Cornell e-mail offends students

Four Cornell University freshmen wrote an e-mail entitled "75 reasons why women should not have freedom of speech" last month. They sent the list -- which they said was intended to be a joke -- to 20 of their friends, who then passed it on to many other people throughout the United States and Canada. Cornell officials debated citing the students under the school's Code of Conduct, but decided that the freshmen did not violate the code, especially given their rights to freedom of speech. Instead, the four students will have to do 50 hours of community service, attend a "Sex at 7:00" health education program and apologize personally to a group of senior Cornell administrators. But Penn Data Communications and Computing Services Executive Director Dan Updegrove said he was surprised the students received any punishment at all. "It's hard for me to imagine taking any action at all against the authors," he said yesterday. "We have seen some cases that are substantially more egregious that have been judged to be free speech." The e-mail included lines such as "If she can't speak, she can't cry rape" and "Of course, if she can't speak, she can't say 'no.' " According to a statement released by Cornell Judicial Administrator Barbara Krause, her office received "many complaints" about the e-mail message. She added, however, that since Cornell does not have "a hate speech code," the students could only be prosecuted under the Code of Conduct if they engaged in sexual harassment or misused computer resources. Neither situation was proven in this case, according to Krause. "Although I do not find a violation of the Campus Code of Conduct based upon the facts in this case, the students themselves recognize that they have caused great anger and hurt to many people," Krause said in the statement. "They deeply regret their actions and want to begin the process of restoring their reputations and the community's confidence in them." The four students wrote a letter of apology published in the Cornell Daily Sun, Cornell's student newspaper. In the letter, the students said they "had no idea that [they] were really being taken seriously and seriously offending people." "We are not trying to blame anything on society, we just wish to convey to you that we never meant any of the things we wrote," they wrote. "All we can do is take responsibility for our stupid actions, and hope that everyone who reads our list and this can have an open mind and accept our deepest apology." Updegrove said no policy is currently in place for dealing with controversial and offensive e-mail at the University. "I think that most university administrators agree that the solution to speech is more speech," Updegrove added."If no one ever said anything, e-mailed anything or posted anything that they thought might offend any part of the population, there wouldn't be a whole lot of discourse."

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