Brad Olson: Speech and the private sector

It is not easy to digest the month-old post to the upenn.talk listserve that has raised the latest hell on our campus, and it is equally trying to decide what action, if any, to solicit from the university.

History Professor Alan Kors has urged against "running to mommy and daddy," which is a heartless and condescending way of advising students not to seek university adjudication. More fitting, as he has said, would be "moral outrage and moral condemnation." And further, "You're allowed to say hateful things. And the more appropriate response is more free speech."

President Rodin has moved in the same direction, writing in a letter to the Penn Arab Student Society that racism in any vein is unacceptable, but that censuring speech is not the right way to fight it.

This newspaper, in Wednesday's editorial, made a similar judgement, probably befitting of any newspaper, that "First Amendment or no First Amendment, limitations on free speech are never a wise or effective way of combating racism, hatred and prejudice."

The direction of all intellectual vehemence seems to point at upholding free speech, and while this is a courageous, quixotic stance, it is, finally, myopic and deficient.

The Daily Pennsylvanian elucidated that the First Amendment, if it is something good, and it is, should not be overlooked anywhere, especially on a college campus that celebrates academic freedom.

It seems like a lucid declaration, but this situation is somewhat more opaque.

A graduate student, who is also a teaching assistant (which means she is in some degree a University employee), made inflammatory remarks in a public setting. It was not a comment she made to a friend in confidence, not a whispered aside, but a written-down and articulated posting to a popular newsgroup. That makes it the same as an angry obloquy on Locust Walk. It is a decidedly public declaration.

In any company, any private institution, employees do not necessarily have the right to say whatever they want and keep their jobs. What if Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times, went back to Birmingham and made a speech at a Ku Klux Klan rally, saying that Jews were animals and that it was time for them to die? Could the Times fire him for that? Or would that be antithetical to free speech?

A drastic example, sure. But the implication is there -- that free speech, while essential to any true democracy, does not necessarily extend to the private sphere.

And so, our quandary lingers: why shouldn't it?

Well, as an employer in the private sector, I can and should be able to decide if an employee, in expressing their opinion publicly (particularly if that opinion condones genocide), has somehow jeopardized the image of my firm or my newspaper or the venerable university I am in charge of. I can decide that I don't want to have a bigot doing my accounting, writing my articles or teaching my classes.

Furthermore, even in the case of government employment, your public speech can render you incapable of doing your job. Does a school district have to tolerate a teacher that has an unabashed penchant for neo-Nazism? Of course not.

The beauty of the First Amendment lies in its protection of the press and of private citizens. That means that newspapers, for the most part, can fearlessly criticize governmental negligence or abuses of power. It means that a teaching assistant can go out on the street, anywhere in the United States and say what she said on that newsgroup without getting arrested.

But it doesn't mean that she can do so and expect her employers to turn the other cheek. As for the future of this teaching assistant, it is up to the University to determine whether her actions have made her unfit for her responsibilities as a teaching assistant. At this point, it seems like nothing will supplement the moral outrage Professor Kors advised.

At the heart of this, then, is the question that many of us have posed to ourselves and to others: if this were some other group, a more numerous group or a more powerful group, would the University have reacted in the same way?

A last quick insight of Wednesday's editorial is that it recalled the "water buffalo" debacle that shamed our campus 10 years ago, where the university tried to expel a student for hollering "shut up, you water buffalo" to a group of black students singing sorority songs. According to the editorial, this "made Penn a nationwide laughing stock and a symbol of PC gone terribly wrong."

Now, though, in an effort evidently aimed at turning the bandwagon around, the University has wandered away from a respectful middle ground to a place that, while less problematic, is spineless nonetheless. Brad Olson is a senior History major from Huntsville, Texas.

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