After last September’s shootings at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., during which lone gunman Aaron Alexis killed 12 people and injured three others, Kansas University journalism professor David Guth delivered a terse and somewhat careless commentary on Twitter: “#NavyYardShooting. The blood is on the hands of the NRA. Next time, let it be YOUR sons and daughters. Shame on you. May God damn you.” Faced with criticism from state politicians and gun lobbyists, the university placed Guth on administrative leave. In December, the Kansas Board of Regents approved a comprehensive social media policy that appeared to give state university presidents unlimited discretion over faculty members’ use of Twitter and Facebook. Following an outcry from state university faculty and First Amendment advocacy groups, a revised version was released earlier this month, but it still allows faculty to be punished for social media activity that “impairs discipline by superiors or harmony among co-workers, impedes the performance of the speaker’s official duties, interferes with the regular operation of the employer, or otherwise adversely affects the employer’s ability to efficiently provide services.”

The policy — intended to codify the standards of social media conduct that apply to faculty members and the process by which violators are to be punished — has largely been criticized as an imposition on free speech. Delivering the Council of Faculty Senate Presidents’ statement to the Kansas Board of Regents, Sheryl Lidzy, an associate professor at Emporia State University, emphasized, “The freedom to speak without fear of reprisal is perhaps the ultimate example of a principle with which we are not at liberty to experiment.”

But it’s more complicated — and the repercussions more harmful — than that. With universities increasingly hiring adjuncts who lack the job security that tenured faculty members enjoy, a bigger chunk of today’s faculty is left unprotected and could be fired perfunctorily. And because scholars are increasingly presenting and discussing their research through online channels, such a policy, given a sufficiently broad interpretation, could have a chilling effect on liberal arts and social science scholarship.

The first of these two concerns — the replacing of tenured faculty with adjunct faculty, who work on short-term contracts — does not apply in this instance. Guth, an associate professor with 23 years of service, has tenure, making him part of a group of tenured and tenure-track faculty that has shrunk from 57 percent of nationwide faculty appointments in 1975 to 30 percent in 2011 (PDF). His status is likely the reason that, rather than resign his post, he began a yearlong sabbatical after returning from academic leave.

But were Guth an adjunct, he could have been terminated swiftly, perhaps even mid-semester. An adjunct who maintains a blog that appears to be “interfering with official duties” could be removed with minimal administrative process. And the revised policy, despite paying lip service to academic freedom, gives administrators a lot of leeway in firing even tenure-track faculty.

For faculty at the “publish or perish” stage of their careers, harsh social media regulations could also serve as a significant impediment to professional advancement. Big shifts in the dissemination of scholarship, including the closure of some university presses, have prompted junior scholars to seek out new avenues for presenting their research. The U.S. Intellectual History Blog, to which I contribute occasional posts, allows academics to share their work in a quasi-public setting. Sport in American History, Legal History Blog and ContractsProfBlog are among many such sites posting material that often skirts the line between pure, disinterested research and the opinion of its author, with academics staking out positions that, at least to others in their field, might be deemed controversial. These blogs are in turn frequently discussed on Twitter, where academics who “follow” one another can offer critiques. Guth, whose research interests include law, the media and crisis communication, might not have been engaged in the production of scholarship when he tweeted about the Navy Yard tragedy, but a personal blog entry he published around the same time indicated that his impassioned feelings about the subject arose from a deep engagement with Second Amendment issues.