Last September, Harvey wrote in The Free For All about Star Simpson -- the MIT student who was arrested at Logan Airport for wearing a (prank) sweatshirt displaying a working circuit board connected to a battery -- and predicted that "there is no way prosecutors can convince twelve sane jurors that a student, wearing such a sweatshirt with the flashing lights tacked onto the outside rather than hidden underneath her clothing, was actually trying to perpetrate a hoax that she was a suicide bomber." Well, this morning's Boston Herald confirmed Harvey's prediction, reporting that the DA's office decided not to pursue the hoax charges because they could not have proven her "intent to cause anxiety, unrest, fear or personal discomfort" -- a necessary element of the crime -- to a jury. Instead, she gets pre-trial probation for the disorderly conduct charge, and prosecutors plan to drop that charge in a year if she completes community service and doesn't get into any more trouble. 

Updated (6/10/08 1:30pm): Readers who access The Free For All through the old site rather than the new site might see this post misattributed below to Wendy Kaminer because of software limitations with the old system. The post was penned by James Tierney, a research assistant for Harvey Silverglate.

Every few weeks a story pops up about how someone – often a college student or an employee who has been fed propaganda to the effect that he or she is entitled to live an offense-free life – was “harassed” because someone else left nasty comments on their door dry-erase board, or some such thing. The most recent example comes from the University of North Dakota, where one student was just charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct for smearing ice cream on the wall of the dorm elevator to write the words “Scott is a Jew.” Of course, the local DA’s office was right to charge the kid with a crime: smearing ice cream on an elevator wall is arguably a crime of defacement – although permanent things like spray paint would make a more air-tight case – and if a jury agrees, the smearer should be punished. Writing slogans on public dormitory spaces, other than your own, or on bulletin boards and other spaces reserved for personal, non-communal use is also defacement. In neither case does it, nor should it matter what the content or point-of-view is. According to the article, “North Dakota law carries no special designation for hate crimes,” but in other states and on college campuses all around the country, this is not the case. Students elsewhere often find themselves in trouble on the basis of what they said, rather than on the basis of the defacement itself.

Graffiti has the ability to offend whether it says “Scott is a Jew” or “Fuck the Police!” -- or even an artistic rendition of Jesus Christ on a building’s exterior wall. So instead of using massive administrative infrastructure (in the college setting) and wasting juries’ time (in a criminal justice setting) trying to determine whether something was subjectively offensive (thus constituting some loose definition of “harassment”), colleges should adopt content- and viewpoint-neutral rules concerning what is essentially graffiti when written anywhere other than public bulletin boards (or the equivalent). This simple fix would save schools and police departments money, and would prevent students and other citizens from being punished for their opinions.

Just when you think you’ve heard the last politically correct, holier-than-thou pronouncement coming out of our university campuses for a while, you open the morning’s newspaper and find more inanities. This morning’s two-minutes-outrage is a rant from campus professors, researchers and administrators criticizing Big Tobacco for giving – and universities for accepting – no-strings-attached grants for health-related research at Boston University, Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of technology, and the University of Massachusetts. 

“Taking money from the tobacco industry to conduct scientific research is like the DA taking money from the Mafia to conduct investigations of crime,” Gregory Connolly, a prof at Harvard School of Public Health, is quoted by the Boston Globe as saying. Connolly may be an expert in his field, but he clearly is ill-informed about how the government funds its anti-Mafia investigations. In fact, state and local prosecutors rely on mob and other criminal money, collected through the asset forfeiture programs enacted in many jurisdictions, to run those investigations and otherwise fund law enforcement offices. Private ill-gotten gains are thus redirected into the law enforcement coffer, then subsequently turned around and aimed back at the criminal syndicates.

Of course, Mafia kingpins aren’t being generous or philanthropic when they “fund” activities that are clearly against their own self-interests through this process. By contrast, the Globe article shows that Big Tobacco is actually voluntarily forking over big bucks for health-related research – especially into those diseases that the companies’ products help cause in the first place. There’s a certain justice to this, no? Besides, what would Professor Connolly prefer Philip Morris do with the money instead of donating it to universities – add to its tobacco advertising budget?

Dr. Michael Siegel of B.U.’s School of Public Health fears that the tobacco companies will be “using the good name” of the various academic institutions. Isn’t that what virtually all donors are trying to do – and does Dr. Siegel propose that our colleges and universities do morality checks before accepting money from donors, much less before naming classrooms or even whole buildings after them? One can barely imagine how lists of alumni and other donors would quickly shrink. And, besides, whose test of morality would apply – Dr. Siegel’s?

One of the rare voices of sanity to come through this morass of pious bleating is that of researcher Rami Tzafriri of MIT. He defends his use of tobacco money “that does not compromise my independence.” It’s no coincidence, perhaps, that such sanity and honesty emanate from MIT, an institution still devoted to rational thought rather than to the latest intellectual and pseudo-political fashions of the day. (That’s why speech is freer at MIT than at most other academic institutions plagued by speech codes, but that’s a column for another day.) Academics at MIT are secure enough in their own professional scruples to understand that the source of their funds will not (at least in the case of no-strings-attached grants) compromise the methodologies or outcomes of their research. What does it say about the integrity of other schools’ faculties when professors start wringing their hands self-consciously, worrying about interference with research?

This interscholastic debate parallels a similar contretemps which broke out in the 1990’s at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). By that time the organization was experiencing severe tensions between, on the one hand, true-believer civil libertarians, and, on the other, those who wanted to turn the venerable organization into a “progressive” political group that would carry forward a political program rather than focus on free speech and other such liberty issues. (Such politicization would devastate the organization’s credibility as an honest broker for liberty. In fact, this battle continues today.) Then Executive Director Ira Glasser defended the group’s acceptance of no-strings-attached grants from Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. Morton Mintz strongly criticized Glasser in a series of reports and articles, including a Nieman Report (PDF) and an article in The Progressive. One did not have to be cynical to realize why Big Tobacco would support the ACLU – the companies were dependent on the nation’s tradition of allowing people to harm themselves if they really want do, as well as on the free speech arguments in favor of “commercial speech” (read: tobacco advertising). But as long as the ACLU was in control of how the money was spent, Glasser rightly refused to knuckle under to the PC crowd.

Hey – if the universities decide to do investigations of the good moral character of their donors as well as the ways in which they made their fortunes, I’d like to volunteer to be on that committee. I can probably get material for a few truly awesome columns, if not a screenplay or two.

                                                                    Harvey Silverglate