Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2005/05/13/permissible_not_beneficial.php
Friday, May 13, 2005
Dartmouth's speech code, if it in fact ever existed, has been repealed, and, after much effort by Trustee T.J. Rodgers, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and the chattering classes, our free speech rating has been raised to "green*"! Huzzah!
What, though, to make of this, given the relatively disparate significance accorded recent events by FIRE, which proclaimed it a great victory, and the administration, which termed it a minor clarification?
While we certainly applaud the administration's action, the next—and only—logical step is for President Wright and Dean Larimore to repudiate their 2001 letters—since, after all, they apparently did not constitute College policies—and to re-recognize Zeta Psi fraternity. This is where the rubber meets the road, where we will see if the College is simply engaging in a cutesy rhetorical flourish or has set off in a truly new direction when it comes to expression on campus.
These next obstacles raise not only practical questions—will the administration humble itself enough to make the "permanent" temporary?—but moral ones. Students should not, of course, be punished for speaking their minds, and this is the technical actuality of the matter, claims of "harassment" be damned. But is it not also true that those Zeta Psi rascals should have been punished for something?
After all, the Zetemouth and the Sigma Report represented the worst of all speech: maximally uncouth, minimally expressive, and full of malevolence towards particular individuals. The documents in question may have been classified as speech, but they were extremely unbecoming and extremely damaging to the—dare I say it?—Dartmouth community.
One might respond that Zeta Psi would have been sufficiently censured by the community without intervention by the administration, or that while some punishment was in fact in order, what was handed down did not fit the crime. It was particularly disproportionate considering that Phi Delta Alpha fraternity was recently re-recognized after trying to burn down neighboring Chi Gamma Epsilon.
The truth of the matter, however, is that Zete's critics, including administration officials, were morally right: lewdly defaming fellow students (whether the defamed were Zete brothers or Melissa Heaton '02 doesn't much matter) is simply unacceptable in an academic environment. This is particularly true of a place such as Dartmouth, which is, at least theoretically, responsible for training this nation's elites, and, as a private institution, could and should hold its members to a higher standard than the law allows.
How should we then be held? During his tenure as President, so I am told, President John Sloan Dickey used to call in the various fraternity presidents and outline the standards to which they were expected to hold their members. Things have changed quite a bit from those days, but the lesson remains the same: freedom and responsibility go hand-in-hand.
When the College punishes every misdeed by invoking Big Brother-esque "community standards," students will be unable to determine what is appropriate because they will have no occasion for doing so. The talking heads will lay down the rules, and students will remain striving only not to get caught, lacking any conception of why guidelines exist in the first place.
What if, on the other hand, the administrations viewed lapses in judgment—including those of speech—as occasions for instruction rather than punishment? If, in the words of TDR advisor Jeffrey Hart, a Dean told a student, "Smith, if I hear of anything like this again, your College record will not be fit for the bottom of a bird cage"? Coupling such a reprimand with censure from the Dartmouth community would go a long way towards imbuing students with the moral timber necessary to determine right from wrong.
Such responsibility, however, flows from freedom. It is precisely when students are free to write ill-advised "sexposés" or yell "scalp 'em b****es" from a fraternity porch that they will learn they ought not do so.