Students at Penn tussle again over the issue of free speech

Allowing that "not everyone in this room agrees with the First Amendment - in fact, some of us think that free speech is a bad thing," the Student Activities Committee at the University of Pennsylvania voted in January to deny funding "forever" to a campus magazine that criticized U.S. military involvement in Haiti. The satirical piece poked fun at Haitians' voodoo practices.

"This was a violation of free-speech rights, property rights and intellectual heritage," says John W Howard, president of the Individual Rights Foundation, based in Los Angeles. "If the university chooses to do nothing and remains silent out of fear of provoking the anger of the radical campus speech-gaggers, then we will take immediate action." The IRF has agreed to represent the magazine on a pro bono basis.

The latest incident of political correctness at Penn began last fall when the 106-year-old Red and Blue, the oldest campus magazine in the Ivy League, ran a piece by junior Jeremy Hildreth titled "One Man's Vision of Haiti." In it, he argued that Haiti is not important to U.S. interests and therefore the American military mission there is unjustified. He added that the "greatest manifestation of Haiti's backwardness is its religion, voodoo."

The article caused an uproar among African-American students. Lashanta Johnson, the Black Student League's representative on the Student Activities Committee, or SAC, told the student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, that "funding was revoked on the grounds that the magazine has a political slant."

But J. Christopher Robbins, editor of The Red and Blue, argues that "SAC was biased and unfair" because it funded other groups with political agendas, including a feminist publication called Generation XX. "Regulations on how to give out money were selectively applied to The Red and Blue as `political' but were not applied to other groups," notes Dan Schorr, a senior from Valley Stream, N.Y, and a member of the Undergraduate Assembly executive board, which oversees SAC.

The Red and Blue receives $2,000 to $5,000 per semester from SAC and earns an additional $7,000 to $10,000 a year from advertisements, subscriptions and donations. "They aren't out of business, but the funding denial will definitely delay the next issue," says IRF spokesman John Herr. Penn's president, Judith Rodin, has defended freedom of speech, and SAC has invited The Red and Blue to reapply for funding, according to Herr.

The incident, however, was further complicated by the destruction of some back issues of The Red and Blue. The magazine had permission to store its archives in Irvine Auditorium, but at some point Penn Musicians Against Homelessness cleaned out the office and put the old issues in a hallway where they were tossed out. "There is some dispute whether the musician or the university knew what was there," says Herr. "Some were recovered in a nearby Dumpster in late February, but 477 issues dating from 1889 to 1938 are still missing." The value of the trashed magazines was put at $100,000 to $150,000.

Schorr, also president of the First Amendment Task Force at Penn, says free-speech advocates are proposing an all-elected student government to replace SAC and the Undergraduate Assembly. "One elected body that will give out all the money should prevent situations like the one involving The Red and Blue from happening," he says. The new student government would include a "kind of Supreme Court to keep groups from being singled out by ideology."

"PC happens on a lot of campuses", Schorr says, "but because of the `water buffalo' incident, there's more attention paid to Penn." He was referring to an incident that occurred two years ago, when then-freshman Eden Jacobowitz was accused of racial harassment and was nearly expelled for calling some boisterous black women outside his dorm window "water buffalo." About the same time, Daily Pennsylvanian writer Greg Pavlik was accused of racism for a column he wrote that criticized Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. and denounced affirmative action. When the charges against Jacobowitz were dropped, about 60 members of the Black Student League trashed more than 14,000 copies of the Daily Pennsylvanian. The black students went unpunished. Sheldon Hackney, now the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was the university's president at the time.

Attempts to stifle free speech on campuses continue to mount, says David Gentry, president of the First Amendment Coalition, the student arm of the IRF. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Gabrielle Saod, president of the College Republicans, faces a judicial hearing on accusations that she called a black female student a "wild, uncivilized animal." She says she told the woman to "stop treating me like a wild animal" after she began haranguing her about an anti-affirmative-action resolution.