Jeff Millman: An unnecessary juxtaposition

For a newspaper, the best story is the newspaper. When the newspaper becomes the news, the story tends to be self-congratulatory or self-righteous. It tends to be easy to write: the sources are often found in the same newsroom, and since they understand the reporters asking the question and writing the story, they make it easy to generate the story. And everyone involved is pursuing the unified goal of bringing glory to the paper.

That's why newspapers usually make such a big deal out of winning awards that are meaningless to nearly everybody. For example: a story last Tuesday about The Washington Post winning the most Pulitzer prizes appeared on the front page of The Washington Post. That's also why newspapers tend to allocate more column inches to report on their journalist comrades who die "in the field" than the soldiers who fall victim to the combat they cover.

Think about who got more press coverage: Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was killed by Pakistani terrorists, or U.S. Agency for International Development humanitarian Laurence Foley, who was killed by Jordanian terrorists.

Maybe that's why The Daily Pennsylvanian has turned its retrospective on the Water Buffalo affair into a rally for itself. The DP is merging two separate incidents -- the absurd prosecution of Eden Jacobowitz's "Water Buffalo" violation of the speech code and the theft of a DP's entire daily circulation -- to make them seem equivalent morally and in their implications for what has changed on campus.

What is the connection between the Water Buffalo affair and the theft of the newspapers? "Really, nothing," according to DP General Manager Eric Jacobs. The DP therefore chose a curious date to publish its series "The Water Buffalo Affair: 10 Years Later." As of this week, we are several months late of the incident's birthday, Jan. 13, 1993. But Tuesday did mark the 10-year anniversary of another event -- the theft of the daily DP press run by a group self-described as "members of the black community."

The two incidents were similar in that they both embarrassed the University administration, both dealt with issues of free expression and racial tension and combined, alerted the national media to political correctness run amuck. But these episodes of embarrassment shouldn't be thrown together, so that their confusion would vault the theft of the DP's press run to the moral high ground of Jacobowitz's defense against the insidious enforcement of a speech code.

Law Professor Edwin Baker, an expert on free speech issues and the Constitution, says those that took the entire press run of the DP "certainly indicated contempt for the idea of a free press." And while that's bad, it was a lot worse when the Wharton administration confiscated the DP in 1987 because a government or school authority censoring or banning the press is a clear violation of the spirit of the Constitution's First Amendment.

In response to Wharton's heinous crackdown against freedom, the University passed an amendment to the code of conduct, which specifically prohibited the confiscation of any publication, even if it is free. Jacobs and the DP staff expected the Penn administration to prosecute the "members of the black community" who violated this rule, but the DP was upset when no charges were filed. But according to Baker, whether taking a large quantity of a free newspaper constitutes stealing is a matter of legal dispute.

What's not a matter of dispute is that the old Penn speech code completely undermined any concept of free expression. What makes the Water Buffalo affair considerably more appalling is that the obstructer of liberty was not a fellow student, but an institution of authority, and one that champions a total freedom of thought and exploration. The Water Buffalo affair was also worse because it not only denied a person's natural and precious rights, but also saw him prosecuted for believing in these rights.

The theft of the DPs was a wicked convolution of symbolic expression; because similar acts happen with unfortunate regularity on campuses across America, this incident alone was not the impetus behind the uproar. The theft of the DPs had nothing to do with the repeal of the Penn speech code. The theft of the DPs was not the reason the national media lambasted the Penn administration for its prioritizing political correctness above personal liberty.

But the DP has already reached the moral high ground. The staff of this newspaper slaves away night after night to provide a dramatic illumination of the value of uninhibited expression. The Water Buffalo affair reminds us to never take that for granted.

Jeff Millman is a senior Philosophy, Politics, and Economics major from Los Angeles, Calif.

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