Jonathan Shazar: Punishing speech and the slippery slope toward fascism

Last month, the College of the Mainland, a small community college in Galveston County, Texas, gave tenure to a political science professor who had openly and loudly professed Marxist views.

That made people in conservative Galveston County angry, and they challenged Smith's tenure bid. One local resident proclaimed that Smith "stands for everything I can think of that we don't want our kids taught."

In January 1993, then-College freshman Eden Jacobowitz found his progress on an assignment disrupted by a loud sorority event outside his Hamilton Village dorm room. And he wasn't the only one.

During the display, a litany of racial slurs had rained down upon the the sisters, who were black. And to this, Jacobowitz added, "Shut up, you water buffalo."

Regardless of his intent in using the word, Penn threw the book at Jacobowitz, saying he violated Penn's racial harassment policy.

And a few weeks ago, a Linguistics graduate student and teaching assistant posted some rather despicable sentiments about Palestinians and their right to remain in existence.

An uproar followed, with some calling for Stephanie Winters' head.

For many, the comparison of these stories is absurd. Jacobowitz never endorsed the wholesale slaughter of blacks. And David Smith didn't threaten anybody.

To a certain extent, this is true. The three cases are very different from one another. But if the principles of free speech are applicable to Jacobowitz and Smith, why aren't they to Winters?

If we can legitimately punish people for their "dangerous" and "threatening" speech, why can't Penn do so for "racial harassment"? Why can't Galveston County fire someone who teaches "everything... that we don't want our kids taught"?

Well, who exactly defines "dangerous"? Who decides if a word constitutes "racial harassment"? Who determines if something is offensive enough to the surrounding community that it can be banned, and its expression punished?

These questions are by no means new, and this column can hardly be seen as breaking new ground in the free speech debate. But they certainly beg the question of where the limits will stop.

Then again, no one wants to limit Stephanie Winters' speech, right? They just want to make her pay for it. Kind of like how Penn wasn't trying to stop Eden Jacobowitz from saying offensive things, it just didn't want him doing so from a high rise window.

So what exactly is the difference again?

I would like to think that nobody on this campus believes that David Smith should be denied tenure because he is a Marxist, or for any of his other strongly held personal beliefs.

I would like to think that nobody on this campus believes that Eden Jacobowitz should have been expelled for calling anyone a water buffalo -- or any other term, for that matter.

So I would like also to believe that no one would want to punish Stephanie Winters for her thoughts, no matter how awful or unfortunate or "threatening" or "dangerous."

Words are thoughts. And whether or not a person puts those thoughts into the public forum in verbal form doesn't change the fact that she holds them. At its base, policing words is policing thought.

Thoughts can of course be "threatening" and "dangerous." Mein Kampf comes to mind. But no one is calling on the Penn Bookstore to stop carrying Hitler's hateful speech. No one is crucifying History Professor Thomas Childers for recommending it to students in his course on the Third Reich.

In the end, those who proclaim that Penn can do whatever it wants to Stephanie Winters are, in a sense, right. The First Amendment does not apply to a private university like Penn. The Civil Rights Act does not protect speech.

But Penn, as an institution dedicated to ideas, has a moral obligation to protect the free exchange of those ideas, even if we don't like them.

Some prominent members of the community have come down hard on people like myself for our "rush" to support the aggriever while we ignore the suffering of the aggrieved.

But the right way to support those who feel threatened is not to demand that Winters be fired or sanctioned in any way.

In a free society, ideas should be met with ideas. The most effective way to deal with Winters and those who agree with her is not to demand retribution, but to tell them that they are wrong and to show them why.

Does Penn have the right to fire or expel Stephanie Winters? Of course it does.

But that doesn't mean that it should.

Jonathan Shazar is a junior History and Political Science major from Valley Stream, N.Y., and editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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