University of Wisconsin law professor David Schultz has made it an annual event. He brings his first-year students to Sterling Hall on campus, to show them where anti-war protesters in 1970 detonated a bomb that claimed the life of a researcher and injured several others.
Mr. Schultz's purpose is clear: to show what political radicalism is capable of and to teach students a lesson about how law can apply to this blight on UW's history.
The bombing that took place was, and remains, objectionable. When contrasted with our current battles over protestors' tactics, the battles of today, in an exceedingly generous view, simply seem trivial.
The Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State University's student newspaper, recently published a controversial protest of its own, albeit in a much more civil manner. David McSwane published a simple, yet unelaborated, opinion column attributed to the newspaper's editorial board. The column in its entirety was: "Taser this… FUCK BUSH."
Although short in length, these four words managed to cause such a stir that the columnist who wrote them and the newspaper editors who let them slide by, were put in such a precarious position that some lost their jobs and the paper almost ran out of advertising money to stay afloat. All within a period of about two weeks, mind you.
The columnist's words certainly hearken back to that highly politicized era of the Vietnam War, where dissent took on a new meaning. Burning draft cards was just the start, and it taught Americans the value of speech, its limits and why it needed to be protected.
Battles over bombings and burnt draft cards make all this fuss over an admittedly banal and uninspiring epithet all the more predictable and overdone. To steal a phrase from my grandmother's vernacular it's simply "old hat."
But don't try telling that to Colorado State University's College Republicans chapter, who in its never-ending battle to remain relevant, decided to spearhead a petition to end the journalistic livelihood of the Collegian's editors.
CNN campus correspondent and CSU senior Brett Okamoto characterized this as a debate between "…First Amendment rights … [and] a case of abusing those free speech rights with an irresponsible, offensive remark."
CSU's College Republicans chair Chelsey Penoyer, the leader in the assault on the columnist's rights, clearly claims that Mr. McSwane was abusing his speech rights and is now hiding behind the First Amendment as a defense.
CNN reported that Ms. Penoyer went so far as to say the column "…makes the students at Colorado State look like a bunch of uneducated children who don’t have anything intelligent to say."
Indeed, Ms. Penoyer, but you might want to shift the focus of that statement to yourself. When you start ascribing this much value to this rather pointless expression, you've already established how unintelligent your student body apparently is.
If any legal question remains, courts have made it abundantly clear that political speech is held to a higher standard of protection than just anything else. In fact, a case with facts remarkably similar to this one, Cohen v. California, involved a man wearing a jacket brandishing a similarly intellectually challenged phrase, "Fuck the Draft," which was held to be a constitutional expression of speech.
But, Ms. Penoyer and others at CSU want you to believe that what they are really going after is the "abuse" of the First Amendment and are not trying to instill any sort of legal consequences for Mr. McSwane's column.
However, in avoiding the legal system's formal imprimatur, they are instilling their own social sanction on Mr. McSwane and the Collegian. His speech is legal and certainly worth protection, as most educated on the subject will reveal, but the ramifications for his speech are not following this ideal set forth in our Constitution.
Our Constitution has this right so that political dissent could be heard to influence politics. Mr. McSwane's speech accomplishes this; it attacks the credibility of an unpopular president who does not take the necessary amount criticism of which he is more than worthy.
The social sanctions and the calls for Mr. McSwane's resignation exemplify the danger of forgetting this ideal set forth in our Constitution. There is no such thing as an abuse of the First Amendment; speech is either legal or it is not, and such judgment calls most certainly should not be left for a senior at Colorado State University to decide.
Offense is part and parcel to a free society, and if we start calling for everyone's head the second we hear something that upsets us just a little bit, we will learn the hard way why we have these rights in the first place. For CSU and those in charge of this petition, it is time to step up to the plate and deal with the fact that we live in a free society with a variety of opinions and ideas worthy of protection.
And if a reality check is what is really necessary, it is not as if anyone is bombing buildings or even burning draft cards.
Dissent, such as Mr. McSwane's column, can take a variety of forms, but punishing the insipid remarks of a college newspaper's columnist with the same esteem as more extreme forms of dissent that are clearly proscribed, in turn makes us look exactly like what Ms. Penoyer believes we and Colorado State University are not: unintelligent.
Robert Phansalkar ([email protected]) is a first-year law student.
