Harassment Regarding Teaching or Classroom

• Report student misconduct, discrimination, or harassment to the Dean of Students Office (umass.edu/dean_students/report-incident; 413-545-2684). 

• Under US copyright law, faculty own the course materials they create, including lectures, lecture notes, materials, syllabi, study guides, and all web-ready content.
• Lectures and other class content cannot be recorded and distributed by students without the professor’s explicit consent.
• Only the faculty member, and anyone to whom the faculty member explicitly grants permission, may reproduce, distribute, upload, or display course materials created by that faculty. See the UMass Intellectual Property Policy (T96-040) here.
• If their material has been uploaded to a third-party website, they can send a copyright takedown notice (17 USC 512). See MSP’s advice on how to protect classroom materials in Appendix 3 on the Academic Freedom Crisis Toolkit main page.
• The MSP recommends communicating this to the students in the syllabus. Wording is provided in Appendix 3. Although US copyright takedown law applies whether students are warned or not, students can be disciplined for violating the professor’s established course policies under the disruptive conduct clause (Appendix 7.1 of the student conduct handbook).

• UMass IT has configured Zoom for security and to reduce the risk of disruptions, such as "Zoom bombing" attacks.
• Additional recommended settings to further increase security can be followed here.
• These additional options may make Zoom harder to use in some cases, so they are not currently enabled by default.

UMass Amherst firmly supports the rights of its faculty, students and community to exercise the right of free speech and self-expression, as well as for audiences at university events to be able to hear and engage in the event activity. 

If a campus event is being intentionally disrupted to the point that the event cannot continue as planned, the campus Demonstration Response and Safety Team (DRST) recommends that remarks by the event emcee or designated staff should emphasize the following important points:

• As a public institution, UMass is committed to allowing event speakers express themselves without disruption and to allow our audience to hear their message.
• Disrupting the event speaker violates the rights of not only the speaker, but also everyone in the audience who wishes to listen.
• Advise the interrupter that they’ve said their piece and now kindly end their disruption of the event. If that does not happen, let them know that campus security will be called.
• If necessary, repeat twice that campus security may be called.
• If the situation is not resolved, call campus security at (413) 545-3111, and also advise the audience to remain in their seat.
• As a last resort, the event organizers/emcee have the option of ending the event.

For more information about event policies, please contact the Executive Director of Environmental Health & Safety and Emergency Management, @email