Category Archive

The parents of Tyler Clementi, the gay Rutgers first-year who killed himself last fall, say they want their son’s roommate prosecuted, but they don’t want him to receive too harsh a punishment.

Dharun Ravi is accused of streaming one of Clementi’s dorm-room hookups over the internet and attempting to broadcast another. Ravi used Twitter to brag about the invasion of privacy to friends and acquaintances.

Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge days later, shortly after complaining to dorm staff about Ravi. Ravi and a fellow student, Molly Wei, who is alleged to have participated in the prank, withdrew from Rutgers not long after Clementi’s suicide.

Ravi and Wei have been charged with two counts each of invasion of privacy, and prosecutors are believed to be considering hate crimes charges as well. Neither case has yet been brought to a grand jury. A prosecutor this week told a local newspaper that “the investigation is continuing.”

Students at the University of Arizona have installed a mock border fence, topped with barbed wire, in the middle of the campus.

The fence, which is seven feet tall and four hundred feet long, was installed by a coalition led by the UA chapter of No More Deaths, a humanitarian organization whose mission, according to the group, “is to end death and suffering on the U.S./Mexico border through civil initiative.”

The coalition that built the fence intend it as a protest not only of the wall at the US-Mexico border, but also of the wall separating Israel from the West Bank.

Students planned the project over a period of eight months, obtaining all necessary permits and permissions. The fence will be up on campus for ten days.

This weekend is the Legislative Conference of the United States Student Association, the nation’s oldest and largest annual student organizing and lobbying event. It kicked off Friday night with a summit of state student association leaders, continued yesterday with a USSA board meeting and dinner speeches from activist and former White House official Van Jones and Stephanie Bloomingdale of the Wisconsin AFL-CIO, and continues through Tuesday’s National Student Lobby Day.

USSA is one of the nation’s indispensable student organizations, and Leg Con is — along with the group’s annual student Congress — one of the true high points of the USSA calendar. You can follow all the news and gossip this year by checking out the #LegCon11 hashtag on Twitter.

In a few minutes I’ll be heading out to the Defining the Future of Public Higher Education conference at SUNY Stony Brook. I may or may not be blogging from the scene (tweeting is almost inevitable, of course).

If you happen to stop by the conference, be sure to say hi.

Roger Shibley of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), who I criticized yesterday for his remarks on the Alexandra Wallace video, has written a new piece at the FIRE website responding to my criticism and explaining that organization’s approach to the various speech acts it defends on First Amendment grounds:

“An integral part of being able to do the work we do is not letting our feelings about the viewpoint of the expression itself affect how we analyze the expression or how vigorously we defend the rights of the speaker. … Instead, we consistently present on our website all the evidence that we have about the expression in question in order to help people make up their minds for themselves, and we expect people to draw their own conclusions.”

That’s certainly a reasonable position, and indeed I have commended FIRE for taking exactly this tack in its letter to UCLA. But I criticized Shibley’s original blogpost precisely because it failed to follow this approach.

FIRE’s policy, Shibley says now, is to summarize each speech act fully and dispassionately without editorializing, and to let their readers draw their own conclusions about its merits. But Shibley did editorialize about Wallace’s video. He called it “pretty tame,” and “not particularly severe.” In it, he said, Wallace “couches her language in a number of ways and even apologizes at the beginning for not being ‘politically correct.'”

This is editorializing. Worse, it’s misrepresentation of the video itself, as Wallace at no point in it apologizes for her lack of “political correctness.” Instead, she deploys that term as a pre-emptive defense against the criticism she expects to receive: “we know that I’m not the most politically correct person so don’t take this offensively.” Instructing people not to be offended by your views is not an apology for those views.

And Shibley’s misrepresentation of the video doesn’t end there. As I pointed out in my original blogpost, Wallace’s “ching chong ling long ting tong” mockery of Asians’ speech and her snide reference to the Japanese tsunami went unnoted in Shibley’s summary, despite their centrality to campus criticism of Wallace and prominence in media coverage of the controversy.

I’ve done this dance with FIRE before. Twice in the past I’ve pointed out situations in which they’ve misrepresented or mischaracterized racist or sexist speech in ways that minimized the ugliness of those speech acts. This isn’t a one-time slipup. It’s a pattern.

Again, I respect FIRE’s principles as articulated. I can accept their belief that the work they do requires them to do no more than “present … all the evidence that we have about the expression in question in order to help people make up their minds for themselves.” But that’s not how Shibley approached the Wallace case, and it’s not how FIRE addressed the two previous cases I’ve highlighted. In each of these three cases, representatives of FIRE offered partial and incomplete descriptions of presumptively racist and/or sexist speech, with their omissions serving to create the impression that the speech was less obnoxious than it actually was. And in each of these three cases those same representatives offered editorial defenses of that speech on content-based rather than civil libertarian grounds.

FIRE is an organization encompassing members and leaders of wildly divergent political perspectives. It speaks out on behalf of controversial speech of all kinds. The work that it does on behalf of the rights of people with unpopular views is often valuable. But despite all this, its reputation in many quarters is one of political and cultural conservatism. There are many reasons that it has this reputation, but the phenomenon I’ve described here is, to my mind, one of the most significant.

If the folks at FIRE want to be accepted as a force for free expression across the political spectrum — if they want to be seen as, in Robert Shipley’s words, “an honest and trustworthy broker to whom people of all different values and beliefs can come for help” — they’re really going to have to do a better job with this kind of stuff.

Afternoon Update | Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE, has offered a couple of thoughts on this post, and I’ve responded in turn. Click through (or scroll down) to comments to see the exchange.