Ignore the radical feminist inching her way toward the provost's office and you will discover that until Wednesday, the University of Wisconsin was in the midst of a terribly dry news cycle. Press releases coming out of the school's PR shop hardly cried out for newsrooms to be brought to standstills; of the three issued Tuesday, one focused on adult language classes, while another was simply headlined "Book Smart."
Then again, it is always the slow news days that find some way to end with the biggest headlines. And Wednesday proved no exception.
The story of Benjamin Chamberlain and his three friends being charged with a litany of hate crimes for their alleged vandalism of Ogg Hall and harassment of an LGBT liaison has hit the UW campus amidst what can only be described as the perfect storm.
With little else to focus on in the lead up to Wednesday's courthouse shame, the news media had once again turned its eyes to the UW System trying to create a policy on resident assistants leading Bible studies in dorms. The story has been floating about since late last year but sneaked back into the headlines with a Regent-appointed committee having just turned in a list of recommendations slightly more vague than UW's public posture during the Paul Barrows scandal.
And that is the second critical component of this story's making. After a fall term in which students, Madisonians, the local media and, to a degree, the national press came to expect scandal upon scandal from UW (I'll resist re-hashing the tawdry list), the community is not about to accept an absence of tabloid-worthy news in the spring. And if that means converting a mole hill into a mountain or two, campus leaders — especially students — are perhaps all to eager to step up to the plate.
Finally, the question of hate crimes is one that promises to not divide this campus down Republican versus Democratic lines but, rather, to pit the student left against itself. That is the controversy that has commenced to strike the UW community, and, with this unique blend of circumstances, it promises to mushroom wildly over the coming days, weeks and perhaps even months.
On one side is a minority community — and its advocates — constantly in search of equality through affirmative and unequal methods. This is precisely what hate crime laws are: ways of upping the ante on ordinary offenses when perpetrated against select minorities.
On the other side is a blend of liberals and libertarians who embrace free speech as not just a bedrock of civil society but, indeed, the well-placed first guarantee of the Bill of Rights. To them, a legal assault on the thoughts of a criminal is plainly excessive and wantonly unconstitutional.
To be sure, hate crime laws amount to little more than poorly disguised speech codes of the worst order — those that prosecute rhetoric that may not even be manifest on the surface.
And while it may seem that this case is too flawed with the heavy-handed strokes of heartless bigotry to create a debate of any decent size, it is worth noting that it is always the most disturbing of incidents that ignite the biggest controversies. When the Nazis sought to march in Skokie, few defended the hate group's gut-wrenching speech, but many came prepared to defend the worst of society's rhetors fully aware that lines drawn on the furthest of perimeters may always sufficiently protect the many valuable shades of gray found in-between.
In fact, free speech law is seldom constructed around those with noble messages and almost always built to protect the most offensive. It was another anti-Semitic cause that helped lead to the fall of prior restraint, and it was Larry Flynt, arguably the nation's foremost peddler of smut, who helped protect parody when it came under fire in the early 1980s.
To be sure, Mr. Chamberlain seems unlikely to become a rallying point as grand in scope as Hustler Magazine, a Nazi parade permit or even the shameful mock slave auction held on this campus not too long ago. But the UW community is ready for a solid intellectual fight and the hate crimes that disgracefully sit in Wisconsin's criminal code have finally touched campus.
Mac VerStandig ([email protected]) is editor in chief of The Badger Herald and a senior majoring in rhetoric.
