Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/04/08/the_trustees_diversity_and_free_speech.php
Friday, April 8, 2005
Four years ago this month, creative loner Melissa Heaton '02 climbed into a dumpster behind Zeta Psi fraternity, rooted through the trash, and stole a partially-torn copy of a satirical fraternity newsletter. Following sensationalist headlines in the Daily Dartmouth describing what it called "sex papers," the College launched an investigation, determined the newsletter and Zeta Psi to be sexist, and permanently severed ties with the fraternity.
To justify Zete's derecognition, a breach of students' right to free expression, President James Wright wrote a letter in May 2001 outlining Dartmouth's position on free speech. Wright said that "speech has consequences for which we must account," adding that "the rights, feelings, and considerations of others" trump speech rights.
Dean of the College James Larimore concurred in a similar missive, explaining that "community standards" are more important than "the principle of freedom of expression and dissent." He added that "expressive behavior" without administrative oversight and management is "corrosive to the very idea of a residential college."
Organizations like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group, often cite these statements as constituting Dartmouth's speech code. Curiously, though, copies of both Wright's and Larimore's letters vanished from the Dartmouth website as the alumni Trustee campaign started.
And it's no wonder: the campaign has drawn some unwanted attention to the issue of student liberties. Both petition candidates, Peter Robinson '79 and Todd Zywicki '88, have attacked the College's restrictions on free speech in their election statements, as has Gregg Engles '79, who was nominated by the Alumni Council.
Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, has been the most unequivocal in his defense of free speech. "The administration must rescind all restrictions on freedom of speech, unambiguously restoring the most fundamental of all human rights," he said in a campaign statement.
In response to a Student Assembly questionnaire, Robinson insisted that he will not simply take the administration at its word when it insists there are no speech codes. "I would refuse to accept any mere form of words like that President Wright offered at Convocation," he said. "The administration must instead take action, rescinding all infringements on freedom of speech."
Zywicki said Dartmouth's restrictions on the student expression have only managed to divide and isolate students. The College is not properly protecting free speech, he wrote in his official candidate statement: "Protection of freedom of speech and intellectual diversity must be a priority issue."
"A system of vague and secret rules backed by arbitrary enforcement is contrary to the principles of free and robust speech to which Dartmouth should aspire," he told the Assembly.
Even Engles, one of the "official" candidates, came out against the College speech codes. In a March 25 campaign e-mail, he wrote that Dartmouth has become so monolithically liberal that dissent is crushed. "Because when a group becomes so convinced that its views are correct," he said, "it becomes very easy to stifle opposing points of view."
These three candidates have also extended their remarks from a defense of free speech to a condemnation of Dartmouth's overwhelmingly liberal atmosphere. Robinson explained that Dartmouth's pursuit of political correctness has "done the College terrible harm" by stifling independent thought, while Zywicki said "the College has failed in its most critical mission to protect intellectual diversity and free speech on campus." Engles wrote that Dartmouth's professors must share "diverse points of view," and be "free from the intellectual orthodoxy that exists on many U.S. campuses today."
Even the candidates have been silenced in their campaign for free speech. Under the Alumni Association's campaign rules, neither the petition candidates nor those nominated by the Alumni Council are allowed to speak about their candidacies outside of one short statement and two Association-approved e-mails. The rules are explicit: "any effort to garner votes" is prohibited.
Both Robinson and Zywicki understood the threat: if they didn't fall in line, they would be disqualified. Both have declined to speak with The Dartmouth Review about election events, citing the College's censorship.
Both petition candidates used the Internet to campaign for spots on the alumni Trustee ballot, in particular using online political weblogs to promote their candidacies. Robinson posted about his candidacy on National Review Online's "The Corner," while Zywicki solicited signatures on the widely-read "Volokh Conspiracy" weblog.
Upon being certified for the ballot, however, both men dismantled their web pages to comply with the Association's rules. But they made it clear they disagreed: "The rules governing the election prohibit me from displaying anything that might be construed as 'campaign' material," Robinson wrote on the remnants of his campaign web site, "so I've had to take down the pages on which I originally explained why I'm running, who I am, and where I stand."
The campaign rules, in their application, are almost farcical. While the petition candidates have been all but prohibited from campaigning—one of Zywicki's two official e-mails was mysteriously "lost" in transmission for several days—the rules appear not to apply to the others. Notably, a shadowy group of former administrators known as Alumni for a Strong Dartmouth has been actively campaigning for the four candidates nominated by the College-friendly Alumni Council. The Alumni Association's Balloting Committee has done nothing to curb the group's actions.
Members of Zeta Psi fraternity's alumni association decried the College's hypocritical stances on free speech in an e-mail to The Dartmouth Review. According to the fraternity, the College is willing to condone "forcibly dismantling Todd Zywicki's personal website and censoring his proposed candidate e-mail to the alumni" while at the same time allowing "a smear campaign waged against him and the other petition candidate by a group of former Trustees and other College insiders."
As an undergraduate, Zywicki was a member of Zete.
The Association, interestingly, uses the First Amendment to defend its limits on speech. "There are First Amendment issues that we cannot necessarily control," Alumni Association President John Walters '62 said. He noted that it would be hard, given Constitutional protections on speech, for the Association to regulate the speech of independent organizations like ASD, The Dartmouth Review or the Daily Dartmouth. The College, though, seeks to regulate dissent on the grounds that the First Amendment does not apply at all to Dartmouth, and has routinely attempted to censor The Review.
ASD's campaign is about more than attacking the petition candidates and promoting the four official nominees. It has also defended the Wright administration against its critics, including those who say Dartmouth enforces speech codes on its students. Their case is simple: President Wright says there are no speech codes, therefore there are none.
In its effort to prove Dartmouth lacks speech codes, ASD also claimed Trustee T. J. Rodgers '70, who ran last year as an anti-establishment petition candidate, had said Dartmouth does not restrict speech. This provoked Rodgers to write a scathing op-ed in the Daily Dartmouth. He wrote that "there has been and continues to be a serious free speech problem at Dartmouth." Dartmouth's speech codes, he continued, not only violate the spirit of the First Amendment—from which the College is exempt as a private institution—but did so "egregiously," by never actually defining punishable offenses and relying instead on appeals to ambiguous "community standards."
Foiled in its attempt to prove Dartmouth students enjoy free speech, ASD then tried a third tactic: they said, in effect, that speech codes were justifiable. Even were Dartmouth to have speech codes, the group argued, they would be irrelevant since other top schools are also rated poorly by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. But even a liberal-dominated school like the University of Pennsylvania managed to garner the speech group's perfect rating, and ASD did not explain why Dartmouth should stoop to the level of Harvard, Princeton, or Cornell Universities.
This twisted logic prompted a pointed response from FIRE, who said Dartmouth should be a model for other colleges and not simply resign itself to the lowest common denominator. "Students at Dartmouth have fewer free speech rights than students at a local community college," FIRE president David French said, "and this group is pleased that other colleges are just as restrictive? Is that even an argument?"
FIRE has declared that Dartmouth's free-speech rating will not improve until the College re-recognizes Zeta Psi. The fraternity's alumni association agrees, arguing that "the only way for Dartmouth to extract itself from the messy controversies its unevenly-applied policies have created is to back up its assertion that 'Dartmouth has no speech code' by putting an end to this intellectually inconsistent course of action and re-recognizing Zeta Psi."
Dartmouth's inconsistent policies have actually created something of a backlash. A group calling itself "Alumni Asking What the F***" has formed to attack the College and the Alumni Association for hypocrisy. Several alumni enraged by ASD's campaigning have also contacted The Dartmouth Review to complain.
Editor Emeritus Daniel Balserak contributed to this article.