflected in news media and experienced by Journal readers, universities around the world have approached the COVID-19 pandemic and renewed their attention to systemic racism in myriad ways, both operationally and communicatively. I’m hopeful that future public relations scholars will examine various aspects of communication between higher-education organizations and their stakeholders (e.g., faculty-student, administration-faculty, and university-community), as well as the impacts of universities’ operational and communication choices on organizational relationships and reputations. From the pivot to remote instruction to the funding of more faculty lines specializing in diversity-related areas, the studies are endless that could be conducted on how universities have responded to pandemic-related issues, be they as novel as the latest viral pandemic or as entrenched as institutional racism.

What’s interesting (and discouraging) about this last month of calendar year 2021 is not merely that both the health and racism pandemics continue unabated. It’s also that the good intentions and actions of the many (e.g., who get immunized against diseases or who engage in self-improving actions to confront their own implicit biases) seem at times no match for the virulence emanating from the few (e.g., who deny categorically the science-based effectiveness of vaccines [cf. DiRusso & Stansberry, 2022; Hotez, 2019; Hussain et al., 2018] or who seek to undermine the integrity and outcomes of electoral systems [cf.; Haggard & Kaufman, 2021; Kleinfeld, 2021]).

Communicating (about and with) academic freedom

I have no solutions to these problems. But I have the freedom (and the responsibility) to call attention to them because I have the privilege of academic tenure at my employing institution. A foundational principle of post-secondary academic life in the United States and a few other countries, academic tenure typically is earned by faculty members who meet their institution’s specific expectations related to teaching, research, and service (cf. AAUP Statement, 1940/1970). Contrary to popular misconceptions, academic tenure does not give a faculty member carte blanche to behave illegally or improperly, nor does tenure absolutely guarantee so-called “lifetime employment” without appropriate work being performed for the employing institution.

Faculty who are fortunate enough to find themselves in a tenured or tenure-earning position typically see the earning of tenure as a career milestone that confers freedoms from certain constraints (whether real or perceived). These freedoms might include the ability to voice opinions in faculty meetings or to refuse a committee service assignment, the freedom to conduct research on relatively esoteric subjects of interest to a small group of likeminded academics, or simply the freedom to rest, i.e., to take a break from the pressure of producing scholarly and creative content.

These freedoms are well deserved, for sure, but to luxuriate in only these privileges as a tenured faculty member is to miss entirely the actual point of academic tenure, which is neither to have a “job for life,” nor to be free from all constraints on our personal desires or preferences. As explained by Cherniavsky (2021):

Academic freedom is not about the freedom of individual academics to say whatever they want—rather, it defines the collective freedom of the faculty to set the norms of academic debate, free from interference by administrators, governing boards, or the state. (p. 9)

Communicating (with and for) the public

In short, the purpose of academic tenure is to give academic freedom to (typically highly educated and very competent) faculty members. And the purpose of academic freedom is to speak out as needed on important societal issues on behalf of the public, i.e., to serve the public good. Our privilege of academic freedom comes with the responsibility to serve society by improving the human condition – for all humans, including the humans that we don’t like, that we disagree with, and that we believe to be factually incorrect and perhaps even morally reprehensible.

Threats to academic freedom in higher education all boil down to politics. These include efforts by state legislative bodies to control what is taught (e.g., Flaherty, 2021; Schrecker, 2021; Zinshteyn, 2020), as well as efforts by politically appointed boards of trustees (cf. R. Scott, 2020) to grant, deny, or revoke tenure on bases unrelated to academic qualifications or merit (e.g., Killian & Ingram, 2021; Padilla, 2021). These also include efforts to ban or weaken academic tenure altogether, as well as continued and continual de-funding of public higher education (cf. Warner, 2020). The fiscal realities in higher education have resulted in the increased use of contingent (i.e., non-tenure-line) faculty (cf. ”The Annual Report,” 2021; Benjamin, 2010; Finkin, 2000; Zhang et al., 2015), who are more politically vulnerable than their tenured counterparts, as well as the outright dismissal of tenured faculty when their departments are eliminated due to budget constraints (cf. Stroup et al., 1982).

As Loope (1995) put clearly:

Without tenure, we can hardly expect higher education faculty to state their minds on controversial topics or to propose unpopular solutions to scientific or social problems facing the state, nation, and world. Academics commit themselves to the search for truth, whether in the laboratory or in classroom discussions with students. Without a contractual guarantee of safety from recrimination, few faculty could afford the risk of challenging popular ideas and conventions in this search. Our cultural survival rests on our ability to recognize truths among the many fictions of the modern world; through tenure, we give university faculty the best chance to help us make these difficult distinctions, a bestowal we should take care to preserve. (p. 11, emphases added)

The bottom line is that those of us with the privilege of academic tenure need to do three things. First, because actions will always speak more loudly than words, we need to enact concretely and repeatedly tenure privilege in service to public good. Second, we need to talk publicly and frequently about why tenure for faculty is important to freedom for all. And third, we need to safeguard academic tenure diligently and ferociously, so that we don’t lose it. In short, as admonished by King: “If you have tenure, don’t waste it” (King & Sha, 2021, n.p.).

• Remote internal crisis communication (RICC): Role of internal communication in predicting employee engagement during remote work in a crisis

In crafting their theoretical framework for Remote Internal Crisis Communication (RICC), Ganga Dhanesh and Gaelle Picherit-Duthler demonstrate how foundational concepts from public relations (i.e., two-way communication, crisis communication, and employee engagement) can be enhanced by theorizing that draws on concepts originating from other disciplines. These include job demands-resources theory (i.e., JD-R) from organizational psychology (cf. Bakker & Demerouti, 2017), content and objectives of internal crisis communication from business management (cf. Mazzei & Ravazzani, 2015), and flexible work designs from human resources, called new ways of working (i.e., NWW or NWoW; see Renard et al., 2021 for a conceptual overview).

The result is a brilliantly conceived and robustly tested model that ultimately strengthens relationship management theory in public relations (cf. Ledingham & Bruning, 2000) by examining four dimensions of employee engagement: cognitive, affective, behavioral, and social (cf. Soane et al., 2012). The study found that, when working remotely during a crisis, employee engagement was separately predicted by the four variables of two-way communication, internal crisis communication content (i.e., informative, identification, factual), internal crisis communication objectives (i.e., security, belonging, activating behavior), and new ways of working (i.e., employee control over work time, work content, and use of communication media), this latter mediated by social connection.

Perhaps most importantly, because in reality no communication happens in isolation, the study found that when all the variables were examined together, the most significant predictors of employee engagement were two-way communication and internal crisis communication content that strengthens trust in and identification with the employing organization. I appreciate the authors’ creative theorizing based on extant literature and their careful explanations of all statistical procedures conducted. I believe this work pioneers a foundational, conceptual framework for future investigations of organization-public relationships in the new reality of remote-work, which I should think includes those hybrid work environments in which, at any given time, only a portion of employees may be remote while others are face-to-face. Also, given the finding about the importance of social connection in mediating the relationship between new ways of working and employee engagement, we scholars must intensify our efforts to explicate social connection as a concept and explain its driving antecedents.

• Diversity-oriented leadership, internal communication, and employee outcomes: A perspective of racial minority employees

In this article, Yeunjae Lee, Jo-Yun Li, and Wan-Hsiu Sunny Tsai integrate normative notions of internal communication with organizational justice theory to develop and test a theoretical model in which diversity-oriented leadership and symmetrical internal communication serve as antecedents of organizational justice. Furthermore, while organizational justice and symmetrical internal communication both lead to employee advocative behaviors, the impact of symmetrical communication comes through employee engagement.

Conceptually, the study departs from other diversity research in public relations by focusing on diversity-oriented leadership, in which organizational leaders both welcome and appreciate the contributions of employees from diverse backgrounds (cf. Luu et al., 2019). Lee, Li, and Tsai also offer an updated definition of symmetrical internal communication as “an internal communication system characterized by two-way information flow, reciprocity, feedback and input, listening, employee participation, and balance of interests” (p. x).

Methodologically, the research’s exclusive focus on employees from minoritized racial/ethnic groups extends quantitatively our understanding of these populations, whose perspectives typically have been investigated qualitatively in prior public relations scholarship. I appreciate the authors’ evaluation of common method bias in their data, to address concerns regarding high levels of multicollinearity in the results. And I note their appropriate use of structural equation modeling to investigate hypothesized relationships that have been carefully and fully grounded in extant literature.

• Employees’ dissenting voices via testimonials and their impact on corporate hypocrisy perception and reputational damage via narrative transportation

In this age of digital media, employees’ experiences internal to their organization can easily become known outside their organization. This timely study by Minjeong Kang examines the impact of employee testimonials regarding their negative workplace experiences on the reputation of the employing organization as perceived by external stakeholders, with two key findings about spillover effects. First, internal issues can spill over to external perceptions. Second, reputational damage can spill over across two organizational reputation dimensions, with negative perceptions of organizational morality affecting perceptions about organizational ability.

I appreciate the article’s careful and methodical construction of the study’s theoretical framework, which connects public relations scholarship on employee-organization relationships (EOR) and employee communication behaviors (ECB) to the outcomes of perceived corporate hypocrisy and organizational reputation. What makes this study novel for public relations research is that the connection is explored specifically through the concept of narrative transportation, whereby external stakeholders are affectively transported into a state of identifying with employees (see Green & Brock [2000, 2002] for more on the concept of transportation; Slater & Rouner, 2002 for a discussion of narrative persuasion).

Data reported in this study were collected pre-pandemic, but the implications of this research for the current state of employee communications are unmistakable, particularly given the contexts of both health and racism pandemics and the reality of a “Great Resignation” (cf. Klotz, as cited in Cohen, 2021; see also Kaplan, 2021), as employees reassess their work-life priorities. Future research might examine additional applications of narrative transportation relevant to organization-public relationships, as well as explore situations where a few perpetually unhappy employees engage in negative communication behaviors about the employing organization even when the majority of their coworkers are satisfied and engaged.

• Why does listening matter inside the organization? The impact of internal listening on employee-organization relationships

By integrating public relations theories of employee-organization relationships (EORs) with self-determination theory (SDT, cf. Deci & Ryan, 1985), this article by Yufan Sunny Qin and Linjuan Rita Men extends theorizing on listening internal to organizations. Specifically, the authors define internal listening as “a multi-dimensional concept that entails recognizing, acknowledging, understanding, and responding to the needs, concerns, and interests of internal stakeholders (i.e., employees across all levels) from both the organization’s and leaders’ perspectives to foster mutually beneficial relationships” (p. 7).

The article extends public relations theory by differentiating clearly between organizational listening and supervisory listening (and studying both simultaneously); by connecting internal listening to outcomes in employee-organization relationships (i.e., trust, control mutuality, commitment, and satisfaction; cf. Hon & Grunig, 1999); and by investigating the mediating effects of satisfying employees’ psychological need in the workplace (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness; cf. Deci & Ryan, 2000). Regarding the latter, the study’s findings offer clear evidence that one underlying mechanism for how internal listening affects employees’ perceptions of their relationship with their employing organization is the extent to which employees perceive that the organization is meeting their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

The study also found that listening matters to public relations in the internal communication context not only because organizational listening itself drives EORs, but also because both organizational and supervisory listening affect the satisfaction of employee’s psychological needs, which in turn mediate (i.e., explain) EOR outcomes. In these pandemic times, employees’ psychological needs will only continue to evolve in both complexity (at the individual level) and diversity (at the collective level). Thus, the findings reported in this article will have implications far into the future of continued research on employee-organization relationships.

• The rise of internal activism: Motivations of employees’ responses to organizational crisis

This article by Yeunjae Lee integrates relationship management theory (cf. Hon & Grunig, 1999) with internal crisis management and crisis communication theory (ICMCC; cf. Johansen et al., 2012) to investigate how exchange and communal relationship types as perceived pre-crisis impact employees’ negative affect, communicative behaviors, and activism intentions during an organizational crisis. The study’s results showed that exchange and communal relationships had differential impacts on employees’ responses to an organizational crisis; both relationship types yielded activism intentions, but via different routes.

Specifically, employees who saw themselves in an exchange relationship with their employing organization tended to have negative emotional responses to organizational crisis, and those negative feelings in turn mediated their activism intentions. On the other hand, employees who saw themselves in a communal relationship tended to engage in active communication behaviors, which in turn led to activism intentions. Understanding the distinctive routes by which organization-public relationship type (i.e., exchange or communal) predicts the intentions of employees to engage in internal activism holds much promise for public relations scholarship and practice in both crisis management and employee communication.

Although the data for this study were collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic that has greatly impacted employee-organization relationships, I believe that the article’s focus on internal activism holds much relevance in this moment, as employee unions gain traction (e.g., Isidore, 2021; McMenamin, 2021; Selyukh, 2021) and workers in general seek collectively to have better employment conditions, compensation, and benefits (e.g., Alexander et al., 2021). I am also heartened by the author’s pointed note that internal activism need not signal a negative phenomenon; rather, those employees with intentions to engage in internal activism may be demonstrating their genuine care for and commitment to the organization, especially in situations where they perceive a communal employee-organization relationship.

Internal to the operations of any scholarly journal are the reviewers whose genuine care for and commitment to the academic enterprise are intrinsic to the eventual publication of any manuscript. Thus, I’d like to communicate my appreciation for the reviewers who invested some of their academic freedom in offering input that shaped the articles published in this issue:

Linda Aldoory, University of Maryland

Cheng Hong, California State University, Sacramento

Sungwook Hwang, Pusan National University (KOREA)

Hua Jiang, Syracuse University (New York)

Laura Lemon, University of Alabama

Jim Macnamara, University of Technology, Sydney (AUSTRALIA)

Jae-Hwa Shin, University of Southern Mississippi

Weiting Tao, University of Miami (Florida)

Ana Tkalac Verčič, University of Zagreb (CROATIA)

Justin Walden, North Dakota State University

Two reviewers who requested their identity remain blinded (North America)

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).