(Editor’s note: No word yet on whether Butler will be suing students for criticizing the football coach.)

Butler University has sued an undergraduate student for making libelous and defamatory statements about administrators on a blog he kept anonymously.

Details of the case became public last week when Bill Watts, an English professor at Butler, wrote a piece in the student newspaper and sent an e-mail to the university’s Faculty Senate in which he questioned “the practice of suing our own students for their utterances.” The e-mail provoked a written response from Bobby Fong, Butler president, who defended the lawsuit Tuesday at a Faculty Senate meeting, noting that “academic freedom does not provide protection for defamation and harassment.”

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