Halvorssen: Dartmouth is 

"PC Hell"

by Andrew Grossman

The Dartmouth Review talks with Thor L. Halvorssen of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education about the College’s decision to derecognize Zeta Psi.

TDR: Now that the College’s decision has been handed down, does Zeta Psi have standing to pursue the case legally?

TLH: Not very much, legally. Not very much. Dartmouth College is a private institution; it can choose to suppress the freedom of speech of any particular group of individuals with whatever capricious basis it wants to.

What Dartmouth cannot do is engage in false advertising. Henceforth, I would hope that the Dartmouth administration has the candor and integrity to make it clear, on page one of its admissions materials and catalog, that certain forms of speech that are legally protected, that are free off-campus, are not free on-campus. After all, men, particularly impolite and crude men who engage in that sort of behavior, have the same rights as people who do not engage that sort of lewd behavior. As impolite and salacious as these newsletters may be, they are protected by the First Amendment.

A college administration should recognize that freedom of speech, from an intellectual perspective, is quite important for a college campus. Of crucial importance to the debate about freedom of speech on campus is that a private school much like Dartmouth can adopt whatever rules within the law that it wants to. For example, it’s not the model of education that I would choose, but nothing is preventing Bob Jones or Christendom College from saying that they’re going to regulate speech that does not abide by certain Biblical principles. However, provided they do not commit fraud, no one goes to Bob Jones expecting a free liberal arts atmosphere.

The fact is that Dartmouth College promises academic freedom, voluntary association and freedom of speech, but it delivers selective oppression and censorship.

TDR: Are there really grounds to accuse the College of fraud, of deceptive advertising? Would such a thing hold water legally?

TLH: Well, it hasn’t been tried. I’d hope so. From a freedom of speech angle, the idea that this is sexual harassment—no lawyer would ever deem that sexual harassment.

Hustler v. Falwell: the Dartmouth administrators should read the decision. Parody, even parody that is salacious, rude, and crude is protected. Period. This is not sexual harassment. On a college campus, anything that seems offensive nowadays is termed harassment. There was a decision in the Third Circuit, very recently, that made it clear that harassment is repetitive and severe conduct. It is not based on the content; it is based on time. The restrictions on speech are based on time, place and manner, not content. This is clearly content-driven. Had those newsletters been about the most recent charity works of the brothers, there would have been no problem with them. The fact is, it’s about content.

If any woman feels slighted by something that has been in there and believes that she has been libeled, she can go to the courts. She can take them to court. But it should not be the business of the college administration to get involved in this sort of thing.

The argument that should be made is an ethical one. Think about how sad it is that people now respond to a speech code at this or that college, or that the college uses harassment to silence certain people. People say, "Well, it’s a private institution, and they can do what they want." It’s a very sad day where people in this country—where six year-olds are constantly telling people, "It’s a free country" in the playground—get to college and say, "Well, this is a private institution and they can do what they want." No. No, not if they are going live by the mission upon which the college was founded.

The argument that you have got to make is that an education worthy of free men and women has got to occur in a place where there is debate, disagreement, and speaking and writing about what others would deem unthinkable. It is called the right to heterodoxy. To being eccentric, to being passionate, and in this case, to being rude and tasteless.

This newsletter is rude and tasteless, but tastelessness is not against the law. Parody is still within this culture of freedom that we have; parody is still permissible. At Dartmouth College, though, it is clearly not. It’s very clear that students at a community college in Hanover have a lot more rights than students at Dartmouth. Students at the University of New Hampshire have constitutional protections and could probably carry this out with impunity. At Dartmouth College, the double standard continues.

And this is only one symptom, another symptom of the College’s war on certain types and certain individuals and certain groups. This is yet another symptom of the "long march forward," if you will, the "Cultural Revolution" that’s going on at Dartmouth.

If anyone is concerned about those students and the prejudice and tastelessness and so on, well, ignorance does not disappear when you repress their expression. Instead, it goes simply deeper into the souls of those students, and no one has a chance to know how they think. And if they go through diversity training or anything like that, that’s even more scandalous.

What those women should have done, or anyone who disagreed, is to have published their own paper. How about publish a paper headlined "Zete Psi: Tasteless Jerks?" That would have been an appropriate response. Oppressing them, it’s fascistic. And some people don’t understand that there is a very big difference between defending the "sex paper" and defending the right to publish the "sex paper." They are two very crucially different issues. And people just don’t get it. It’s very sad. Your college is PC Hell.

TDR: Yeah, don’t we know it. What should the other fraternities on campus be looking out for?

TLH: The fraternity system nationwide has laid down, and not taken on the administration.

Nationals are more interested in padding their budgets and surviving as national organizations than they are in taking care of the individual chapters. They’re more worried about liability than they are about responsibility. They’re more worried about following all kinds of arcane and ridiculous rules that only allow them to live for a few more years before the colleges find some pretext to get rid of them.

The fraternities simply have to get very serious and have to make it clear to the administration that they are a part of the system, and that they expect the same treatment as everyone else. And they do not get it. Why it is that no one on your campus made the argument, "OK, fine we’ll get rid of alcohol, as soon as the faculty and the president give it up as well"?

The other thing they can do is keep mailing the parents. Inform every perspective student, hang a big sign. This is what this college is about. They may tell you that you’ll get a wonderful liberal arts education at this first-rate Ivy League school. The reality is, no. You’re going to get an education, but you have no freedom here. Even if you are twenty-one years old you have no freedom. You can’t even talk about tasteless things with your friends.

I would make it more a moral argument than I would a question of fraternities’ need to pursue this or that legal action. I think the battle can be won, purely on a moral basis by making arguments, through contacts with donors, through going through directories and foundations and contacting each and every individual donor. It would probably take no more than 100 hours to make a concerted effort. Don’t let them get the better of the PR argument. Yes, this thing is tasteless, lascivious, but it is protected.

Andres Serrano’s "Piss Christ", his portraits of nuns in sexual positions; Robert Mapplethorpe’s, pictures of a black man urinating into the mouth of a white man. That’s pretty lascivious. If somebody said that that’s harassment, would your administration say, "OK, we’ve got to close this exhibit"? No they won’t. Why? Because they think of these terms purely with a double standard that goes through everything.