Remember Wayne Dick

Remember Wayne Dick

LAST SPRING, Yale sophomore Wayne Dick received a draconian sentence of two years' probation for putting up posters satirizing Yale's "Gay/Lesbian Awareness Days." At issue here was the currently sacred cultural status of homosexuality.

At his recent installation as Yale's new president, Benno Schmidt, an expert on the First Amendment, spoke very pointedly about freedom of expression. His remarks were widely interpreted in New Haven as applying to the Wayne Dick case.

This student, to Yale's credit, has picked up notable faculty support. Emeritus history professor C. Vann Woodward, who chaired the 1975 committee that drafted Yale's "University Regulations" regarding free speech, thinks that Yale, not Wayne Dick, is in violation of Yale's regulations. Guido Calabresi, dean of the Yale Law School, and law professor Elias Clark are backing the student's right, under Yale's regulations, to have his say.

President Schmidt no doubt knows that he is sitting on a ticking legal bomb. In recent years the courts have been holding that a university, as well as its students, is bound by its printed regulations. It is fairly well established that these are in the nature of a contract. In the Wayne Dick case, Yale appears to be in contractual violation and vulnerable to a law suit.

More broadly, the case involves what Margaret Anne Gallagher has called (see "Campus 1986," Sept. 26) the "tyranny of pity." In this syndrome, supposed victims acquire exceptional power. In the Wayne Dick case, the tyranny of pity enabled Yale homosexuals to abrogate not only Dick's constitutional rights but Yale's own contractual obligations to its student. This is an important case. Stay tuned.

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