E-Mail This Article to a Friend Send out the clowns (continued)

The Supreme Court ruled in similar fashion four years later on a closely related issue when it upheld the constitutionality of so-called hate speech. It unanimously reversed a conviction under a municipal ordinance criminalizing cross-burning or the use of any other symbol "which one knows or has reasonable grounds to know arouses anger, alarm or resentment in others on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender." While all the justices agreed that hate speech was protected, a majority added that the ordinance doubly violated the First Amendment by virtue of its selective enforcement against only a certain point of view. The application of this ruling to UMass’s actions could not be clearer. Whether speech communicates love, hate, or something in between, it’s all protected in this country. And, of course, it’s doubly protected on college and university campuses, because notions of "academic freedom" join to supplement the First Amendment.

So even if the parody were a form of "hate speech," it would be protected. But this was not hate speech at all; it was simply poking fun at the overwrought, unfair, hypersensitive, and politically opportunistic accusations of "racism" hurled at students who opposed racial quotas. That didn’t prevent Gargano from telling the campus newspaper, the Daily Collegian, in a September 27 article: "I have the authority to remove these people from office.... I could give them 500 hours of community service, have them conduct an open-forum discussion; I have a variety of sanctions at my disposal. I’m not ruling out dismissal." He urged the offending parodists — by then dubbed "the KKK Nine" by administrators and faculty slumming for political rectitude — to resign from student office. "Are we clear?" he warned them in the pages of the campus newspaper. "Resign!" Gargano was obviously pressuring the students into "voluntary" resignation in order to avoid an all-out war under the scrutiny of civil-liberties groups and the national news media.

Gargano’s strategy appears to have worked so far. Higgins resigned from the SGA at the end of September, and the administration has built a wall of secrecy around the whole matter. According to inquiring reporters and others, Gargano responds to questions simply by noting that the students have already been reprimanded by the university, claiming he cannot say what was done to them so as to protect their privacy. In other words, under the guise of protecting students’ privacy, the taxpayers who pay the salaries of Gargano and UMass Amherst chancellor John Lombardi, who has gone beyond mere pandering by creating a 22-member Commission on Racial Diversity to address the supposed crisis, are not allowed to learn the details of their gross violations of students’ constitutional and academic-freedom rights. The students, understandably frightened, have issued no public statement.

So far, letters of protest written by David French, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), on October 7, and by attorney William C. Newman, staff counsel and director of the Western Massachusetts Office of the ACLU of Massachusetts, on October 3, have not forced the administration to back down. (Disclosure: I am a co-founder and current board member of FIRE, as well as an ACLU of Massachusetts board member.) The disciplinary action was actually imposed after those letters were received by Lombardi and Gargano.

LOMBARDI AND Gargano clearly have some understanding of First Amendment rights, and that makes their treatment of Higgins and his band of merry jesters all the more egregious. A year ago, the Daily Collegian found itself in the national spotlight following the combat death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman, who had left a successful football career in the NFL, joined the Army, and gone to fight in Afghanistan. UMass Amherst graduate student Rene Gonzales wrote a column for the Collegian that called Tillman "an idiot ... this ... ‘G.I. Joe’ guy who got what was coming to him" for "acting out his nationalist-patriotic fantasies forged in years of exposure to Clint Eastwood and Rambo movies." The column gained national attention for its outrageous insensitivity. When the inevitable attacks began against the student columnist, University of Massachusetts president Jack Wilson issued a statement denouncing the article as "a disgusting, arrogant and intellectually immature attack on a human being who died in service to his country." Still, he defended the columnist’s free-speech rights, stating: "While I recognize Rene Gonzalez’s right of free speech, I must also assert my right of free speech to criticize what he said." Rightly, the university administration protected the student’s highly offensive and controversial exercise of his free-speech rights, and added its own views to the free marketplace of ideas.

So it is all the more disheartening that while the administration admirably protected columnist Gonzalez’s right to offend millions of citizens at a moment of wartime tragedy, it has acted wholly unreasonably — and unconstitutionally — in its treatment of students who are perceived as out of sync with current campus orthodoxies. These administrators need to be reminded that there are greater values at stake in higher education than a quiet campus, or, for that matter, a politically correct one.

Harvey Silverglate is a regular Phoenix "Freedom Watch" contributor. Dan Poulson assisted in the preparation of this piece.