Places I Never Meant to Be: Don’t let bullies censor

When I was in high school, I tried to go to battle with the principal over censorship. I even brought my case to the powers that be in my small town, the Board of Education. I thought I was better off than most censorship fighters because I was willing to work with the administration to make things better.

Instead of learning about victory, I learned about the bureaucratic mess that called itself the school administration when I tried to work with them. In the three years since this incident happened, I became a member of the National Coalition Against Censorship, and I have learned all the ways the government tries to use censorship to promote its own agenda.

It seems the students at Harvard University were learning the same lessons last week. When Harvard Business School’s student newspaper, the Harbus, printed an editorial cartoon featuring the career services Web site covered with error messages, the administration reacted by reprimanding the editor, who in turn pulled the cartoon from the paper and resigned as editor. The Harvard University English Department also canceled a poetry reading because the poem contained controversial material about Israel and Palestine.

In the cartoon, the error boxes showed a variety of different messages, including one saying ‘Career Services absolves itself of any and all responsibility for the functionality of Career Dink despite the fact that we selected the vendor.’ But that wasn’t the error message that caused the controversy, it was one that only said ‘incompetent morons’ that fueled the administration’s fire.

The cartoon – which, by the way, is not offensive at all, and you can judge this for yourself by viewing it at http://media.collegepublisher.com/media/paper343/stills/7z0wh106.jpg. caused the administration to tell the Harbus to steer clear of any objectionable content, according to former Harbus editor Nick Will.

Is censorship what Harvard Business School wants to teach the people who dedicate their free time to working on the student newspaper?

Editorial cartoons are satire, which is why they are printed in the newspaper. The Nov. 18 issue of The Daily Free Press depicts a man standing outside a tree house, which says on the side ‘No Girls Allowed’ and its inhabitants are yelling ‘Girls are icky … They’ve got cooties.’ The man is saying ‘Augusta officials are standing firm on their membership policy.’

Did anyone who read this cartoon seriously think the Augusta officials said those things? Do they really think this administration works out of a tree house?

No, because the cartoon is satire. Harvard Business School, meanwhile, took the satire to heart and banned the cartoon and threatened the editor. Campus administrators told The Boston Globe they never intended to punish anybody, just to tell them the cartoon violated the ‘community standards’ code. By trying to force students to comply to this code, the Business School administration is inflicting censorship.

In another censorship-related incident at Harvard last week, the English Department canceled a poetry reading because the poet, Tom Paulin, a Harvard alum, in a poem titled ‘Crossfire’ called the Israeli militia the ‘Zionist SS.’ The English Department said in a statement they and Paulin had ‘mutually decided’ to cancel the event.

Harvard cannot erase dissenting opinions. Just because what Paulin said is not popular does not mean he can be silenced. Students, alums and even Harvard President Lawrence Summers complained about the event, and it seems the Department decided it was easier to just cancel the event rather than deal with all the negative publicity.

This is another form of censorship; they cannot stop this idea. If the English Department does not agree with Paulin’s opinions, then they can hand out flyers at his reading explaining this is not their opinion. They can write to the Harbus and explain why he is speaking, even if though they don’t agree with some of the language in his poem.

Of course, Harvard is just jumping on the bandwagon of censorship policies, following the cue of the federal government. The federal government has passed laws requiring library officials to turn over to the FBI their records on patrons. At the extreme end of this, the FBI can interrogate a person for checking out an unpatriotic book. This completely violates freedom of speech.

There are problems also at the local levels, and not just in areas in the middle of the country where people expect this sort of thing to happen. In New York, excerpts on the English Regents exam were edited for content, changing the meaning of some of the excerpts. One of the excerpts edited because it contained politically incorrect words was from a speech by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan! The University of California in San Diego banned students from putting links to a free expression website on their webpages.

Censorship is spreading, and now is the time for Harvard students to step up. Will may have resigned, but the school must rally behind him and needs to show the administration they cannot censor something as simple as an editorial cartoon. Freedom of speech is in the First Amendment, and it absolutely applies to Harvard University.

Harvard students themselves can bring real change. Nobody likes the word censorship it carries such a negative connotation, and I involuntarily make a face every time my History and Principles of Journalism professor brings it up. If students begin to threaten the university the way the university has threatened them, they can begin to make a difference.

Students need to write to The Boston Globe, write to The New York Times, write to the National Coalition Against Censorship. The more public their case is, the more people know about it. They need to put signs up when prospective students come to look at Harvard. But, most importantly, they need to work together and get the whole school involved.

There is no working with an administration that tries to bully with censorship, and there is no compromise until censorship itself is banned. Censorship will not disappear until people begin working together to change it. By changing it at places like Harvard and UC-San Diego, changes will begin to be made at on the state level and on the federal level.

As for me, the administration had my high school tried to appease me after the National Coalition Against Censorship agreed to take up my cause, and I was quoted in the local newspaper. The principal was asked to formally apologize to me (not that he ever did) and the administration and I never reached a formal armistice, but I thought I had made progress. I was never forced to change anything in the student newspaper again, and I asked my successors to send me copies of the censorship-free newspaper after I graduated.

But when I came home at Thanksgiving, the censorship policies were back in place. My successors were threatened and were too scared to fight the administration during their junior year. I felt sorry for them; I even understood why they couldn’t fight the principal, but I haven’t asked them to send me a copy of the newspaper since.