Bound and Gagged: Campus Speech Codes

By Ryan Samuels | Wednesday, October 8, 2003

On July 28, Gerald A. Reynolds, Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights of the United States Department of Education, wrote an open letter to the administrators of colleges and universities across the country. In his letter, Reynolds clarified that federal laws guaranteeing civil rights in education cannot justify the inhibition of free expression—not even on the grounds that some speech constitutes harassment. This should occasion a long overdue consideration of free speech here at Dartmouth.

Reynolds writes, "Any private postsecondary institution that chooses to limit free speech in ways that are more restrictive than at public educational institutions does so on its own accord and not based on requirements imposed by OCR [the federal Office of Civil Rights]." Dartmouth, a private university, is not legally required to protect speech. Yet, as the most prestigious educational institution in New Hampshire—a state that honors the motto "Live free or die"—Dartmouth has a moral obligation to protect unhindered discourse, pieties and sensitivities be damned.

According to the Student Handbook, "Freedom of expression and dissent is protected by College regulations." Under "Standards of Conduct," however, the same document reads, "Dartmouth seeks to provide educational opportunities of excellence, both in and outside the classroom, to assist students to develop critical thinking, integrity, judgment, appreciation of cultural and ethnic diversity, as well as social and ethical values necessary for community life." Here are two commitments: one, succinctly stated, to freedom of expression; and the other to the prolix but fashionable ideal of diversity. Diversity, of course, is "cultural and ethnic," but not ideological, by the interpretation of James Wright, Jim Larimore, and Martin Redman.

These commitments have been at loggerheads in recent years, resulting in several embarrassing scandals. Not surprisingly, these incidents have invariably revolved around one or more institutional members of the Greek system. As everyone knows, President Wright vowed publicly in 1999 to eliminate the Greek system "as we know it," in a "spirit of inclusion." Since the subsequent implementation of the Student Life Initiative, the most egregious administrative encroachments upon free speech at Dartmouth have involved fraternities.

The Principle of Community, also enshrined in the Student Handbook, states that "[t]he life and work of a Dartmouth student should be based on integrity, responsibility and consideration." But the principle cannot function as the basis for a hearing before the Committee on Standards, the judicial body for handling individual offenses meriting separation from the College. According to the Office of Residential Life, a coeducational residential organization, fraternity or sorority must, for recognition, "[e]nsure that its conduct, purpose, and activities are consistent with the mission of Dartmouth College and the Dartmouth College Principle of Community."

On the evening of February 16, 2001, a female student reported having endured from several brothers (five in her account; two in theirs), on the lawn of Psi Upsilon, shouts of the old Dartmouth cheer: "Wah hoo wah! Scalp 'em." She asked, from across the street, "Why is Psi U so cool?" The fraternal songsters replied, "Why are you so fat?" and then shouted, "Scalp those bitches!"—thereby adding feminist insult to the ethnic injury of the unreconstructed Indian anthem. (That's not even to mention the affront to obese citizens everywhere.)

Eugene Long, one of the accused brothers, argued to the Office of Residential Life that "scalping is a blatant anachronism and has not been practiced in New England for centuries." He noted as well that decades of students and alumni, until recently, sang the cheer at athletic events without incident.

Yet the Judicial Committee of the Coed Fraternity Sorority Council judged Psi Upsilon in violation of Standards of Conduct regarding harassment and College standards of behavior and leadership. The Committee also slapped the entire house with a healthy dose of sensitivity training, including several events dealing with issues of race and gender. Dean Redman, arguing to The Daily Dartmouth that the "educational sanctions didn't seem to address the issues of harassment or victimization," imposed two terms of full social probation, imposing a ban on alcohol—during parties and in public spaces of the physical plant—on the entire house. When the brothers of Psi Upsilon appealed and a majority in the Student Assembly passed a resolution criticizing the probation imposed by Redman as "misguided," he upheld his decision.

Later that spring, another altogether more sordid conflict arose between freedom of speech and assembly on one hand and offended sensibilities on the other. A female student exposed to administrators a mock newspaper, The Zetemouth, describing the sexual exploits of individual brothers at Zeta Psi—and naming names, both male and female. It was described by its authors as being written in a satiric vein and circulated only among the membership of Zeta Psi fraternity.

The brothers of Zeta Psi had never intended their paper for public consumption. The female informant, in fact, had stolen the smoking gun—a torn and discarded issue of The Zetemouth, soaked with beer and vomit—from a dumpster on the fraternity's property. Nevertheless, Dean Redman, citing a similar incident in 1987 involving Zete and sexually explicit newsletters, decided to permanently derecognize the fraternity on the grounds that the house had violated three standards of conduct, one involving harassment and two others pertaining to the ethical codes of the local and national Zeta Psi organizations.

In a "Letter to the Dartmouth Community," President Wright opined that the house had violated the commitment of the College to be "an actively anti-sexist, anti-racist, anti-homophobic institution and community." 101 members of the faculty, in their characteristically tortuous prose, published an open letter in The Daily Dartmouth citing "the administration's failure to address the systemic and incalculable harm that both our students and our own pedagogical work suffer by Dartmouth's acceptance and support of structures that promote such attitudes of entitlement and disrespect." The professors argued that the Greek system caused damage to the image of the College, and demanded that Wright reform the "secret fraternity culture" posthaste.

Campus reaction to the scandal climaxed in a march of hundreds of students, converging upon Zeta Psi, at which an outraged student feminist repeatedly kicked the front door. Her loud obscenities were accompanied by cheers from the crowd; at least one administrator complacently observed this from the back of the throng. One female student sent a screed to the entire membership of the house, thanking the brothers "for altruistically reminding us that we are nothing but mere c**ts, dirty holes, tits of varying cup-sizes for you to suck, to stick your purifying d**ks into. That we are rancid snatches who have no right to say NO. Who when we do, should immediately repent, bend over and present (our dirty holes) and docilely submit." Her sentiments, crudely stated but politically correct, did not constitute harassment, while the authors and readership of a privately published and circulated newsletter appealed to freedom of speech in vain.

In the case of Psi Upsilon, the administrative punishment of an entire residential society for the actions of a few fits the abandonment by the modern left of the classically liberal ideal of individual responsibility—in favor of rights and sanctions accorded to entire groups as wholes based on ascriptive characteristics such as gender, race, or sexual orientation. The incident with Zeta Psi constituted an even more egregious assault on free expression and assembly, involving as it did an actual publication and resulting in official derecognition of a student group.

Events of recent years have shown that, at least here at Dartmouth, offended sensibilities always trump freedom of expression. Grievances need only find expression in the language of diversity directed against the "prevailing paradigms" of the "white patriarchal establishment." As a result the warning from a high federal official that national regulations guaranteeing civil rights in education cannot justify the restriction of free expression on American campuses, even on the grounds that some speech constitutes harassment, has special relevance for Dartmouth College. Here, it is clear, the absolute commitment to freedom of speech, promised in the Student Handbook, has come into conflict fairly regularly in recent years with administrative efforts to protect students from offense.

The vague language of the Student Handbook, in the very types of rules and regulations regarding harassment against which the United States Department of Education warns, ensures further defeats for freedom of expression. As an example of behavior falling under the jurisdiction of Standard I, for instance, providing that "Students and student organizations must not engage in behavior which causes or threatens physical harm to another person," the Student Handbook states, "Conduct which places another in reasonable fear for his or her safety or in danger of bodily harm," and thus locates the assessment of guilt in the subjective fear of the accuser.

"Any disruption of the orderly processes of the College" violates Standard II: "Students and student organizations must not engage in behavior that threatens the safety, security or functioning of the College, the safety and security of its members, or the safety and security of others." Free speech in its most noble exercise is often anything but orderly. At least left-liberal malcontents need not fear; causes fashionable among the faculty and administration, such as anti-war protests, have in the past received funding from the Departments of Spanish and Sociology. The ambiguous prose of the Student Handbook continues further—as will the hindrance of free speech at the College on the Hill, unless its administration heeds the timely advice of Mr. Reynolds and the United States Department of Education.

The status of free expression at Dartmouth continues to degenerate under the tutelage of an administration that winks at the door to door distribution of other student publications even as it instructs employees of the College and undergraduate advisors to remove issues of The Review. This past Sunday, Director of Student Activities Linda Kennedy, citing the independent status of the Review, unceremoniously evicted three of its representatives from the Media Organizations Fair. The fair was intended for all student publications; yet the Review, operated entirely by students, was deprived of a valuable forum for the recruitment of new freshmen.

The quality of social, political, and academic discourse at the College, as well as the credibility of the administration's "commitment" to freedom of expression, decreases accordingly with every student thereby lost to The Dartmouth Review.

Bound and Gagged: Campus Speech Codes

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