From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Revolting at Rutgers
Why take college students seriously when they cry "censorship"?
"Die Jew. Die, die, die, die, die, die. Stop living, die, die, DIE! Do us all a favor and build yourself [an] . . . oven."
These words are an excerpt from the "Personals" column in the Medium, a magazine at Rutgers University published with a grant from a committee that disburses money for student activities.
We're so in thrall to the First Amendment, so conditioned to swallow it whole, that even when faced with stomach-churning speech that owes its very existence to the law's indulgence, we rarely stop to question whether the amendment always serves our best interests.
An example of this knee-jerk speech-worship--this promotion of free expression as a right über alles--can be found in Tuesday's ruling by the Supreme Court that simulations of child pornography on the Internet are, in effect, protected speech.
Another example--perhaps more humdrum, but no less revelatory of the tensions that arise when the First Amendment trumps all other principles--is that of recent goings-on at Rutgers, where I happened to participate in a panel discussion on "Campus Freedom of Expression." The panel was laid on as a result of recent complaints by editors at two student magazines, who believe that the university authorities have acted unconstitutionally in restricting on-campus distribution of the publications in question. (No attempt was made to censor content.)
The first publication, the Medium, is a repellent, scatological little rag, published by a group of students who would seem to be suffering from an editorial version of Tourette's syndrome. The "Personals" columns are screechingly abusive, often anti-Semitic, and the rest of its pages carry pornographic pictures and text.
The second, the Caellian--a name of uncertain derivation--has been around for generations, but is currently put out by a group of "revolutionary" female students. Unlike the Medium, whose raison d'être appears to be to horrify reasonable people, the Caellian has a fairly conventional ideology for the age group to which its editors belong. It strives "to liberate women/yn from all forms of oppression, be they sexual, sociopolitical, socioeconomical etc." The magazine's content is standard-issue feminist juvenilia, except that its back pages have sexually explicit pictures aimed at a lesbian readership. A recent issue, pegged to breast cancer awareness, featured 12 pairs of bare breasts on the cover.
The sin committed by the Rutgers deans was to insist recently that the bare-breasts issue of the Caellian, as well as an issue of the Medium, be placed in distribution bins that obscured the covers from view. Some students had expressed their objections to these magazines; and a few bins, it seems, were proximate to a day-care center. So the campus authorities, exercising their judgment, took steps to protect the offended students and young children, while ensuring that the content of the magazines remained unabridged.
You'd think this was a sensible compromise. You'd think the editors, too, would see that this halfway house was the best way to satisfy competing interests. But not a bit of it. They screamed "Censorship!" from the rafters and scampered for refuge in the First Amendment.
At the panel discussion, I'd noted that the problem with many campus publications--one that was particularly acute, it seems, at Rutgers--is that editors are playacting at being editors. They publish their material in an artificial environment, answerable to no one and immune from market forces and community pressure. No sooner had I said this than an editor of the Caellian raised her hand and spluttered: "I resent your remarks. They're outrageous. How dare you say we're playacting!"
But what was her magazine's editorial policy? It appears that they run everything they receive, in the order in which they receive it. Would they run a piece that said that Jews were inferior? Yes, another editor said. "Not to run it would be instilling an authority in a single individual. One person would be deciding what is acceptable." And this is not playacting?
As for the Medium, its editor--a burly chap in a basketball jersey--declared that "no one is above getting it." His magazine was "an envelope-pushing paper, and the university would stagnate to an incredible degree without it."
Behind him, a Jewish student in a yarmulke raised his hand and adverted to the "personal" in which his kind had been urged to die. "I'm scared by this," he said. To which an editor stood up and purred, "The Medium is satire, humor."
If this consoled the Jewish student, it was not writ large on his face. He shook his head. The editor, meanwhile, sat down. Butter wouldn't melt in his mouth--but it might turn rancid there.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy features editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His "Citizen of the World" column appears Tuesdays.
