Dear Lawrie,
Whilst I am tempted to agree with you on this as fundamentally you are talking about freedom of speech, I’m going to try and go against my instincts and put forward some concerns about what you have written.

Part of my caution about embracing your stance fully stems from a concern about what is appropriate and the fact that one person’s ‘mild’ views are another’s extreme. So an anecdote I heard was that an academic member of staff at a UK university was tweeting comments in support of the Assad regime. I looked at his account (which was public) and it did seem clear where he worked and that his views were largely in favour of the regime at a time when the majority view regards this as wrong. Yet only a few years earlier in 2002, it was acceptable for Tony Blair to recommend Assad receive a knighthood. Who judges whether this university employee has stepped over the line and just as important – when?
It’s clear that the ‘community’ did not deal with this – the tweets went unchallenged (I suspect very few were reading them). But if I were his colleague I would not be pleased to be seen to be associated with his views by the fact that I worked at the same place. I can’t imagine that an institution would want this association either. Tim Hunt, although not using social media to share his inappropriate ‘joke’ about women scientists, was tried by the ‘community’. The result was a loss of job that seemed at least to me a knee jerk response to the furore. Athene Donald explores the complexity of the situation in her blog (http://occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald/2015/06/15/what-next-after-tim-hunt-just1action4wis/)
Reputation is important and if we live in a networked society where comments spread like wild fire or there are ‘extreme’ views aired, I do think that an institution should have a right to say to employees ‘you can’t write that and associate it with our name or brand’. I also have concerns about the reliability of the ‘community’. If as Nietzsche says morality is the herd-instinct in the individual, the online herd often don’t react at all, or if they do, they stampede and all subtlety and nuance of a post or tweet can be lost in the rush to either condemn or support.
Best wishes
Sarah