By Harvey Silverglate 

            Three cheers for Margery Eagan for her July 8^th Boston Herald column’s deft skewering of those who have reacted with horror and, even worse, threats of future censorship toward this year’s Beverly Farms Horribles Parade, posted on YouTube.  Eagan alone appears to understand the appropriateness of the biting – even crude and vicious – satire directed at the whole brouhaha over whether a group of teenage mothers-to-be in Gloucester got together to plan their deliveries at about the same time.

            Most of the controversy has revolved around the question of whether the girls planned this gala as a group pregnancy, or whether so many pregnancies in one high school were simply a coincidence. (Dan Kennedy has written about this bizarre controversy competently, as usual, on his blog). But Eagan has addressed another aspect that gets to the heart of the matter: What’s wrong with satirizing the bad judgment of these girls, whether they have gotten pregnant as a group project or individually, in bringing babies into the world in a manner statistically likely to wreck the lives of both babies and mothers?

True, the satire, as reported by Eagan, was as crude as it was vicious; the parade included “floats featuring women’s legs splayed as if at the gynecologist and signs like: ‘We got Humped, Now We’ve Got Bumps.’” The good townspeople are criticizing the satirists, but, as Eagan argues persuasively, the real problem is the bevy of pregnant teens who have earned the criticism, not for having sex, but for producing a small army of babies under very unpromising life-circumstances.

            If parents in town don’t want their 5-year-olds to view such a risqué Horribles parade, suggests Eagan, they should keep the kids at home. After all, the nature of the parade floats is by now well-known and utterly predictable. “The Horribles parade is a long-standing, thoroughly offensive tradition in town, fully advertised as such,” reported the columnist.

There is a point to be made in delivering harsh and heartless criticism of reckless conduct such as that exhibited by the teenaged mothers. The heartaches that accompany single-parent motherhood at such a young age invariably impact the young mothers far more than the teenaged fathers, Eagan notes. “In real life it’s girls who get left. It’s girls whose minds we must change.” Satire and parody are among the most potent social formats for delivering withering critiques in an effort to change views and behavior, even if that satire comes, unappetizingly, from over-privileged residents of a tony suburb.

One of the more disturbing developments of contemporary society is the widespread hostility to parody and satire, demonstrated by people and institutions that should know better. I’ve written and agitated at length, for example, over the hostility demonstrated by institutions of higher education toward student-authored parodies and satires about important social and political issues. That our society criticizes the satirists rather than the people being satirized tells us that we’re unprepared to face up to difficult social problems, and so we try to shoot the messenger.

In a puritan streak, Harvard University has forced several student groups who were planning on hosting a "Barely Legal" party to change the name -- or they otherwise couldn't hold the party, according to the Harvard Crimson and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). (Disclosure: Free For All writer Harvey Silverglate is Chairman of the Board of Directors of FIRE.) One student involved in the party's planning explained that the name was meant to imply the party "is going to be so crazy it should be illegal," but other students complained about the allusions to pornography. It's unfortunate that students are so sensitive on college campuses that they force their classmates to apologize even though their party ideas aren't "intended to imply statutory rape," but it's even more unfortunate that Harvard has shamelessly capitulated to student complaints and prevented students from expressing themselves. In the words of FIRE President Greg Lukianoff, "If Harvard is willing to censor something as small as a party with a mild theme, how can we believe that it will defend the expression of truly controversial views on its campus?"

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.

By Harvey Silverglate

As engines of creativity and innovation, colleges are always pushing the envelope on scholarship. While this is usually good – since it broadens our culture’s collective knowledge – occasionally you see some really idiotic proposals and research agendas coming out of the American academy. And each time you think you’ve seen the last truly dumb idea – at least for a while – emerge from a college campus, along comes an even dumber one to challenge your grasp on reality.

The Chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder, G. P. “Bud” Peterson, has proposed a new endowed chair in “Conservative Thought and Policy” that would (not necessarily, but most likely) be held by a politically conservative professor. The announcement comes as Peterson is seeking to raise the funds necessary to create the professorship. Peterson is a rare Republican at the helm of an American public university – especially one of national prominence like Colorado’s. Indeed, the picture is the same at most private universities, though less so at private religious institutions and the service academies. With this kind of background, it’s understandable that he would notice the grip that the academic left has on higher education.

It’s important to note that the academic left is not coterminous with traditional liberalism. Quite the opposite is true. I’m referring to the whackjob sociological, political, literary and other such theories and authoritarian tendencies of critical theorists and others in dubious academic disciplines. Alan Charles Kors and I dealt with this phenomenon – I hope – in our 1998 book, The Shadow University.

Despite Peterson’s political leanings – and his presumptively good-faith desire to develop more ideological diversity in higher education – if the problem is higher education’s intolerance for views outside the left’s agenda du jour, the solution of hiring a token conservative professor would exacerbate rather than cure the problem.

For one thing, the problem on campuses isn’t a perceived schism between “liberals” and “conservatives.” The idea that campuses are “liberal” is a myth. As I said earlier, the academic left differs markedly from those who fit the mold of traditional liberalism, with its focus on, for example, free speech. Though the litany of censorship cases on American campuses is legion, it’s not that “liberals” and “conservatives” are suppressing student and faculty speech. Instead, that’s the job of campus totalitarians on the far right and the far left alike. (That today there are far more totalitarians of the far left than of the far right on college campuses is not a comment on the relative merits of one over the other. It is just that the crazy left happens to have the upper hand right now in academia.)

For another, the notion that only a conservative is qualified to hold a chair in “Conservative Thought and Policy” is a parody on affirmative action. Should universities require that endowed chairs in Judaic Studies, for example, be held by a Jew? (So far it’s not clear that Peterson’s proposal would limit the position to conservatives, but the implication is that the school would be looking for a scholar/true-believer to fill the spot.) Is it the academic discipline – the study of conservative thought – that Chancellor Peterson wishes to bring to Colorado, or just a conservative? It doesn’t seem like a well-thought-out plan. (And besides, what does it say for the general conservative distaste for affirmative action programs when they drop their presumptively principled opposition when the policy instead benefits a group they do happen to like – namely, themselves?)

The fundamental problem with the proposal is that it does not deal with the underlying outrage that besets higher education today: the fact that our university campuses are among the least free institutions in our society. Ideally, campuses should be among the most free since academic freedom is, at least in theory, central to the pursuit of knowledge and the practice of higher education. Until we solve this central problem, one has to give conservative polemicist George Will some credit for his response to the Wall Street Journal's query: “Like Margaret Mead among the Samoans, they’re planning to study conservatives. That’s hilarious.” By the way, Will’s name has been bandied around as a possible candidate to fill the new chair, but it looks like they’ll have to find another specimen – perhaps one less sensitive about being treated like the subject of an anthropological study.

    The Waltham-based university named after the late and great Supreme Court Justice, Louis D. Brandeis, champion of free speech and free thought, has just achieved the dubious distinction of winning one of the “muzzle awards” given out annually by the highly respected Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, located in Charlottesville, Virginia.

    Twelve “winners” were picked this year, and Brandeis was chosen for its utterly incomprehensible efforts to punish a tenured faculty member, long-time Professor Donald Hindley, for his having used the word “wetback” in what turns out to be a perfectly appropriate and relevant manner during a lecture on Mexican politics and culture. It’s an offensive word, Brandeis’ Provost concluded, notwithstanding the available evidence that Professor Hindley was actually criticizing the racist use of the term. (Of course, even if Hindley approved of such use of the term, it would be his right. But the irony of punishing an anti-racist classroom lecture, on grounds of racial or ethnic intolerance or harassment, is just too much.)

    The battle against the Brandeis censors in the Hindley case as well as other recent attempts at suppression of speech has been taken up by the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education , of which I am co-founder and currently serve as Chairman of the Board of Directors. It is nice to see that the First Amendment Center agrees that battling censorship at Brandeis is a worthy goal. Maybe Brandeis President Yehuda Reinharz will begin to get the hint and undertake a conversion of Brandeis’ culture into something that Justice Brandeis would recognize and of which he would approve.

                                        Harvey Silverglate

A report by Boston Globe federal courts reporter Shelley Murphy is as interesting for what it omits as for what it reports.

The story involves what appears to be an allegation that Boston FBI Supervisory Agent Robert Callen either bullied, or harassed, or otherwise acted inappropriately toward an un-named “female federal prosecutor” at a meeting in the federal courthouse in 2006. Callen allegedly came up behind the unnamed prosecutor – who was assigned at the time to the Organized Crime Strike Force – put his arm around her in a headlock, and gave what the Globe article describes as “a Three Stooges-style noogie.”

This office incident – as anyone with an older brother can attest, undoubtedly one of the worst things that can be done to you at a tender young age – led to a year-long investigation and ultimately a recommendation that Callen and two other unnamed agents (let’s call them Curly and Larry) be fired. Of course, the “noogie” itself might not be the grounds for the dismissal recommendation. Rather, investigators from the FBI inspector general’s office concluded that Callen and the two other agents were not truthful when questioned about the incident.

Murphy reveals that her decision not to publish the name of the offended prosecutor was based on a request from Acting U.S. Attorney Michael K. Loucks. However, Murphy apparently learned the victim’s name for the story, and in fact reached the prosecutor, who “now handles drug cases,” by phone.

This instance of the Globe’s skittishness when it comes to publishing “sensitive” information comes on the heels of my recent Boston Phoenix Freedom Watch column. There, I complained about the Globe’s policy of not spelling out the actual four-letter words and other expletives involved in FCC censorship stories, where the actual words are crucial to the legal issues. So yet again I am astounded to see the Globe self-censor and sacrifice truth for style or political correctness – the refusal to publish the name of an alleged victim of harassment while naming the alleged harasser – an especially egregious violation of the public’s right to know since the alleged victim is a public servant and not an ordinary private citizen.

And, while we’re at it, there’s another aspect to the story that is troubling: When regular citizens are caught lying to the feds, the penalty is usually a “false statement” indictment under Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001, which makes it a felony, punishable by five years in prison, to make a “material” misstatement to a federal official. Instead of being indicted, the three FBI agents are heading for mere dismissal even though they didn’t tell the truth when talking to investigators. This is just another aspect of the double standards that more and more characterize our culture.

We’re living in a Three Stooges world.

                                             Harvey Silverglate

By James F. Tierney

Two weeks ago, Harvey Silverglate blogged about a federal Magistrate Judge, Wayne Brazil, who overturned a “civility code” at San Francisco State University on the grounds that it targeted speech and expression that falls under the protection of the First Amendment. (The case was brought by the officers of SFSU's College Republicans, who were investigated under the civility code when students complained they had insulted Muslims by stepping on the Hamas and Hezbollah flags -- which contain the word “Allah” in Arabic script -- during an anti-terrorism rally.) The opinion is available here.

            One of the craftiest semantic tricks adopted by campus censors since the mid-1980s used to suppress unpopular viewpoints and supposedly offensive speech on campus has been the “civility code,” a close relative of the “harassment code.” The latter has received more attention by commentators as well as courts. But free speech advocates have been slow to recognize the dangers posed by codes that insist that students be civil to one another – or else. It is the “or else” that makes these codes mandatory, and hence a form of censorship.

            On November 7^th, U.S. Magistrate-Judge Wayne Brazil, sitting in federal court in San Francisco, made one of the clearest statements I’ve yet seen as to why forced civility, innocuous as the term may sound, can all too easily be turned into a speech code and lead to unconstitutional censorship. Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian public interest organization, and supported by the non-partisan and wholly-secular Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (disclosure: I co-founded FIRE and currently serve as Board of Directors chairman), Brazil issued a preliminary injunction against San Francisco State University’s so-called civility code. The jurist said that the school could enforce the portion of the code that prohibited true intimidation and harassment but it could not conflate those concepts with the act of merely telling someone something he or she did not want to hear. This ruling sends the clear message that before a public college or university – which, being a governmental institution, is bound by the constitution’s free speech provision – may shut a student up, it must actually show that the speech or conduct can reasonably be seen “to threaten or endanger the health or safety of any other person,” not just make him or her uncomfortable.

            Of course, there’s nothing wrong with civility, but, like much that is virtuous, it must be the product of voluntary self-restraint, not orders barked by an intrusive (and unconstitutional) campus feel-good bureaucracy. Magistrate-Judge Brazil said he would issue a written opinion, which we’ll be looking for. Meanwhile, let us each do a good deed and find someone today to whom to be voluntarily civil.

            As Jenna Russell reported in The Boston Globe, Vermont’s largest city finds itself cursed (some among the “gown” might say blessed, but the “town” more accurately says cursed) with a 4-acre, $61 million complex that university officials have pawned off on the public as “a symbol of growth and revitalization at the smallest public flagship campus in the country.” The186,000 square foot monstrosity houses offices for student clubs, a food court, a bank, a copy shop, a bookstore, a ballroom, and a game room “with pool tables, lounge chairs and a fireplace."

            The building has to be seen as more than a mere architectural error, inappropriate for the otherwise sylvan setting of this traditional, even if bustling, New England city.  There is a further and perhaps more fundamental question – not raised in the Globe report and rarely discussed in reports about the massive building campaigns in progress on campuses all around the country: Why is it that the modern university seeks, more and more, to keep its students glued to the campus rather than to encourage them to venture out into the city or town in which it’s located?

  One thing is sure: Burlington is going to be seeing far fewer students venturing off the campus to eat at local restaurants and cafes, visiting Ben & Jerry’s, transacting business at the local bank, using the services of the local copy shop, seeing what’s on the shelves at the local bookstore, or attending a social event outside of the campus ballroom. Stores and shops on the main drags and smaller by-ways in this college town will gradually dwindle, and once-vibrant unique local businesses will be the first to go, in much the same way Harvard Square has lost most of its quirky independent businesses and modestly-priced student-suitable eateries over the last couple of decades. When I arrived in Cambridge to attend law school in 1964, there were three all-night cafeterias in the Square. Now, there are none. I met more interesting people at the Patisserie Française than on the Harvard campus, but that café moved out years ago, as Harvard established more and more on-campus eateries and cafes. Even Harvard’s Lamont Library recently opened its own late-night café, lest a student be inconvenienced in having to leave the stacks in order to get some caffeine.

  The tendency of colleges – in Burlington, Cambridge, and just about everywhere else – to turn the campus into a company town of sorts, and keep the students penned in rather than out on the town, surely helps preserve the oddly isolated culture that has afflicted American campuses of higher education, where the values and practices of the “real world” grow more and more remote everyday. Only on a campus, after all, could limiting protests to one gazebo seem like a good idea. Only on a campus could the definition of the term “harassment” be watered down so much that it includes engaging in pure political speech, such as publishing unflattering facts about a world religion, or engaging in an anti-affirmative action bake sale that satirically illustrates its point by discounting prices to certain races. Only on a campus could a collection of Palestinian artwork be removed because it advocated only one side of a divisive issue.

   Even at Harvard Law School, the apex of the American legal establishment, there is a speech code – dubbed “Sexual Harassment Guidelines” – that grew out of a 1990’s student parody of feminist legal theory. Today students may safely engage in parody or other “offensive” speech in Harvard Square (protected by the venerable First Amendment, after all) that would be punishable if spoken in Harvard Yard or Harvard Law School. A student may not, at Harvard, engage in the kind of parody we normal citizens freely watch every night on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.” Our campuses of higher education, once the most free places in our society, are now the second least free (outranked, still, by our maximum security prisons).

             I’m not saying that providing a student on the campus with everything he or she needs is solely, or even largely responsible for the increasingly wide chasm between the campus and “the real world” that is characterized by the typical American urban street. (That’s a subject that my co-author and I tried to explore in our 1998 book The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses). But I think that this isolation does facilitate the successful indoctrination of students with multicultural and gender-related sensitivity training, speech codes, and other aspects of the tendentious and nauseatingly politically correct modern academy that is at war with liberty, with truly liberal education, and with the greater society. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan’s famous speech aimed at then Soviet Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev, it’s time to tear down this wall, or perhaps this student center. The increasing isolation of gown from town can bode nothing but ill for both society and higher education.

  I’m equally dismayed at the ADL’s poor handling of this fiasco. I wrote earlier that the ADL finds itself in a hole largely of its own digging (see “Genocide and its Partisans: What the ADL Did Wrong”). And if you think that the ADL’s flip-flop on the G-word is going to make this flap disappear, think again. The ADL’s poorly conceived and essentially dishonest explanation of its reversal has opened the door for yet more attacks.

Of course, the ADL won’t admit that it caved to the Armenian lobby. So in a textbook PR move, the organization tries to claim that reversing its stance was its own idea all along (“We have always described the painful events of 1915-1918 perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians as massacres and atrocities”).