-Caveat Lector-
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> ------- <Picture: WND Exclusive Commentary>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> ------- Muzzling the speech cops
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> -------
>
> By Ralph R. Reiland
> © 1999 WorldNetDaily.com
>
> Reversing the speech code craze on campus, the University of
> Wisconsin has called off the speech police by becoming the first
> major university in the nation at which a faculty vote abolished
> all campus harassment codes.
>
> It was chancellor Donna Shalala who established Wisconsin's
> stringent speech regulations a decade ago, setting limits on
> expression and punishments for any who dared to stray too far
> from the current orthodoxies of the Left. "American society is
> racist and sexist," she proclaimed at the time. "In the 1960s, we
> were frustrated about all this. But now, we are in a position to
> do something about it." In a position, too, to bludgeon anyone
> who's right-of-center into silence.
>
> Wisconsin's students succeeded in getting Shalala's speech code
> declared unconstitutional in 1991. The school's "content-based
> restrictions on speech has the effect of limiting the diversity
> of ideas among students, thereby preventing the 'robust exchange
> of ideas' which intellectually diverse campuses provide," ruled
> Federal District Judge Robert Warren. "Suppression of speech," he
> concluded, "even where the speech's content appears to have
> little value and great costs, amounts to governmental thought
> control."
>
> Left intact by Warren's decision was a separate faculty speech
> code, now voided, that imposed punishment on professors who
> created an "intimidating or demeaning" environment, a statute
> covering "all expression, teaching materials, student
> assignments, lectures and instructional techniques" that anyone
> of a particular "gender, race, cultural background, ethnicity,
> sexual orientation or handicap" might find "objectionable."
>
> As a footnote, it's the same Donna Shalala, now Bill Clinton's
> Secretary of Health and Human Services, who recently lost a
> unanimous decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals, "United Seniors
> USA vs. Shalala." The court ruled that the 1997 federal
> regulation that prevented doctors from treating any Medicare
> patients for two years if they contracted privately for medical
> services with any Medicare patient, free from any cost to the
> taxpayers, imposed an unconstitutional harm on seniors by denying
> them control over their own health care and private spending. As
> at Wisconsin, Shalala's I-know-what's-good-for-you central
> planning paradigm was judged to be in direct violation of
> fundamental American rights and principles.
>
> Shalala, unfortunately, was hardly the only true-believer in
> academe who sought to create unhostile environments and insure
> common decency through thought control, coerced sensitivity,
> mandatory sensitivity training sessions that smacked of political
> re-education camps, and the suppression of free speech. Across
> the nation, said Jeane Kirkpatrick, American universities were
> turning into "islands of repression in a sea of freedom."
> Choosing censorship and shunning over counter-speech and free
> thought, the "neo-McCarthyites of the righteous Left," in Nat
> Hentoff's phrase, had become wholly fearful of lively debate and
> fully allergic to contentious places.
>
> "The most serious problems of freedom of expression in our
> society today exist on our campuses," said Yale University
> president Benno Schmidt. "On many campuses around the country,
> perhaps most, there is little resistance to growing pressure to
> suppress and to punish, rather than to answer, speech that
> offends notions of civility and community. Offensive speech
> cannot be suppressed under open-ended standards without letting
> loose an engine of censorship that cannot be controlled. To
> stifle expression is, apart from an invasion of the rights of
> others, a disastrous reflection on the idea of a university. A
> university is a place where people have to have the right to
> speak the unspeakable and think the unthinkable and challenge the
> unchallengeable."
>
> At Stanford, a rigid speech code prohibited all expression that
> "constitutes harassment," i.e., words "intended to insult or
> stigmatize," words that might by their "very utterance inflict
> injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace."
> Stanford law professor Charles Lawrence argued that the First
> Amendment "presupposes a world characterized by equal opportunity
> and the absence of societally created and culturally ingrained
> and internalized racism, sexism and homophobia." Gag rules apply,
> in short, on all those whose views might fall outside the range
> of acceptable Left orthodoxy until we all set foot in utopia. In
> Houston, a Faculty Human Relations Committee voted to banish Mark
> Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" from the library of the Mark Twain
> Intermediate School. With penalties ranging from official
> reprimand to expulsion, the University of Connecticut outlawed
> acts of "conspicuous exclusion from conversation" and
> "misdirected laughter."
>
> On the politically correct sliding scale of free expression, of
> course, some were permitted more free speech than others.
> "Freedom of speech should belong mainly to the powerless rather
> than those in power," explained a Stanford law professor. While
> most students and faculty dared not question in public the
> fairness or consequences of affirmative action quotas, seeing
> such candid commentary as not worth being sent to the Gulag, the
> Left felt entirely free to launch ad hominem offensives of
> politically correct intolerances at the entire "bourgeois
> superstructure" --- Western values, imperialism, Eurocentric
> "Anglos," militarism, democratic traditions, materialism,
> academic standards, capitalism, etc., etc. -- expelling
> Aristotle, Shakespeare and other "dead white males" from required
> reading lists and purging "patriarchal hegemony" and
> "malecentered science" from the curriculum.
>
> In his book "Illiberal Education," Dinesh D'Souza writes of being
> confronted by a self-described "sensitivity coalition," some
> fully outfitted in the rattling chains of slavery, during a
> speech at Tufts. Before D'Souza took the podium in an auditorium
> protected by armed police, professor Donald Klein, acting on
> university instructions, warned student activists to abstain from
> throwing things at the speaker, or shouting him down. After his
> speech, D'Souza was approached by an outraged Afro-American
> Studies professor who accused him of both "logocentrism" (the
> "white man's obsession with big words") and of having a "white
> perspective" (a preference for "rationality" and "sexual
> restraint").
>
> Standing alone, D'Souza's campus account of his encounter with
> the folly of ethnic tribalism and mindless groupthink is
> sufficient to underline why last week's Wisconsin faculty vote is
> so notable, so overdue.
>
>
>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> -------
>
>
> Ralph R. Reiland, an Associate Professor of Economics at Robert
> Morris College in Pittsburgh, is co-author with Sarah J. McCarthy
> of "Mom & Pop vs. the Dreambusters: The Small Business Revolt
> Against Big Government," available at 800-262-4729,
> ISBN#0072347740. He can be reached by e-mail.
>
>
>
> <Picture: WorldNetDaily.com>
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> ------- © 1999 WorldNetDaily.com, Inc.
>From WorldNetDaily
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> University of California agrees to revise free-speech policies
>
> By The Associated Press
>
> 8.12.99
>
> • What do you think? Have your say in The Forum.
>
>
>
> SAN DIEGO — All Ryan Benjamin Shapiro wanted was to trigger a
> debate about human rights. He posted a handwritten sign on his
> dorm room window and waited for fellow students at the University
> of California, San Diego, to start talking.
>
> The political sign — which contained a profane word — did more
> than that. It got him in trouble with university officials who
> ordered him to take it down and then, when he refused, punished
> him with a three-hour community service sentence.
>
> But the 19-year-old sophomore knew his First Amendment rights. He
> took his case to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed
> a lawsuit.
>
> Yesterday, the ACLU and Shapiro declared victory when the
> university agreed to settle the lawsuit by revising its
> free-speech policies. University of California attorneys also
> agreed to review anti-harassment policies at its nine campuses to
> ensure students' free-speech rights aren't being violated.
>
> "From the very beginning, I knew I was right and, perhaps
> blindly, I just always hoped the world was fair," said Shapiro,
> who's majoring in political science and economic science.
>
> Shapiro's battle began late last year after he posted a
> handwritten sign on his dorm window that was deemed to have
> violated the "fighting words" policy. It read: "F--- Netanyahu
> and Pinochet."
>
> Shapiro posted the sign after reading newspaper stories about
> Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and biological weapons
> research, and the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto
> Pinochet, who was charged with crimes against humanity.
>
> Shapiro, a National Merit Scholar from Hidden Hills near Los
> Angeles, said he got a crash course in First Amendment law by
> researching cases that supported his belief that the sign was
> constitutionally protected as free speech. He used those cases to
> petition UCSD officials to repeal the punishment, but his request
> was denied.
>
> A letter to Shapiro denying his petition chastised him for being
> "unnecessarily obstinate" for refusing to remove the
> "depressingly inarticulate" sign.
>
> "He's a very bright, articulate young man who chose his words
> quite intentionally," said Jordan Budd, an attorney for the ACLU
> of San Diego and Imperial counties. "He intended to trigger some
> debate about human rights issues."
>
> The ACLU filed the lawsuit on Shapiro's behalf to change policies
> that "gave university administrators unbridled discretion to
> censor fliers and banners on campus that they deemed offensive,"
> Budd said.
>
> The settlement calls for university officials to revise a policy
> that outlined guidelines regulating the distribution and posting
> of non-commercial fliers, posters and banners.
>
> "That policy, we believe, did not meet constitutional
> requirements, but I think, had it not been with the problems with
> that policy, Ben Shapiro would not have been disciplined," said
> University of California attorney Christopher Patti.
>
> Nick Aguilar, UCSD director of student policy and judicial
> affairs, said the policies needed tightening to avoid being
> misinterpreted by administrators, but defended the university's
> stance on free speech.
>
> "UCSD has a record of defending free speech, whether it be by
> individuals or by our various student media," Aguilar said.
>
> The agreement also requires University of California attorneys to
> outline guidelines on how to interpret a section in the student
> code that pertains to the use of "fighting words." In general,
> the section is intended to prevent speech that the Supreme Court
> found in the 1942 decision Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire is not
> protected by the First Amendment, Patti said.
>
> The university must also suspend a three-hour community service
> sentence imposed on Shapiro and purge his record of any mention
> of the incident.
From
freedomforum.org/speech/1999/8/12caucsandiego.asp
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At this site, an examination of the ruling about "fighting"
words can be found (Chaplinsky vs New Hampshire)
http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/chaplinsky.html
A<>E<>R
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