My Freedom Watch column on the death of parody on American
college campuses, which appears in the Boston
Phoenix ’s August 1st issue, provoked more of a response than
any of my columns in recent memory. My email in-box was jammed with messages,
largely from those who agreed with me, but a few from less-than-convinced (or
at least less-than-happy) readers. I encouraged some of the more perspicacious
writers to direct their comments to the letters-to-the-editor page. Overall, I
got a sense of declining respect for campus culture – which, I have to admit,
has been precisely my own response to the takeover of campuses by the
post-modern sensibility that values propaganda over free speech and elevates
cultural and political goals over due process and fact-finding in student
disciplinary proceedings. (My fuller arguments concerning these dangers are
laid out in Alan Charles Kors’ and my 1998 book, The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty
on America’s
Campuses (paperback from HarperPerennial, 1999).
Among the
more interesting comments, however, were those concerning the central part of
my column: how censorship came to Harvard Law School (HLS) just as Barack Obama
was graduating from both the school and from his position as President of The Harvard Law Review. One
administrator at HLS commented on the piece generally without referring to the
central role the school played in my discussion of the death of parody in
academia at large. In other words, mum’s the word or, as they say in the real
world, “no comment.”
A faculty member said that things
at HLS were as bad as ever, although it had been my personal impression that the current dean, Elena Kagan, was a significant improvement over her
predecessor Robert Clark, who seemed willing to sacrifice just about any
principle in order to keep the restless natives quiet and calm on his watch.
Still another faculty member reminded
me that the overwhelming faculty vote for adoption of the infamous HLS Sexual
Harassment Guidelines, which swept within its prohibition a broad variety of
speech traditionally protected by academic freedom, perhaps understated the
degree of faculty opposition to the censorship inherent in the measure. As I noted
in the piece, the radioactive atmosphere led some fair-minded faculty to vote
for the Guidelines as the lesser of the available evils.
I did, in
my column, point out that the HLS faculty’s peripatetic fighter for liberty,
Alan Dershowitz, voted for the Guidelines with major reservations and only
after certain modifications were made to the Code. Dershowitz did, indeed,
defend the rights of the parodists, arguing vociferously that the parody was
protected speech under both the First Amendment and principles of academic
freedom. He managed to get a provision inserted into the Guidelines that purported
to exempt from prohibition any speech that would be protected under the First
Amendment. (However, this “First Amendment savings clause” provision found its
way into only one section of the Guidelines, and it was still the student’s
risk that he or she would potentially guess
wrong as to whether a particular parody would fall within the protected
category.) Dershowitz and perhaps a
few others voted for the Guidelines only because it was the best alternative in
a situation that was rife with faculty and administration anger at free speech.
A couple of faculty members, utterly disgusted with the goings-on, refused to
show up for the faculty vote at all. It is hard to say that these were “purists”
for heroically boycotting the whole
scene, or whether they simply threw in the towel and thereby enabled the
censors.
All in all,
it was a very unhappy time at HLS, and it may well be that there would be more
opposition to the Guidelines had the parody arisen today rather than in 1992.
But I wouldn’t bet on it. The small
number of faculty members who opposed the Guidelines, including Dershowitz who
voted for them, are much nearer to the end of their careers than to the
beginning, and they are being replaced by younger faculty members whose
fidelity to academic freedom in the face of a demand for politically-correct placating has not yet been sorely tested. The
sad fact, in my estimation, remains: There are still things Harvard Law students
could safely say in Harvard Square that they wouldn’t dare utter in Harvard
Yard.