quarterly

THE
Newsletter of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
QUARTERLY
Volume 4 Number 1
Spring 2006
Inside
From the Interim
President
2
Albertson College
Revamps Its Policies After
FIRE Criticizes Troubling
Speech Codes
3
Report Exposes Extensive
Constitutional Violations in
the UNC System
3
FIRE Interim President
Addresses Rights at
University of Wisconsin
and Beyond
4
DePaul University Lifts
Ban on ‘Propaganda’
4
Victory for Freedom of
Expression at Washington
State University
5
FIRE Changing the
Culture
6
FIRE’s Weblog, The Torch,
Celebrates One Year of
Engaging Commentary 7
FIRE in the News
8
9
From the Board of
Directors
10
FIRE Seeks Summer
Interns
11
In the Mail
Foundation for Individual Rights
in Education, Inc.
601 Walnut Street, Suite 510
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Phone:
Fax:
215-717-3473
215-717-3440
Visit us online:
thefire.org
UNC Greensboro Drops All Charges
Against Free Speech Protestors,
Rescinds Policy Hostile to Students’
Freedom of Association
owing to public outrage, the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro
(UNCG) has dropped charges against
two students who led a peaceful
protest against the university’s policy of quarantining free speech to small areas of campus.
FIRE had brought UNCG’s repression to light
in December.
B
This resounding victory for free speech came
just days after FIRE and the Pope Center for
Higher Education Policy released a report documenting dozens of policies from across the
University of North Carolina System—including
UNCG—that violate the U.S. Constitution (see
page 3).
UNCG had been on the defensive since FIRE
revealed in December that students Allison
Jaynes and Robert Sinnott faced punishment for
violating the school’s “free speech zone” policy
by protesting outside the school’s two small “free
speech zones.”
Jaynes and Sinnott had led a protest against the
school’s free speech zone policy on a grassy area
outside the library. During the protest, an administrator ordered them to move to a “free speech
zone.” Jaynes and Sinnott refused, citing the First
Amendment. Administrators and police did nothing further to stop the peaceful protest, but a few
days later Jaynes and Sinnott were charged with a
“violation of Respect” for refusing an order to
stop their protest.
Students protest UNC Greensboro’s repressive
“free speech zone” policy
The students contacted FIRE, which wrote
UNCG to explain that the university’s blanket
restrictions on free speech outside of the “free
speech zones” are contrary to the First
Amendment. The letter also reminded UNCG
that FIRE has defeated similar policies at Texas
Tech University, West Virginia University, and
Citrus College in California.
On January 13, Jaynes and Sinnott received
notice from the university that the charges
against them had been completely dropped.
continued on page 5
Spring 2006
1
From the Interim President
hen I started at FIRE back
in the fall of 2001, I was
not entirely sure of what
awaited me. FIRE, which
had been incorporated only in late 1999,
was relatively unknown. Even at that
young age, however, FIRE had achieved
some high-profile victories, including successfully defending the freedom of association of Christian students at Tufts
University, the free speech of a poet and
professor at the University of Alaska, and
the right of the Penn State Young
Americans for Freedom to include a reference to God in their constitution. Still,
while people all over the world had
heard about the “water buffalo incident”
that led Alan Charles Kors and Harvey
Silverglate down the path to founding
FIRE, comparatively few had heard of this
upstart organization.
W
I moved to Philadelphia in October 2001
and immediately knew I was part of
something truly special. FIRE was the
hardest-working, most focused, and most
dedicated nonprofit I had ever encountered. The staff was the most ideologically diverse group I had ever seen, but
because of our belief in free speech, we
never shied away from an argument or a
chance to debate an important issue of
the day.
The instances of administrative abuse
that confronted us—mostly arising in the
wake of September 11—were astounding
to the uninitiated (like me). While FIRE
did not hesitate to defend speakers who,
for example, joked about the attacks,
most of the incidents we saw involved
universities that were trying to squelch
expressions of anger or patriotism that so
many Americans felt. Little did I know
that this was just the beginning of my
immersion into the bizarre world of higher education, where repression and double standards are rampant. I would like to
say that the abuses on campuses no
longer surprise me, but somehow, every
year, colleges and universities find some
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The FIRE Quarterly
new tactic, some novel justification or
rationalization, for punishing dissent.
Now, FIRE is a mature, established, and
nationally known force for liberty in higher education. Our Guides on free speech,
religious liberty, and freedom of conscience are read by students, faculty, and
administrators across the country. Our
expanded speech codes database, called
FIRE’s Spotlight, catalogues codes and
abuses at 335 colleges around the country,
with more being added all the time. Our
website averages over 200,000 visits each
month and our print media coverage is
unmatched, reaching hundreds of millions
of readers last year.
The public’s greater awareness of our
name has, sadly, led only to our discovering an increasing number of abuses on
campus. Last year was the busiest in our
history. The cases demonstrate that the
repressive standards that produced the
“water buffalo incident” never left our
campuses, and in fact may have only hardened. For example: students at a Florida
college were banned from showing the
movie The Passion of the Christ because of
its “R” rating, even though the college had
hosted a skit called “F**king for Jesus”;
universities in North Carolina, Louisiana,
and Wisconsin attempted to enforce policies banning religious groups from using
religious criteria to choose their leaders
and members; a college in Florida
informed a student animal-rights activist
that she could not hand out flyers because
an administrator simply disliked the group
she supported; a university in Wisconsin
banned student resident assistants from
leading Bible studies in their dormitories;
and a college in New Jersey convicted a
Muslim student of “discrimination” when
he sent a private e-mail expressing his religious objection to homosexuality.
These cases represent only a small fraction
of FIRE’s battles in 2005, but each of them
is a scandal at institutions that publicly
claim to honor free speech. The good
Greg Lukianoff
news, however, is that FIRE successfully
resolved each of these cases and many, many
more in 2005. Without FIRE it is unlikely that
any of these students would have prevailed.
I am deeply honored to have been chosen to
serve as FIRE’s interim president. I am
extremely proud of all FIRE has accomplished in its short history. FIRE is, without a
doubt, the most effective force for liberty on
campus that exists, though I believe our
work has only begun. In 2006, FIRE’s message will again reach hundreds of millions of
people. We will expand our presence in the
free speech debate on campuses nationwide.
We will continue to build our catalogue of
speech codes and other violations. We will
educate universities and students about what
it means to live in a free society. We will
coordinate new legal challenges to repressive speech codes and capitalize on the
many legal victories we have already won.
We will reveal many universities’ gross disrespect for their students’ private consciences.
We will complete more in-depth and groundbreaking educational policy work. We will
challenge private colleges to honor the
rights they promise their students.
All the while, we will remain the single best
resource for students and faculty whose
basic rights are threatened. As always, FIRE’s
goals are ambitious, but I learned long ago
that with FIRE’s clear moral mission, our talented staff, and the generous help of our
supporters, we can and do accomplish the
extraordinary.
Greg Lukianoff
Albertson College Revamps Its Policies After
FIRE Criticizes Troubling Speech Codes
fter FIRE publicly exposed a
repressive speech code at
Albertson College of Idaho
this summer, the college has
dramatically changed its policies.
A
In July 2005, FIRE selected one of
Albertson’s policies as its “Speech Code
of the Month.” That policy provided
that “[a]ny comments or conduct relating to a person’s race, gender, religion,
disability, age or ethnic background that
fail to respect the dignity and feelings of
the individual are unacceptable.” FIRE
pointed out that while students have a
right to be free from certain types of
severe harassment, they do not have a
right to have their “dignity and feelings”
respected at all times.
FIRE also criticized a statement in the
Student Handbook providing that “[a]ll
inappropriate behaviors may not be
specifically covered in the misconduct
definitions, and students will be held
accountable for behaviors considered
inconsistent with the standards and
expectations described in this handbook.”
Under this policy, students could be punished for behaviors they did not even
know were prohibited. Particularly when
combined with the broad restrictions on
speech in the other policy, this could have
a powerful chilling effect on students’ speech.
Fortunately, shortly after this policy
was named FIRE’s “Speech Code of
the Month,” Albertson officials
quickly eliminated both of the provisions that FIRE highlighted in the
feature. Albertson President Bob
Hoover stated that “[s]ince its
founding, Albertson College of
Idaho has embraced the ideals of
freedom of speech. In the course of a
review of the student handbook, policies
that could have restricted open discourse
were revised to reflect those ideals.”
Albertson’s harassment policy now
declares, “Albertson College is committed
to supporting academic freedom and freedom of speech, in an environment of open
and vigorous dialogue within the reasonable limits of the law.” In response to
Albertson’s actions, FIRE has improved the
college’s rating on FIRE’s comprehensive
online database of campus liberty,
Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource.
Shortly after this policy was
named FIRE’s “Speech Code of
the Month,” Albertson officials
quickly eliminated both of the
provisions that FIRE highlighted
in the feature.
FIRE applauds the positive steps that
Albertson has taken and hopes that other
colleges and universities will follow suit and
show greater respect for the free speech
rights of their students and faculty. In the
meantime, FIRE will continue—through its
“Speech Code of the Month” and other features—to expose these codes to public
scrutiny and effect change.
Report Exposes Extensive Constitutional Violations
in the University of North Carolina System
A
t a joint press conference in
North Carolina on January 10,
FIRE and the Pope Center for
Higher Education Policy
released a report exposing the abuse of
First Amendment rights in the University
of North Carolina System. The report,
entitled The State of the First Amendment in the University of North Carolina System, analyzed policies restricting
freedom of speech and association at
each of the 16 schools that make up the
UNC System, and made recommendations for remedying these violations
through either the legislative or the judicial system. FIRE found that many
schools in the UNC System maintain bla-
tantly unconstitutional speech codes that
ban a great deal of protected speech. For
example:
• North Carolina Central University states
that “statements of intolerance…due to
race, ethnicity, sex, religion, disability, or
sexual preference may be subject to disciplinary action.”
• North Carolina School of the Arts prohibits “using offensive speech or behavior
of a biased or prejudiced nature related
to one’s personal characteristics….”
• UNC Greensboro states that “UNCG
will not tolerate any harassment of, dis-
crimination against, or disrespect for persons” (emphasis added).
As public institutions, the schools of the
UNC System are legally bound to protect
the First Amendment rights of their students and faculty, and the report makes
clear that most of them are failing to
meet this obligation. In fact, many of the
speech codes in the UNC System are similar or identical to speech codes that have
been struck down as unconstitutional by
courts in other jurisdictions. FIRE hopes
that the publicity generated by this
report will lead to reform in the UNC
System.
Spring 2006
3
FIRE Interim President Addresses Rights
at University of Wisconsin and Beyond
n February 1, FIRE Interim
President Greg Lukianoff spoke
at the University of Wisconsin at
Eau Claire (UWEC) on the topic
of “Liberty in Danger: The All-TooFrequent Quashing of Student Rights at
UWEC and Nationwide.” Lukianoff discussed UWEC’s nationally notorious “RA
Bible study ban,” which FIRE originally
brought to light late last year, as well as
several other abuses at UWEC and on
other campuses.
O
FIRE’s public exposure of UWEC’s unconstitutional practice of banning resident
assistants (RAs) from leading Bible studies in their dormitories has earned the
university nationwide infamy. In this case,
a UWEC administrator sent letters ordering Christian RAs who had been leading
weekly Bible studies in their own rooms
to cease and desist. The administrator
maintained that the private, unofficial
Bible studies would make the RAs less
“approachable.” This statement ignored
the fact that UWEC encourages RAs to lead
controversial politicized events including
The Vagina Monologues, a “Privilege Walk,”
a “Tunnel of Oppression,” and seminars
promoting feminism.
Prior to that, FIRE had protested the
UWEC Student Senate’s unconstitutional
attempt to ban student-fee funding of “ideological, religious, or partisan” activities
and to deny recognition to The Flip Side, a
progressive student magazine, on the
grounds that it was “biased.”
In addition to addressing specific incidents, Lukianoff reminded his audience of
the value of a free marketplace of ideas on
campus. He acknolwedged that such an
environment would allow expression that
some students may find offensive or insulting, but argued that one potential benefit
of feeling offended by someone’s beliefs is
that it helps people develop and strengthen their own convictions. Lukianoff said
that this is part of the educational process
Greg Lukianoff speaks at the University of
Wisconsin at Eau Claire
and jokingly suggested that students who
had not been offended once during their
entire term at the university should
demand their money back.
The speech, which was sponsored by The
Flip Side, drew a large and receptive crowd.
Afterwards, audience members exchanged
ideas in vigorous debate that FIRE hopes
will continue to sharpen the focus on
UWEC’s disdain for student rights.
DePaul University Lifts Ban on ‘Propaganda’
nder pressure from FIRE, DePaul
University lifted a vague ban on
“propaganda” that it used last fall
to silence student protest of a
campus appearance by Professor Ward
Churchill of the University of Colorado at
Boulder.
U
DePaul’s College Republicans (CRs) suffered censorship last October after they
opposed the university’s invitation to
Churchill to lecture and lead a student
workshop. To protest the events, the CRs
produced flyers recounting some of
Churchill’s contentious remarks. When the
CRs submitted the flyers for approval,
administrators responded first by misleading the CRs into thinking that the event
was cancelled, then by invoking a policy
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The FIRE Quarterly
that stated, “We do not approve propaganda.” The students, who did not
believe that quoting a person’s own
remarks was “propaganda,” posted the
flyers anyway, leading to a formal warning
from DePaul and a surreptitious addition
to the policy saying that posters could be
used only to promote events, not to
protest them.
After receiving the warning, the CRs contacted FIRE for assistance. In a letter to
DePaul President Dennis Holtschneider,
FIRE pointed out that the vague and constantly shifting ban on “propaganda” gave
administrators the unfettered power to
censor student speech at will. In his
response, Holtschneider incorrectly
asserted that no DePaul policies mentioned the word “propaganda” and stated
that the policy prohibits the denunciation
of any speaker appearing at DePaul.
However, FIRE’s research shows that not
only did the “propaganda” ban exist, but
the stipulation that flyers may only “promote events” appeared in the policy after
the College Republicans’ flyers were
denied approval.
FIRE brought DePaul’s shifting policies to
public attention in a press release last
December. Several hours later,
Holtschneider contacted FIRE to say that
an addendum had indeed been “recently
added indicating that flyers promoting
‘propaganda’ will not be accepted” and
that he had “asked for it to be removed.”
Holtschneider went on to affirm “DePaul’s
respect for freedom of speech and role in
providing outlets for conversations
Victory for Freedom of Expression at
Washington State University
hanks to a campaign led by
FIRE, Washington State
University ( WSU) rejected the
“heckler’s veto” and warned students not to disrupt a controversial play.
WSU financed and organized the disruption of a different play by the same student playwright earlier this year.
T
WSU’s foray into mob censorship began
last April, when a group of about 40 students disrupted a performance of student playwright Chris Lee’s satirical
Passion of the Musical, which Lee
warned was potentially “offensive or
inflammatory to all audiences.” The
heckling, which included threats of physical violence directed at cast members,
was so severe that it actually stopped the
performance. Nevertheless, campus
security refused to remove the hecklers
and instead forced Lee to censor a song
in the play in order “to avoid a possible
riot or physical harm.” Lee contacted
FIRE for help, and FIRE soon discovered
that a university office had purchased the
hecklers’ tickets with university funds and
helped organize the disruptive “protest.”
FIRE twice wrote WSU President V. Lane
Rawlins in protest, and Lee appealed to
WSU’s Center for Human Rights to ask the
university to take steps to protect artistic
expression. Yet administrators admitted no
wrongdoing on the part of the university,
instead calling disruptive heckling a “very
responsible” exercise of free speech rights.
In response, FIRE took WSU’s disrespect
for artistic expression public, resulting in
vast condemnation of WSU’s actions. FIRE
publicly criticized WSU again when Vice
President Michael Tate continued to
defend the hecklers’ “free speech rights.”
Lee, angered but undeterred by WSU’s
shameful disregard for his rights, pro-
Chris Lee
duced another provocative play this fall.
This time, university officials posted and
read a notice before each performance stating, in part, “Please be aware that disruption
to this performance, or any program[,] will
not be tolerated and will be dealt with
accordingly, up to and including participants
being escorted from the venue.” No disruptions of this play were reported.
UNC Greensboro Drops All Charges Against Free Speech Protestors, Rescinds
Policy Hostile to Students’ Freedom of Association continued from page 1
On February 1, after UNCG expressed its
willingness to receive advice, FIRE wrote
to UNCG calling upon it to abolish its
restrictive “free speech zone” policy.
FIRE’s letter made clear that while UNCG
Unfortunately, UNCG’s disregard for the
First Amendment extended beyond its “free is legally “allowed to enforce ‘reasonable
time, place and manner restrictions’ on
speech zone” policy. Jaynes and Melissa
activities that would significantly disrupt
Westmoreland of the UNCG College
Republicans wrote UNCG to protest the fact university functioning,” there is “nothing
that their groups were required to adopt an ‘reasonable’ about transforming the vast
majority of a university’s property into a
unconstitutional “anti-discrimination state‘censorship area.’” FIRE’s letter also conment.” The policy infringed upon the
groups’ First Amendment right to freedom demned UNCG’s “Policy on Discriminatory
Conduct,” which absurdly bans any “disreof association by requiring them to admit
spect for persons.”
members of opposing political parties.
UNCG’s chancellor has also established a
committee to reexamine the university’s
“free speech zone” policy.
between individuals with a variety of
viewpoints.”
While we applaud DePaul’s decision
to revoke the ban on “propaganda,”
FIRE will continue to monitor the university’s commitment to freedom of
speech. DePaul is being sued by exProfessor Thomas Klocek, who was
dismissed without due process after
an out-of-class argument with
Palestinian students. In its most recent
attack on liberty, DePaul shut down an
“affirmative action bake sale” protest—
a widely used form of satirical protest
against affirmative action—and began
investigating student organizers for
“harassment.” With FIRE’s help, the
group was recently acquitted of this
spurious charge.
In response to the students’ letter and a column by UNC Wilmington Professor Mike
Adams, UNCG’s counsel abandoned the
requirement in a January 20 memo. In doing
so, UNCG credited the ongoing FIRE-coordinated litigation against UNC Chapel Hill,
which has unlawfully attempted to force two
Christian groups to admit members who do
not agree with the groups’ tenets.
UNCG’s belated willingness to receive
FIRE’s consultation is a healthy development at a campus fraught with restrictions
on fundamental rights and freedoms. FIRE
hopes that UNCG will act on the advice
but remains ready to unleash further public censure should the university fail to
uphold its legal and moral obligations.
Spring 2006
5
FIRE Changing the CULTURE
Wave of Activism Confronts Campuses Nationwide
“
A
s I look out my window, it is
either foggy or smoky,” wrote a
professor one morning to his
friends and colleagues. He continued, “I think it is smoke! And where
there is smoke, there is FIRE!”
Professor Kent
Syverson’s announcement of an upcoming
FIRE event at the
University of Wisconsin
at Eau Claire (see page
4) was just one of a
series of efforts he has
made to promote
FIRE’s work to defend
liberty on his campus.
Over the past several
Luke Sheahan
months, the self-proclaimed “rabble rouser” has written op-eds,
publicized FIRE’s cases at his university, distributed copies of FIRE’s Guide to Free
Speech on Campus, and given extensive
talks on the First Amendment at his church.
FIRE’s sustained advocacy of individual
rights has always been magnified by the
courageous initiative of students and professors who take the message of individual
conscience to heart—and to their campuses. Emboldened by Justice Brandeis’ famous
saying that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”
and armed with the vast resources available
on FIRE’s website and in its publications,
students and professors across the country
are taking it upon themselves to educate
their colleagues and classmates about the
plight of liberty in higher education.
Many activists do this by directly confronting campus officials who shamelessly
promulgate capricious, illiberal, and often
unconstitutional policies. At Oregon State
University (OSU), former FIRE intern Luke
Sheahan, editor of the student publication
The Liberty, is waging a written campaign
against the university’s speech codes.
“free speech zone.” They were indeed threatened with punishment, but thanks to FIRE’s
intervention, the university eventually
dropped all charges (see page 1). The university is revisiting its speech policy, and the
College Libertarians—along with the College
Democrats and College Republicans—were
able to hold a second protest without
administrative interference. Sinott vows that
the College Libertarians will run regular
protests until the policy is changed.
Hostility to free speech is no abstraction
for Sheahan, as The Liberty was itself
recently the target of a “heckler’s veto”—in
late October 2005, a new distribution bin
for the publication was stolen. Sheahan
contacted the police and wrote a letter urging OSU’s president to publicly condemn
the theft. But OSU’s administrators faltered, and some even suggested that The
Liberty simply be delivered elsewhere—in
effect, that the publication cave in to the
vandals’ demands. In response, Sheahan
issued a press release and is working to
expose OSU’s glaring disregard for free
speech to the court of public opinion.
After FIRE’s and the Pope Center for Higher
Education Policy’s joint report on The State
of the First Amendment in the University of
North Carolina System (see page 3) lambasted UNCG’s excessively broad “anti-discrimination statement” policy that would have
required campus political groups to admit
members of opposing political parties, Jaynes
and Melissa Westmoreland of the College
Republicans wrote Chancellor Patricia
Sullivan to protest the policy and to explain
its stifling consequences for student groups’
freedom of association. Shortly thereafter,
the university altered its policy to protect the
rights of expressive organizations.
Meanwhile, on the East Coast, College
Libertarians members Allison Jaynes and
Robert Sinnott wanted to demonstrate the
absurdity of the University of North
Carolina at Greensboro’s (UNCG’s) “free
speech zones.” Well aware that they could
face unjust disciplinary retaliation for their
defiance, they led a protest of the “free
speech zone” policy outside of that very
FIRE commends the bravery of those who,
often threatened with repercussions that
may affect their academic and personal wellbeing, nevertheless fight the repression and
unjust policies that pervade their campuses.
The actions of these professors and students
are invaluable contributions to FIRE’s campaign to restore individual rights and dignity
at our colleges and universities.
FIRE Interim President Featured on Fox News Channel
I
n a Hannity & Colmes segment on the censorship
of the DePaul University College Republicans, FIRE
Interim President Greg Lukianoff discussed how
DePaul tried to stop the student group from
protesting a campus appearance by University of
Colorado professor Ward Churchill (see page 4). Prior
to the event, DePaul banned the group from posting
flyers and changed the rules to prevent its members
from attending Churchill’s workshop. Lukianoff, who
was joined by Joe Blewitt, the president of the DePaul
College Republicans, argued that “just as [much] as
[DePaul has] the right to invite Ward Churchill, these
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The FIRE Quarterly
students have the right to disagree with that
choice.” He also pointed out that even though
DePaul has lifted the ban, FIRE will remain vigilant because the university has “a nasty history”
of repressing free speech on campus.
Lukianoff also recently appeared the Fox Report
with Shepard Smith to discuss freedom of
speech and academic freedom as they pertain
to recent controversies involving the University
of California at Los Angeles and Professor
Nicholas DeGenova of Columbia University.
Greg Lukianoff defends
students’ right to protest
FIRE’s Weblog, The Torch, Celebrates
One Year of Engaging Commentary
n February 2005, FIRE launched its weblog, The Torch, as a
decisive step into the daily debate over civil liberties on campus. The blog format, with its unrelenting stream of new content, is an ideal forum for FIRE staff members to introduce and
follow up on FIRE cases, discuss current legal and policy issues
affecting campus rights, point out interesting articles and other
blog posts, and, perhaps most importantly, present FIRE’s reflections on campus incidents and disputes that have not been formally adopted as FIRE cases.
Posts to The Torch have inspired insightful reactions from its dedicated readership—readers are invited to e-mail comments in
response to any post. Since the launch of The Torch, FIRE’s website has steadily attracted more visitors. After the home page, The
Torch remains the most visited page on the website. FIRE appreciates the overwhelmingly positive response to The Torch and
encourages anyone interested in discovering its entertaining and
enlightening contributions to visit The Torch’s page on FIRE’s website at thefire.org/thetorch. Readers can also choose to subscribe
to The Torch via the RSS feed available on that page.
The Torch has also proved to be an effective platform for publicizing FIRE’s “Speech Code of the Month” feature (see page 3).
Below are three excerpts from recent posts to The Torch.
I
FIRE Website Visits: One Year of The Torch
FIRE’s website currently receives over 3 million hits a
month, but counting “visits” more accurately measures
the number of times browsers visit the site.
Spring 2006
7
In the Mail
8
The FIRE Quarterly
FIRE in the News
Campus Conscience Police?
By Wendy McElroy
This column was published December 21, 2005, on the Fox News website. Reprinted with permission.
“Over one’s inner mind, and self, no
one has coercive power.”
S
o write attorneys Jordan Lorence
and Harvey A. Silverglate, authors
of the just-published Guide to FirstYear Orientation and Thought
Reform on Campus from the Foundation
for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
The Guide is yet another indication that
political correctness is faltering on campuses across North America. To those who value the right of individuals to a conscience—
that is, to judge right and wrong for themselves—this is welcome news.
Political correctness is the belief that certain
ideas and attitudes are improper and, so,
should be discouraged or prohibited by
punishing those who advance them.
Conversely, ideas and attitudes that are
proper should be encouraged by being
enforced.
An example of a politically incorrect idea:
inherent biological differences between the
two sexes explain why there are more male
than female scientists. The correct version:
discrimination against women explains the
“gender imbalance” in science, and the discrimination must be remedied.
Both preceding explanations may have merit but PC is not interested in weighing evidence. It acts to quash the ideologically
incorrect idea and to champion the correct
one.
Last January, when Harvard University
President Lawrence Summers raised the
mere possibility of biological differences as
an explanation for the “gender imbalance”
in science, a vicious PC backlash forced him
to apologize publicly no less than three
times. After what some called his “Sovietshow-trial-style apologies,” Summers made
an act of contrition by pledging “to spend
$50 million over the next decade to
improve the climate for women on
campus.”
The most important aspect of the sad
episode is not whether the explanation
of biological differences is correct. It is
that the idea cannot be so much as suggested without the “offender” paying a
terrible price in public humiliation and
in his career.
The cost to society is high; creativity and
intellectual progress wither. The cost to
individuals is higher; without competing
ideas, people cannot adequately judge for
themselves what is true and false, right or
wrong, moral and immoral. For me, that private judgment is what constitutes a conscience, to which every human being has an
indispensable and inalienable right.
The Summers debacle was a high-profile
example of a PC process that has proceeded
more quietly across North American campuses for decades.
The ability of students to judge for themselves is restricted by limiting the ideas
upon which those judgments would be
passed. In turn, this impoverishes the quality of conscience.
FIRE’s new Guide—the fifth in a series of
ideological survival manuals for college students—describes both the manner in which
the right of conscience is being attacked on
campus and how the tide is turning toward
individual rights.
Three common ways in which universities
limit a student’s access to ideas are speech
codes, mandatory “diversity” tests or training, and “nondiscrimination” policies.
Speech codes prohibit expression that
could give offense on the basis of gender,
sexual orientation, race or other “historical
disadvantage.” The codes are used primarily
to protect women, minorities and gays from
words or ideas that they might experience
as insulting. The guidelines are often so
vague as to prohibit the open discussion of
issues like affirmative action or religious
objections to homosexuality.
The right to judge for yourself
what is true and false, what is
right and wrong is a prerequisite for both freedom of speech
and freedom of religion.
Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania offers
an example. In April 2003, the university
defined harassment as any “unwanted conduct which annoys, threatens, or alarms a person or group.” “[E]very member of the community” was required to adopt the administration’s guidelines not only in his or her behaviors but also ”in their attitudes.” In 2004, the
U.S. District Court for the Middle District of
Pennsylvania issued a preliminary injunction
against the university’s codes as unconstitutional and they were repealed.
Mandatory diversity tests and training attempt
to correct the unacceptable political views of
students. The experience of Ed Swan, a selfdescribed conservative Christian at
Washington State’s College of Education,
offers an example.
Swan expressed the belief that white privilege
and male privilege do not currently exist in
our society. In 2004 he was given low scores
on a “dispositions criteria” by which some universities rank the “social commitment” of students. The university threatened to disenroll
Swan if he did not sign a contract that committed him to further political screening and
re-orientation. After a letter from FIRE and a
high-profile protest, the contract requirement
was dropped.
Nondiscrimination policies, which are ostensibly inclusive, have been used to ban “dissenting” groups from campus and from receiving
the student funds to which their members are
required to contribute. Christian groups seem
particularly vulnerable.
continued on page 11
Spring 2006
9
From the Board of Directors
Some University Administrators
Never Learn: Penn Redux
By Harvey A. Silverglate
Harvey A. Silverglate
ou just couldn’t make up this story, but since it happened on a university campus, it must be true. In
September, an undergraduate
minding his own business in his dorm
above the main thoroughfare at the
University of Pennsylvania noticed a young
couple that appeared to be occupied in a
particularly engaging extracurricular activity in front of a full-length window in the
dormitory facing his own. The student
snapped a photograph of this breathtaking
scene—bodies, but no faces visible—and
posted it on his password-protected personal Penn website, devoted to chronicling
his life at Penn, from where it eventually
was picked up for wider circulation.
Y
How did the university administration
react? Acting on a complaint by the female
half of the couple caught in flagrante
delicto, the Office of Student Conduct
charged the photographer with—get this—
sexual harassment and improper use of the
university’s electronic communications
system.
One of the photographer’s advisors reported that the student was on the verge of
entering into a plea bargain that would
have placed him on probation and forced
him to apologize, when history professor
(and my friend, coauthor of The Shadow
University, and cofounder of FIRE) Alan
Charles Kors, a recognized expert in academic freedom, agreed to join the defense
team, along with Andrew Geier, an exceptionally able and independent graduate
student in psychology acting as the
accused student’s formal advisor.
The university, after receiving a deluge of
inquiries by various local and national
news media outlets, dropped the charges
within 24 hours when higher-level administrators saw what the student conduct
bureaucrats would not—namely, the
10
The FIRE Quarterly
absurdity of persecuting the disseminator of
true, factual information on a campus dedicated to academic freedom and free
speech. It was hard to explain, after all, how
the photographer had harassed the couple,
and harder still to explain how posting on a
campus communications network evidence
of improper, possibly even criminal activity
being conducted in the center of the campus was somehow a misuse of the network.
The female half of the performance-art duo
retained the inevitable personal injury
lawyer, who was quoted by The Daily
Pennsylvanian, the student newspaper, as
hinting in a statement released on behalf of
his client that a lawsuit is just over the horizon. “My client is emotionally shattered
from this extremely disturbing ordeal,” the
newspaper reported the lawyer as saying.
“The intense focus on this matter into my
client’s identity and image has imposed
exceptional emotional and psychological
harm,” the lawyer’s statement continued.
The client “will pursue all her legal
options,” including those available under
various right to privacy and other statutory
and constitutional provisions.
It was bad enough that the university seriously considered this exposure of its student body’s extracurricular activities to be
an example of the ever-growing category of
“sexual harassment,” which on most campuses these days includes anything said that
might be taken as insulting or offensive by
women (a category of “historically disadvantaged” persons in the parlance of those
ubiquitous campus speech codes). After all,
one could more easily argue that the couple, by imposing themselves upon the
pedestrians in the thoroughfare below their
dorm window, was in fact harassing the
passers-by, some of whom were young children, and not all of whom would necessarily enjoy such displays. The notion that the
love-making couple had a legitimate expec-
tation of privacy surely reaches a new level of
legal creativity. Even in these days of stretching
time-tested legal doctrines to lengths that can
challenge the very notion of sanity, one would
think that an invasion of privacy lawsuit against
the photographer would be a non-starter—he
was, after all, simply someone who documented a public scene that he did not invite nor
peep through window shades to witness.
Penn, it likely will be remembered by readers of
The FIRE Quarterly and of newspapers in general, not to mention of the first chapter of The
Shadow University, was the university that
charged an undergraduate with racial harassment in 1993 when he shouted out of his dorm
window, to a loud and rowdy group of black
sorority sisters raising a ruckus in the middle of
the night: “Shut up, you water buffalo.” Even
though the student was able to prove that
“water buffalo” was not by any stretch a term of
racial animosity, the university persevered with
harassment charges until worldwide news coverage turned the university and its administration into an international laughing stock.
As a result of that case, the University’s trustees
forced the administration to pledge that Penn
would henceforth cease implementing any kind
of speech code. Until now, Penn became one
of the few university campuses in the nation to
assure its students of their right to free speech
Arguably, the university has not quite broken
its word in the current imbroglio. It has gone
after not a student speaker, but a student photographer who had the temerity to disclose
how presumably bored undergraduates spend
their leisure hours. And, in fairness, when higher-level administrators learned what was happening, they quickly ended what the lower-level student life bureaucrats had begun.
Shoot the messenger, indeed. This case fits the
pattern for so many of FIRE’s cases, where
deans of student life, heads of student conduct
disciplinary boards, and other such administrators in the fast-growing student life bureaucra-
FIRE Seeks Summer Interns
About the Publication
Volume 4 Number 1
The FIRE Quarterly is published four times
a year by the Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education.
The mission of FIRE is to defend and sustain individual rights at America’s increasingly repressive and partisan colleges and
universities. These rights include freedom
of speech, legal equality, due process,
religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience—the essential qualities of individual liberty and dignity. FIRE’s core mission is to protect the unprotected and to
educate the public and communities of
concerned Americans about the threats to
these rights on our campuses and about
the means to preserve them.
FIRE is a charitable and educational taxexempt foundation within the meaning of
Section 501 (c) (3) of the Internal Revenue
Code. Contributions to FIRE are deductible
to the fullest extent provided by tax laws.
Managing Editor: Robert L. Pfaltzgraff III
Content Editors: Laura Brezin
Michael S. Tseng
Layout & Design: Yoonsun Chung
How to Reach Us
FIRE
601 Walnut Street, Suite 510
Philadelphia, PA 19106
Phone.....................................215-717-3473
Fax......................................... 215-717-3440
E-mail................................. [email protected]
On the web:
thefire.org
IRE is looking for dynamic, energetic, responsible, and versatile
undergraduate students to participate in our summer internship program. Each summer, FIRE provides direct
experience in the defense of civil liberties
to qualified students who are committed to
FIRE’s mission. Qualified students will possess excellent research, writing, and communication skills as well as good judgment,
focus, organization, an ability to work
under pressure, and a sense of humor.
F
All FIRE interns do substantive work on
behalf of rights, liberty, and individual dignity. Undergraduate interns spend approximately half their time undertaking crucial
research for FIRE’s Spotlight: The Campus
Freedom Resource. The rest of their time is
spent assisting a specific mentor on FIRE’s
full-time staff. Past interns have gained valuable experience in fundraising, public relations, information technology, FIRE’s casework, and other areas.
The program also
features weekly
seminars by experts
on campus civil liberties, social activities, and outings to
attractions in historic Philadelphia.
A previous intern
FIRE Summer Interns (2005)
offers this insight
into the program: “I was able to learn the
ins and outs of a nonprofit, explore the
East Coast, and defend the Constitution.
It’s hard to beat a summer like that.”
Undergraduate summer internships begin
Monday, June 12, and end Friday, August
11; legal internships are negotiable.
Summer interns receive a stipend of $800
per month. To apply, please fax or e-mail a
cover letter, résumé, and two written
recommendations to FIRE at 215-717-3440
or [email protected]. The application deadline is March 31.
Campus Conscience Police? continued from page 9
For example, in April 2005, the group
Princeton Faith and Action sought official
student status. Its application was denied
because PFA is connected to an outside
organization (the Christian Union) that was
not yet established at Princeton University.
Other groups were not required to meet a
similar standard.
On May 13, the student newspaper The
Daily Princetonian reported, “Nassau Hall
has reversed its policy on the recognition
of religious student groups after being
contacted by an outside civil liberties
organization that protested the treatment
of one such group as an ‘ongoing injustice.’”
The right to judge for yourself what is true
and false, what is right and wrong is a prerequisite for both freedom of speech and
freedom of religion. The right of conscience is the bottom line of personal liberty itself. And it is being reasserted.
Wendy McElroy is the editor of ifeminists.com and a research fellow for the Independent
Institute in Oakland, Calif. She is the author and editor of many books and articles,
including the new book Liberty for Women: Freedom and Feminism in the 21st Century.
From the Board of Directors continued from page 10
cies act as if they are working in a summer
discipline camp rather than a university.
Sometimes higher-level administrators
intervene and nip such outrages in the
bud. At other times, higher-level administrators go along, fearing to quash any
charge parading as “harassment.” No wonder we at FIRE believe that FIRE’s work
likely will not soon be done. The adminis-
trators who supply us with so much work
seem prone to recidivism, and universities
seem institutionally incapable of ridding
campuses of such repressive regimes once
and for all.
Harvey A. Silverglate is FIRE’s cofounder
and a member of its Board of Directors.
He can be reached at [email protected].
Spring 2006
11
The Last Word
Students defy UNC Greensboro’s ludicrous “free speech zone” policy and illustrate its absurdity
by staging a protest outside of that “free speech zone.” At many colleges and universities, it is
all too often the students—and not the administrators entrusted with power—who are the
strongest advocates for the essential values of a liberal education.
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