Mark Fiore: Make room for the right

While Penn, like its students, relishes in considering itself a progressive, open-minded institution, history belies that myth -- especially when it comes to free expression on campus.

Dating back to the notorious "water buffalo" scandal and the University's move to implement a restrictive speech code in the early 1990s, Penn has been anything but a "marketplace of ideas."

Against that backdrop sits PennForum, a student organization formed to promote open discussion of provocative topics like gay marriage. But now that a PennForum leader has explicitly condemned the College Republicans for declining to participate in the group's recent gay marriage debate, the discussion society has further enhanced the University's track record of denouncing individuals with conservative viewpoints.

Guy Margalith's attack on the College Republicans assumes that a conservative Penn student participating in the gay marriage dialogue would have received the same respect as his so-called liberal colleagues. That assumption, like the broader falsehood that Penn embraces viewpoints from all perspectives, strays far from reality.

Indeed, Penn, and many of its students practice the exact opposite of what they preach. Particularly among liberals -- students, staff, faculty and administrators included -- many members of the Penn community are closed-minded, unaccepting and vehemently intolerant of beliefs that do not correspond with their own.

The University, in fact, fosters a hostility toward conservatives -- and lives in denial of this reality. Examples of the hostility are everywhere.

Not a week goes by that at least one of my law professors doesn't mock President Bush in class. And when the mocking begins, almost every student in the class shakes his head in derisive agreement and breaks out in scornful laughter -- completely devoid of respect for both the president and for those who support him.

No doubt such incidents repeat themselves continually throughout campus, from the English Department to the Graduate School of Education. Certainly, in my almost seven years at Penn, similar classroom episodes have occurred on numerous occasions.

Some professors, classmates have told me, have even photocopied my columns, distributed them to their students, and, amazingly, told them, "This is exactly what not to believe." So much for encouraging educated students to make their own informed decisions.

Then there are the rumors. For example, anecdotes tell of one law professor who goes so far as to penalize students on her exams if they fail to give the liberal answer she wants. When a student, moreover, raises a conservative thought in class, it is common for his "liberal" colleagues to roll their eyes in disgust and rudely huff in apparent protest.

What makes the condemnation of conservative thought on campus particularly objectionable is that liberals not only condemn the conservative message, but also the messenger. The same students who preach the values of a diverse student body habitually launch personal assaults against those who do not fit their worldview.

Responses to my columns, for example, both in letters to the editor and in direct e-mails, routinely include charges -- and occasional threats -- against me as a person. Ranging from childish insults on my intelligence to ignorant conjectures about my upbringing, the personal attacks perfectly illustrate the sad state of many liberals' approach to dialogue.

Penn's agenda reaches the top echelons of campus, with University President Judith Rodin reported to have been a candidate for Al Gore's administration had he won the presidential election. And the agenda flows through which speakers are invited to campus -- Gore, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Robert Rubin, Ed Rendell among the many on the liberal side in recent years and Sandra Day O'Connor and John McCain among the few on the conservative side.

Even among the faculty, conservative thought is often scorned. Many Penn schools and departments have no noticeably conservative professors at all, and panel discussions featuring Penn faculty -- such as the many that occurred following the presidential election -- are consistently dominated by liberal thought.

Confronted with this reality, it is no wonder that members of the College Republicans hesitated to participate in PennForum's gay marriage discussion. Had Margalith thought through these facts, he might not have been so quick to shame conservative students for their caution.

This is not to say that conservatives on campus should sit back and let liberals have their way with the flow of ideas at Penn. If anything, it should be a call to arms.

At the same time, it is past due for Penn's liberals to wake up and realize they are not so open-minded after all.

Mark Fiore is a third-year Law School student and a 1999 College graduate from Spring Park, Minn.

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