Book burning 101

Chris Lilik, editor in chief of a Villanova University student
newspaper called

The Conservative Column received a voicemail message from the school's director of student development concerning a parody advertisement directed at a local bank that provided the institution's ATM services.

"We obviously have some concerns about the content of The Conservative Column," said the message. "Therefore, I will be removing all the issues of The Conservative Column that I see."

When Lilik, a Villanova sophomore, cruised the campus, he found the administration had made good on its threat.

The paper had been banned
from campus.

The hallowed halls of America's higher-education institutions, for decades the epicenter of free-speech activity, have now become the launching points for the fiercest assaults on free speech in recent memory.

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Few institutions are immune: Both private and public schools, small liberal-arts colleges and the behemoth land-grant universities, from the Ivy League to the West Coast, are falling victim to official policies on student behavior that attack free expression.

"It's remarkable that our colleges and universities, which are supposed to be hotbeds of free expression, are often just the opposite," observes Ken Paulson, executive director of the

First Amendment
Center at Vanderbilt University.

Others echo those sentiments. In their book,

The Shadow
University: the Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, Harvey Silvergate and Alan Charles Kors examine recent events on college campuses and conclude, "Universities have become the enemy of a free society."

Silvergate and Kors note that the methods used by this new breed of censors vary. Administrative speech codes, which limit what can and can't be said on campus, are frequent favorites. Some students resort to the infamous Leninist tactic of the "heckler's veto" to drown out the politically incorrect ideas of others.

After traveling the country in support of their book and receiving hundreds of communications from victims of censorship on campus, Silvergate and Kors founded the Philadelphia-based

Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education to assist students and faculty members in dealing with violations of their free-speech rights and academic freedom.

Thor Halvorssen, executive director of the foundation, told WorldNetDaily that political correctness and censorship have infected nearly every college campus in the country, creating a mammoth backlog of cases for the organization to consider for assistance.

"It has never been as bad as it has been today. Unfortunately, not many are aware of that," he said. "Whereas these incidents used to be isolated and infrequent, they tended to draw a lot of outrage before. But now it is seen as acceptable to silence those groups that are deemed politically incorrect, and that feeling is pervasive all across the country."

Paulson believes the efforts to censor free speech on campuses stem from the same root.

"The impulse to censor from any point on the ideological spectrum comes from discomfort with ideas. Most engaging in these activities have misplaced motives, thinking their actions are noble and that they are protecting some higher ideal," he told WorldNetDaily. "But they are not being consistent with the First Amendment, and it all becomes very troubling."

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Halvorssen concurred with that analysis and added, "Students coming to school need to realize that being on a college campus does not guarantee you to have four years free from being offended."

Battleground: Tufts University
One major battleground that has raised awareness of the widespread problem is Tufts University. A university pamphlet titled "Confronting Intolerance" was distributed earlier this year, outlining the new Tufts speech code. Among the activities prohibited were: demeaning or derogatory slurs, name-calling and using words or negative images associated with a group on signs to create a publicly hostile environment.

But what troubled students most was the prohibition of "attributing objections to any of the above to the 'hypersensitivity' of others who feel hurt." In other words, not only were students forbidden to say anything that would upset some oversensitive student, but also, if a student even commented on such "hypersensitivity," that in itself would constitute a separate offense of harassment.

Critics of the policy noted that this was not Tufts' first foray into censorship. Twelve years ago, the university came under fire for limiting speech on campus to specifically designated "speech zones." That policy was promptly withdrawn, as have been the new harassment guidelines, which were suspended in March while administrators take the policy under advisement.

Even after Tufts administrators were rebuffed on their speech codes, that didn't prevent them from stripping a Christian student group of its status as a student organization in a secret midnight meeting in April. As

WorldNetDaily reported, the action was taken against Tufts Christian Fellowship after the group refused to allow an openly homosexual student to assume a leadership role in the organization.

After news spread across the country of the group's plight, the university was forced to reconsider the ban and

decided to readmit
the organization and restore its status.

Not all assaults on free speech have come from college administrators.

Editors of Yale University's

Light and Truth discovered earlier this year that student activists had

stolen the paper's freshman orientation issue because the paper had been critical of a freshman "safe-sex" program that promoted risky sexual behavior, including one-night stands, as acts of "sexual liberation." Even more troubling was the revelation that the theft had been aided and abetted by one of the university's deans.

Cornell University has also been a hot spot. Two separate editions of the conservative

Cornell Review were stolen and burned by members of the Black Student Union after an editorial questioned the school's politically correct Black Studies Department. In an Orwellian twist, the president of the Black Student Union defended his group's actions as "free speech."

Wesley Wynne, program director of the

Collegiate Network, a Wilmington, Del., nonprofit organization that has helped establish more than 70 independent campus publications over the past 15 years, told WorldNetDaily that similar Fahrenheit 451 incidents are becoming all too common.

"We've seen these things happening more and more to our member publications. The trend does not bode very well for free speech on campus." He also pointed to recent incidents at such schools as Amherst, Dartmouth, Duke and Georgetown.

Striking back
To help combat campus censorship, the Collegiate Network has full-time personnel who regularly advise independent student newspapers on their legal and civil rights.

Taking a more active role, the First Amendment Center has begun sponsoring "First Amendment Days" on college campuses to help raise awareness of the necessity of guaranteeing free speech and expression campus-wide. In April, the center conducted a series of events at the University of North Carolina, but Paulson admits they have a long way to go.

"We're trying to communicate to students that democracy works," he told WorldNetDaily. "While some think that they're making social progress by censoring others, they don't realize that we as a society end up paying too high a price for censorship."

The Internet and the New Media have also become tools for those suffering persecution on campuses, says Halvorssen.

"Students are becoming increasingly media savvy, which is encouraging. Whether students are using e-mail or press releases to communicate with others, college presidents and deans are unable to stop the flow of information off the campus," he said. "Now that they have access to the national media through groups like ourselves, it is a whole lot easier to put these would-be censors on the run."

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