Free Speech on the Campus

...Informed of the complaint, Dolfman told the black students he had intended no offense, and he apologized if they had been offended...

...At more and more colleges, administrators—with the enthusiastic support of black students, women students, and liberal students—have been answering that question by preventing or punishing speech...

...The language sounds like a pietistic Sunday sermon, but if it ever falls wholly into disuse, neither this publication nor any other journal of opinion—Right or Left—will survive...

...Sending such ideas underground simply makes them stronger and more dangerous...

...Hackney was unmoved...

...indeed, his student course-evaluations had been outstanding...

...What is to be done, however, about speech alone—however disgusting, inflammatory, and rawly divisive that speech may be...

...Affirmative action," is the answer...

...The Nazi symbol has been spray-painted on the Jewish Student Union at Memphis State University...

...shall exist within the United States...

...Sometimes, college presidents and administrators sound as if they fully understand what Holmes was saying...

...Furthermore, there were mounting black-Jewish tensions on campus, and someone had to be sacrificed...

...At the University of California at Los Angeles, the student newspaper ran an editorial cartoon satirizing affirmative action...

...Yet consider what the same Sheldon Hackney did to the free-speech rights of a teacher at his own university...

...These and many more such signs of the resurgence of bigotry and know-nothing-ism throughout the society—as well as on campus—have to do solely with speech, including symbolic speech...

...At other campuses around the country, manifestations of racism are becoming commonplace...

...So, what does it say...

...At Yale, a swastika and the words White Power...

...He asked black students in the class if they could tell him what was in that amendment...

...A student who opposes affirmative action, for instance, can be branded a racist...

...In public universities, this is a clear violation of the First Amendment...

...The pressures to have the "right" attitude—as proved by having the "right" language in and out of class—can be stifling...

...When the opinion editor of the student newspaper at California State University at Northridge wrote an article asserting that the sanctions against the editor and art director at UCLA amounted to censorship, he was suspended too...

...His column on First Amendment issues appears four times a year...

...Yes, Virginia, there are racist assholes...

...Nat Hentoff Free Speech on the Campus A flier distributed at the University of Michigan some months ago proclaimed that blacks "don't belong in classrooms, they belong hanging from trees...

...Sort of like a Vietnamese reeducation camp...

...Where does this concept come from...

...They had not made these points in class, although Dolfman— unlike Professor Kingsfield—encourages rebuttal...

...It doesn't belong to everyone...

...Not when they engage in violence or vandalism...

...Dolfman looked around the room...

...The Thirteenth Amendment," said the teacher...

...After all, it was more important to go on record as vigorously opposing racism and sexism than to expose oneself to charges of insensitivity to these malignancies...

...But first he was forced to make a public apology to the entire university and then he was compelled to attend a "sensitivity and racial awareness" session...

...Finally, a cautious hand was raised: "The Constitution...

...But hardly any professors dissented, and among the students only members of the conservative Federalist Society spoke up for free speech...

...were painted on the building housing the University's Afro-American Cultural Center...

...For twenty-two years, Dolfman, a practicing lawyer in Philadelphia, had been a part-time lecturer in the Legal Studies Department of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School...

...After all, if students are to be "protected" from bad ideas, how are they going to learn to identify and cope with them...

...Barry Endick described the atmosphere at NYU created by "a host of watchdog committees and a generally hostile classroom reception regarding any student comment right of center...

...At the law school of the State University of New York at Buffalo, several women students have received anonymous letters characterized by one professor as venomously sexist...

...The Thirteenth Amendment provides that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude...

...There have also been physical assaults on black students and on black, white, and Asian women students, but the way to deal with physical attacks is clear: Call the police and file a criminal complaint...

...Sounding like the legendary Mayor Frank ("I am the law") Hague of Jersey City, who booted "bad speech" out of town, Chancellor Kaplan said, "This institution is not a lamppost standing on the street corner...

...I wanted them to really think about it," Dolfman told me recently, "and know its history...

...Each year students competed to get into his class...

...University of Wisconsin political science professor Carol Tebben thinks otherwise...

...Yet the University of Buffalo Law School provides no due-process procedures for a student booked for making any of these prohibited remarks...

...Open expression," said Hackney, "is the fundamental principle of a university...

...She believes university administrators "are getting confused when they are acting as censors and trying to protect students from bad ideas...

...Also forbidden are "other remarks based on prejudice and group stereotype...

...So much for free inquiry on that campus...

...And on a number of campuses, women have been singled out as targets of wounding and sometimes frightening speech...

...That's what George III used to say, too...

...In Madison, Wisconsin, The Capital Times ran a story in January about Chancellor Sheila Kaplan of the University of Wisconsin branch at Parkside, who ordered her campus to be scoured of "some anonymously placed white supremacist hate literature...

...A few conservative professors objected to the stigmatization of Murray Dolfman...

...He treats all students this way—regardless of race, creed, or sex...

...I know of no student dissent...

...Conceivably, a student caught playing a Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, or Sam Kinison album in his room could be tried for aggravated insensitivity by association...

...This day, Dolfman was pointing out that no one can be forced to work against his or her will—even if a contract has been signed...

...Dolfman was banished from the campus for what came to be a year...

...The black students in his class did not know what was in that amendment, and Dolfman had them read it aloud...

...On a November afternoon in 1984, Dolfman was lecturing about personal-service contracts...

...This "can be arguably viewed as symptomatic of a prevailing spirit of academic and social intolerance of...

...If any story distills the essence of the current decline of free speech on college campuses, it is the Ballad of Murray Dolfman...

...And you know what, the Constitution protects them, too...

...Why, the Chancellor, of course...

...You're better equipped to fight racism if you know all about those post-Civil War amendments and civil-rights laws...

...Professor Tebben's conviction that free speech means just that has become a decidedly minority view on many campuses...

...At Temple University, a White Students Union has been formed with some 130 members...

...Who better than a part-time Jewish teacher with no contract and no union...

...Accordingly, swift condemnation will befall anyone who engages in "remarks directed at another's race, sex, religion, national origin, age, or sex preference...

...We have ex-slaves here," Dolfman continued, "who should know about the Thirteenth Amendment...

...When I looked into this wholesale cleansing of bad speech at Buffalo, I found it had encountered scant opposition...

...If my children were still of college age and wanted to attend the University of Pennsylvania, I would tell them this story...

...At the University of Buffalo Law School, the faculty unanimously adopted a "Statement Regarding Intellectual Freedom, Tolerance, and Political Harassment...

...I think they can determine for themselves what ideas are bad...

...A student stops a rooster on campus and asks how the rooster got into UCLA...

...Said the appalled graduate: "Content-based prohibitions constitute prior restraint and should not be tolerated...

...His style somewhat resembles that of Professor Charles Kings-field in The Paper Chase...

...Dolfman insists that students he calls on be prepared—or suffer the consequences...

...The Student Press Law Center in Washington, D.C.—a vital source of legal support for student editors around the country—reports, for example, that at the University of Kansas, the student host and producer of a radio news program was forbidden by school officials from interviewing a leader of the Ku Klux Klan...

...In private colleges and universities, suppression of speech mocks the secular religion of academic freedom and free inquiry...

...Moreover, they said, they had no reason to be grateful for a constitutional amendment which gave them rights which should never have been denied them—and gave them precious little else...

...You would think that the law professors and administration at this public university might have known that...

...So did most liberals on the faculty...

...Where in the Constitution...

...We will lose our liberties," Dolfman often told his classes, "if we don't know what they are...

...Last year, for example, when The Daily Pennsylvanian—speaking for many at the University of Pennsylvania—urged that a speaking invitation to Louis Farrakhan be withdrawn, University President Sheldon Hackney disagreed...

...The fifty-strong chapter of the National Lawyers Guild was on the other side...

...One protester was David Gerald Jay, a graduate of the law school and a cooperating attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union...

...Indeed, those students most concerned with making the campus more "sensitive" to diversity exulted in Dolfman's humiliation...

...On this occasion, he told them that he and other Jews, as ex-slaves, spoke at Passover of the time when they were slaves under the Pharaohs so that they would remember every year what it was like not to be free...

...For twenty-two years, no complaint had ever been made against him...

...The students were looking everywhere but at Dolfman...

...But when they speak or write, racist assholes fall right into this Oliver Wendell Holmes definition—highly unpopular among bigots, liberals, radicals, feminists, sexists, and college administrators: "If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought—not free only for those who agree with us, but freedom for the thought we hate...

...He was sentenced by-George Orwell would have loved this—the Committee on Academic Freedom and Responsibility...

...ning "articles that perpetuate derogatory or cultural stereotypes...

...Who decides what speech can be heard or read by everyone...

...A court may prevent the resister from working for someone else so long as the contract is in effect but, Dolfman said, there can "be nothing that smacks of involuntary servitude...

...any idea which is not 'politically correct.'" He went on to say something that might well be posted on campus bulletin boards around the country, though it would probably be torn down at many of them: "We ought to examine why students, so anxious to wield the Fourteenth Amendment, give short shrift to the First...

...I don't think students need to be protected from bad ideas...

...That would not do—either for the black students or for the administration...

...On his way to the stocks, Dolfman told President Sheldon Hackney that if a part-time instructor "can be punished on this kind of charge, a tenured professor can eventually be booted out, then a dean, and then a president...

...The art director was also suspended...

...Later, they complained to university officials that they had been hurt and humiliated by having been referred to as ex-slaves...

...Nat Hentoff is the author of "The First Freedom " and many other books...

...This ukase is so broad that enforcement has to be alarmingly subjective...

...After outraged complaints from various minority groups, the editor was suspended for violating a publications policy against runRacist students have the right to speak or write what they wish, but try telling that to student radicals and university administrators...

...Its title implies support of intellectual freedom, but the statement warned students that once they enter "this legal community," their right to free speech musi become tempered "by the responsibility to promote equality and justice...

...But where else could I encourage them to go...

...Swastikas are not directed only at black students...

...At New York University Law School, a student was so disturbed by the pall of orthodoxy at that prestigious institution that he wrote to the school newspaper even though, as he said, he expected his letter to make him a pariah among his fellow students...

...No hands...